police killed 69 black demonstrators protesting against restrictions on their freedom of movement) ended his support for his church's political teachings. He began to question the biblical justification of apartheid by the Dutch Reformed Church: "I made an intensive study of the Bible to prove that those justifications were not valid. I concluded that the passages that were being used by the white DRC to justify apartheid were unfounded. In some cases, there was a deliberate distortion in order to prove the unprovable!" In the three decades after his resignation from the denomination, Naudé's vocal support for racial reconciliation and equal rights led to upheavals in the Dutch Reformed Church. Cottesloe and the Christian Institute of Southern Africa In response to Sharpeville, the World Council of Churches (WCC) sent a delegation to Johannesburg to meet with clerics. Naudé, by then the moderator of his church district (the Southern Transvaal Synod), helped to organize a consultation (the Cottesloe Consultation) between the WCC and eighty South African church delegates in Cottesloe, a Johannesburg suburb. The Cottesloe Consultation's resolutions rejected race as the basis of exclusion from churches, and affirmed the right of all people to own land and have a say in how they are governed. Naudé alone among his church's delegates steadfastly continued to reject any theological basis for apartheid after Prime Minister Verwoerd forced the DRC delegation to repudiate the consultation. The Dutch Reformed Church later left the World Council of Churches. In 1963 Naudé founded the Christian Institute of Southern Africa (CI), an ecumenical organization with the aim of fostering reconciliation through interracial dialogue, research, and publications. The DRC forced Naudé to choose between his status as minister and directorship of the CI. He then resigned his church post, left his Aasvoëlkop congregation in Northcliff, Johannesburg, and resigned from the Broederbond in 1963. As a result, he lost his status as minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. His last sermon to his congregation noted that "We must show greater loyalty to God than to man". Stoically anticipating the enormous pressure by the Afrikaner political and church establishment that was to come, he told his wife: "We must prepare for ten years in the wilderness." Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu later said "Beyers became a leper in the Afrikaner community." During the same year Naudé was blamed for leaking secret, confidential and unauthorized documents about the Broederbond to the press. The