05258
May 12, 2005

Change means challenge, WCC speaker says

Globalization, polarization are complicating church relations

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International

    
ATHENS, Greece — An increasingly globalized world, marked by religious diversity and tensions between faiths, is demanding that Christians reconsider the way they relate to other believers, a scholar said on May 12 during a world meeting of Christian leaders here.

     “We are living today in a situation of global migration, cutting people off from their religious roots,” Christine Lienemann, a professor at Switzerland’s Basel university, told participants in the Conference on World Mission and Evangelism.

     The May 9-16 gathering is sponsored by the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC), which has 347 member churches, mainly Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox. Although Evangelical, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic churches don’t belong to the council, their representatives are taking part in the meeting.

     Lienemann introduced a paper on “Religious Plurality and Christian Self-Understanding,” drawn up under WCC auspices, which notes that the “greatest challenge” facing religions today is the background of an “increased polarization of communities, the prevalent climate of fear, and the culture of violence that has gripped our world.” (For the text of the document, visit
http://www.oikoumene.org/Preparatory_Paper_N__13.875.0.html).

     Citing a term in the document, Lienemann said there is a need for religious “hospitality” as a sign of respect for religious diversity. “Hospitality is the opposite of coercion to convert,” she said. “Of course, conversion should not be excluded as an option of the guest out of his or her own decision, but this is definitely not in the focus of hospitality.”

     Still, noted Veli-Matti Karkkainen, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in California and a Pentecostal scholar, “Religions need to be given an authentic opportunity to argue for their claims.” He said, “Christian faith, similar to Islam but unlike Jewish faith, is missionary by nature,” and added, “A coercion to convert is different from evangelistic outreach.”

     But the Rev. Hermen Shastri, general secretary of the Council of Churches of Malaysia, warned that “people of other faiths feel threatened by the unbridled and competitive stances of churches when it comes to evangelism.” He said Muslims feel “under siege” because of foreign-sponsored evangelistic missions.

     “In Malaysia, even Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs are beginning to view their own communities as being under siege by an aggressive and impatient Christian evangelism,” Shastri said. Muslims account for about 60 per cent of the 24 million people in Malaysia, Christians less than 10 per cent.

     In one of the opening speeches at the conference on Tuesday, the head of the Greek Orthodox church, Archbishop Christodoulos ,pointed to increased religious diversity in traditionally mono-religious societies.

     “Faithful Christians live together with people of other faiths, other races, traditions, languages,” he noted in what might be taken as a reference to his own country, where 98 per cent of the people belong to the Orthodox church. “More and more people of other faiths live together with Christians and struggle with the same challenges of atheism, agnosticism and anti-religious secularism,” he said.