09054
January 29, 2009

World Social Forum reflects ‘spiritual’ search, mission expert says

by Stephen Brown
Ecumenical News International

BELEM, Brazil ― The rise of movements such as the World Social Forum, which aims to promote an alternative to exploitative globalization, mark a search for spiritual values that can provide a new agenda for 21st century Christianity, a South Korean mission expert has said.

“Even the slogan of the WSF ― ‘Another world is possible’ ― sounds like a strong spiritual and prophetic message and would seem to be grounded in faith values,” said the Rev. Jooseop Keum, program executive on mission and evangelism for the World Council of Churches, an umbrella for 349 churches, mainly Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox. The WCC and partner organizations have sent a 15-person strong team to the forum.

Keum was speaking in Belem, northeast Brazil, where an estimated 100,000 people have gathered for this year’s World Social Forum, a six-day meeting that opened on Jan. 27.

“While the social movements were based on strong socio-political and socio-economic ideologies during the last century, it is spirituality which binds the different movements together at a global level in the space of the World Social Forum,” Keum said during a meeting on theology and liberation held in advance of the WSF.

The first meeting of the WSF took place in 2001 and was intended as a counter to the World Economic Forum, a gathering of politicians and business leaders that takes place each year, normally in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos. Organizers of the 2001 WSF meeting said they had been expecting about 2,000 people, but that 20,000 people attended the meeting.

“Spirituality,” Keum said, “can facilitate a dialogue between the mission of the church and the most prophetic voices in the world today. While we share our spiritual resources with the civil movements, we could also learn from them what the most urgent mission priorities are in the contemporary world.”

Keum, a member of the Presbyterian Church of Korea who studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, said he was making his comments in the context of a shift in the center of Christianity towards the churches in the South.

“More than 65 per cent of the world’s Christian population lives in Asia, Africa and Latin America,” he noted. “This change of global Christian demography will bring a new ecumenical landscape sooner rather than later.”

This shift called into question, Keum said, the agenda of the 20th century ecumenical movement for church unity, which, he added, was based on Western modernism and rationalism. This movement, he stated, “was invented by Western Christianity, mostly led by Western leaders, and structured overwhelmingly by Western agendas.”

However, “it is time to shift the foundation of the ecumenical movement from a logical basis to a spiritual one,” Keum stated. “To mobilize and build the global alternative movement, it is necessary that resources for spiritual renewal be developed as an essential basis of the movement,” he said.