News
Michael Stahl
"Believing without belonging" was the theme of a World Council of Churches (WCC) consultation held at the end of June at the Christian Jensen College in Breklum, Northern Germany. The 50 participants, mostly theologians from the European and North American churches, searched for "new paradigms of church and mission in secularized and post-modern contexts", discussed new forms of religiosity emerging in many countries, and asked what kinds of spirituality churches are called to. "The western experience of church makes it possible for people to believe without belonging, and belong without believing", a consultation report notes. Yet it is the missionary task of the church "to nurture a deeper sense of belonging", participants said.
Looking at religiosity among those who do not attend church, the director of the Orthodox Institute of Mission and Ecumenism in St Petersburg, Vladimir Federow, reported that "in Russia many people perceive themselves as orthodox believers without being members of any constitutional church." His colleague, Anne-Marie Kool, a professor of missiology and director at the Protestant Institute for Mission studies in Budapest, agreed that despite a great sense of mistrust inherited from their communist past, there was "a feeling of believing without belonging" among people in Eastern Europe. Kool is committed to a new contextual approach to mission that aims at "restoration of biblical shalom, reconciliation, as well as a loving, caring, healing community of Christians".
According to a recent study presented at the consultation, church attendance in Great Britain fell by around 20% between 1987 and 1999, while the number of people reporting spiritual or religious experience increased by more than 60% over the same period. But according to Simon Barrow, the secretary of the British and Irish Churches' Commission on Mission, "popular alternative spiritual practices in Britain today are radically dislocated from traditional ideas about God and religion". For him, these are, rather, "secular spiritualities". Considering the situation in their own countries, most participants agreed with Barrow's suggestion that "The huge gulf between authorized church teaching and the diffuse, often intensely individualistic spiritual experience offers no obvious escape route from the continuing collapse of the hegemonic, Christendom form of church." Barrow characterized the churches' response as "technological and managerial rather than spiritual and theological. It is not based on the distinctiveness of resources like faith and promise of God's future." He called on churches "to engage in much more systematic, non-judgmental listening to the spirituality of those beyond their gates".
Barrow's arguments were supported by another consultation report which suggests that "new spirituality is affecting the population at large," and that many people would "no longer find themselves at home in church environments that are out of touch with the changes in their lives". The consultation pledged to take very seriously the new spiritual quest of people all over the world. There is "no reason to lament", it said. Rather, churches should respond to the new spiritualities by drawing on "all the spiritual resources in the long and rich Christian tradition," and "seek ways of presenting these more widely".
George Hunsberger, a professor at the Western Theological Seminary in Michigan, suggested that "our habit of always telling our Christian story as a success story is running out of capital," and that churches which try to recapture their privileged role as chaplain, reconstruct the Christian moral fabric, or recruit loyal and faithful customers for religious services, are in danger. Instead, he feels, they should seek to "recover what it means for them to be missional", and encourage people "to allow the gospel to reshape the way they think and live, forming new patterns that move away from those assumed in their cultural frames".
Offering a Southern perspective, Jyoti Sahi, founder of the Art Ashram in Bangalore, India, criticized the European churches for "having become too involved with rational thinking and having thus lost contact with the symbolic and magical dimension of life". He encouraged the Northern churches to open themselves to "the insights to be found among other faiths and religions". "Christ does not belong to us. Christ asks us to step beyond our boundaries," he said. This point of view was echoed by Korean theologian Hong Eyoul Hwang, a researcher at the Center for Theological Studies of Peace and Reunification in Korea: "Christians need to take the opportunity to learn from Indigenous cultures and religions to face the challenges of post-modern society." There is growing awareness, he said, that the poor are not just objects of exploitation but "the proud bearers of cultural and religious traditions with a truly holistic life-oriented worldview".
For Dietrich Werner, a theologian at the North Elbian Centre for World Mission, the consultation showed that the question of gospel and culture has now entered the debate of Northern theologians, while the challenges of modernization and secularization are being taken up by Southern ones. "More and more, we realize that globalization has not only economic and social consequences, but cultural and religious ones as well," he said.
Michael Stahl works at the Public Relations department of the North Elbian Evangelical Lutheran Church, Hamburg