Ecumenical Leadership' - Keynote Address, SAEPP, Dhaka

Keynote Address: Ecumenical Leadership
11.00-12.30 P.M.
3rd August 2005
CCDB-HOPE Training Centre, Dhaka

Ecumenical Space and Ecclesial Space

Introduction

We often hear it said that the Christian Leaders today are in search of an image. With the secularization of society functions once performed by Christian Leaders, have been taken over by others-educationists, social workers, counselors. Even within the church, the new stress on the wider responsibility has led some to question the traditional form of understanding. Therefore we need to think our role as leaders in our world today. Canon Subir Biswas was very much concerned for the poor and that took him into active participation in many organizations. He was the founder of Urban Industrial Mission ( Durgapur ), Calcutta Urban Service, Kalikata Basti Pragati Sanstha (KBPS), Antara Khelaghar: the fellowship of the Handicapped. Thousand of Bangladesh refugees will be grateful for all the help he gave them and it was out of this massive Relief Operation that the Cathedral Relief Service was conceived and later founded. He could infuse warmth and friendship into people who came in contact with him. I am deeply moved by his last testimony:

“ I was such a busy person, busy from early morning to late night. So busy that others could not approach for help. “How could we disturb you” ? I was doing great things for the kingdom of God , for justice, for truth, for the church and for the poor. I had built whole world around me which depend on me. And then came sudden illness and cessation of all activity. Lord you are marvelous…. In the midst of all the frustration and fear you speak gently. ‘Be not afraid'. Forgive us Lord when we build worlds which are dependent on us and not on you”.

The words are reminder of a person who had prophetic courage and had the capacity to feel the pain of others. Therefore, we need to take our present reality into consideration. One such is the Globalization. Globalization may be interpreted as a term to describe "a process” which embodies a transformation. It can be assessed in terms of their extensity, intensity, and impact- generating transcontinental, interregional and networks of activity.  From an economic perspective, globalization involves an explosion of global trade, investment and financial flows across the boundaries.  With the intensification of international trade, investment and finance, more countries and regions entered the competition for market and capital from a socio-cultural perspective; globalization involves the massive movement of people across borders and the fusion of cultures on a global scale.  From a political perspective, the impact of globalization refers to the tendency for political decisions and actions in one part of the world to generate widespread reactions and consequences elsewhere.  The global movement of people and news with the global flow of goods and capital has turned many a local event into international concerns.

Understanding of Time and Space

There have been different shapes of time and space in history. In the early historical time human community lived in the natural time and local space. Time and space were not arbitrarily defined and managed. The Agrarian production, based upon the land, had been dependent upon the local space and natural time. Community was formed in this context, where cooperation and dependency upon the nature are essential relations. Tribal communities are examples. Politically feudalism is dependent upon the natural time, local space and agrarian economy. Cultural developments were also very much dependent upon the natural space and time, the agrarian economy, feudal politics. Locality is the center of spatial organization of the life.

In the modern times the industrial civilization had emerged. This has shifted the shape of time and space. The concept of the absolute space and absolute time has been dominant in the industrial society. Basically the world has been viewed as a machine. Here the time and space has been managed according to the needs and dictates of the industrial society. The industrial economy has been dependent upon the absolute time and space. This is the core of the modernity. The thrust of the civilization has been regarded as modernization. The Western Enlightenment has dominated the philosophy of the world, and it has evolved the infrastructure of the industrial society, that is, science and technology. The center of the life organization has been shifted to the nation state, suppressing and overcoming the local. In the industrial and modern, the ideas of the free market and modern nation state have emerged. In this context the individual has the absolute identity; and social relations are determined according to contracts among the individuals. The freedom and private property are the highest values to preserve the life. Relation of human community to the nature is one of the domination and conquering.

Due to the development of advanced sciences and high technology, the time and space is now managed in an unlimited extent. This made possible the globalization of the capital and the market. The previous limits and boundaries are being overthrown in the process of globalization. Key players in the modern had been nation states; but in the new cyber age, the key agents of power and influence have been the giant transnational corporate entities such as global corporations and transnational financial institutions.

In the changing scenario of the modern world, the mainline Christianity is giving way to a more non-institutional expression of Christianity. The church is becoming more sensitive to the growing charismatic movements within its fold. It is evident that broadening the sphere and changing the nature of the ecumenical space has become imperative. Because the decline of institutional Christianity and the growth of the Pentecostal-Charismatic form of Christianity and resurgence of religious movements has had, and will certainly continue to have, far-reaching consequences, a direct bearing on the future course of the ecumenical movement. Then there are contradictions of affluence and poverty, and lack of peace and security in the world. These may be the issues that may gather new people in the ecumenical movement. What would it mean to begin our theological and ecumenical questions from a social point of view where realities bring people together and Disasters like Tsunami seem to immediately call for ecumenical sharing.

In the Report of the Consultation, Convened by the World Council of Churches at Chavannes-de-Bogis , Switzerland , 30 November to 3 December 2004 , Dr Musimbi Kanyoro talks about the Dreams and Visions: Living the Deepening Contradictions of Ecumenism in the 21st Century. Kanyoro's dream is for an ecumenical space where people encounter each other and where God meets each one in their journey of faith. An ecumenical space can have many round tables so that people need not fight for space but rather they can seek to discover which table God is inviting them to join. Churches may come together motivated by burning issues of the day such as in the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance. Kanyoro dreams of an ecumenical space where voices, opinions and contradictions can hear one another without fear and censorship; a space which is conscious of the changing times in communication and embraces communication as a method to tell its story to those who can join the space and those who will not or need not join; a space where variety and diversity are assets rather than liabilities; and a table where faith and scriptures are taught. Like the Pharaoh in Joseph's time, she is troubled by her dreams. They need interpretation. What kind of leadership is needed for these tables? How will tables relate to each other? The WCC has called all of us to share our dreams. But 'who' will interpret them?

Creating Space: A Case Study

The rise of the new Pentecostal churches, which are more numerous than the established churches that are declining. They present themselves with a much stronger pastoral and missionary dynamism than the established churches. They are the churches of the poor, of the outcasts, they are the expression of the religiosity of the forsaken which reach out to millions of people. Within less than a century Pentecostals are in the process of outgrowing all other Protestant churches taken together.  The influence of Pentecostalism is not restricted to Pentecostal churches, but rather its influence penetrates into different denominations including the Roman Catholics.  It is really an ecumenical movement. Pentecostalism would bring a new impetus to Christianity and society.  If so, any study of the ecumenical movement should not ignore Pentecostalism.   

The history of Pentecostalism shows us that it basically is a contextual grass-root movement.  It is a religion of the poor based on Oral liturgy; narrative theology and witness, maximum participation at the levels of reflection and prayer, inclusion of dreams and visions into personal and public form of worship, an understanding of the body-mind relationship that is informed by experience.

The question is raised if at the micro level the new church is helpful, at the macro-structural level does it transform the system? Does it contribute to transforming the foundations of social relations? Pentecostals are apolitical. They are not interested in politics; they are indifferent towards politics as a commitment for social change. They do not make their members, their communities politically aware; in this sense they are truly alienated from the system. The roots of this non-political attitude is based on a privatized and individualistic faith. Pentecostals are aware of the great social problems such as unemployment, indebtedness, etc., but they say that with the second advent of Christ every problem will be solved (millenarianism). Violence, war, etc. are signs that precede the advent of Christ. Hence, an apocalyptic messianism, with no political implications. But to stop here would be to contradict creating space. We have to overcome some biases towards the members of Pentecostal Churches and Charismatic Renewal. In order to begin a dialogue with our Pentecostal brothers and sisters it would be best to start from daily coexistence and concrete actions and struggles in favour of the people. These actions may pave the way for a new ecumenical dialogue and practical cooperation. The simple fact that brothers and sisters of Pentecostal churches are present is a sign that the Spirit of God wants us to live in communion.

A Narrative Ecclesiology

People identify with particular stories and the Church as a community is no exception. To exist as a church means to have a collective memory and story bears the corporate memory. The Church as a story-telling fellowship tells the story of Israel and of Jesus Christ. The use of story as a category in Christian theology has been a subject of extensive discussion in recent decades. My concern in using story as a leading category is to show how the story of Israel , the story of Jesus and the early church lead to a vision of the church that can form the basis of an ecumenical identity; to gain insight for the self-understanding, and to overcome narrow identities within the Church.

Story is a powerful category for forming corporate identity. It helps to give a community identity, and therefore helps to constitute community. It can express things for which other idioms would be inappropriate. In particular the identity of a group can be articulated by stories. People are what they tell of themselves in their story and what they make of their story. It is also true that the story is vulnerable because it could be abused by a community by becoming the bearer of an ideology like the myth of the Aryan race or of white supremacy.

The Church is called to tell a story of which it believes God to be the author. It is God who has reconciled the world to Himself through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is not a fairy tale but an active word which makes history. It calls into being a fellowship of people for a specific task by His grace. The story tells of God's engagement with human history. In the search for an ecumenical ecclesiology, it is vital to strive for an ecumenical perspective through this story in a context where narrow particularity is often divisive, encouraging identity as black or white, first world or third world, male or female, and in particular within India as brahmanical, dalit or tribal.

The Story of Israel

The primary symbol of Israel 's self-interpretation is the people of YHWH . They owe their origin and existence to YHWH 's eclective activity. The interpretation of this story of the people of YHWH is seen in the continuity between Judaism and Christianity in terms of promise and fulfillment. The Old Testament is seen in terms of promise and New Testament in terms of fulfillment with the church as true Israel .

The story of the Church includes a failure to recognize the historical bonds that tie it to the history of Israel . The need is to understand the story in its historical matrix as it developed. The identity of the people of Israel is based on the Covenant. This goes back to their historic experience of deliverance from bondage in Egypt (Dt. 26:5f and Joshua 24).

And you shall make response before the Lord your God, ‘A wandering Aramaen was my father; and he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number; and there he become a nation, great, mighty and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. Then we cried to the Lord the God of our fathers, and the Lord heard our voice, and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression; and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror, with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.' (Dt. 26:5f)

The concept of ‘People' belonging to God is at the heart of the above confession. Once they were ‘No People' but now they are ‘A People'. The declaration begins in the land of Canaan then moves to Egypt and then out of Egypt . It calls into memory those events which were supposed to make ‘A People'. The identity of the People was maintained by the Covenant and the Law which was important for the stability and structure of the community. Both are the acts of identification of the people. YHWH is the God of Israel and Israel is the people of YHWH . The deliverance from Egypt was systematically worked out in Deutronomy and that idea underlies other writings of the Old Testament.

The union between YHWH and His people is based on a free historical activity of God in the history of His people. The most important aspect of the story of Israel is that it is not the people's but God's free choice, his mercy, love and faithfulness that constitute a people. Israel was only summoned to recognize that as an act of grace. Israel was repeatedly reminded of that moment when she was led out and responded to that act of grace. The story of Israel is a story of response and failures, judgement and punishment.

The discontinuity of Christianity from its own historical matrix in Israel was focused through faith in Jesus Christ. Christian tradition has characterized the discontinuity represented in Jesus as a deepening of the faith of Israel . But this does not mean that the Church as the people of God has no relation to Israel . Israel is the historical matrix. The continuity is broken in so far as Israel stands for a determinate ethnic and national way of remembering God.

The Story of the Early Church

The disciples of Jesus saw themselves as Israel in the same way as other groups such as the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots and the Essenes. In the beginning the earliest Christian community in no sense felt themselves to have a new religion distinct from Judaism. There was no boundary line between themselves and their fellow Jews. They saw themselves as Israel . They met in the temple (Acts 2:46 ). They took the categories for self-understanding from the Old Testament. They understood their story as a continuation of the story of Israel rather than its fulfillment. It was Jesus Christ who was the fulfillment.The idea of the people of God was fundamental to the understanding of the self-description of early Christians. The reality from ‘No People' to ‘A People' finds expression in the book of Acts and the Pauline Letters. One crucial issue that triggered off changes in the continuity between Judaism and Christianity was the place of the Gentiles in the Christian community.

The letter to the Romans sets the tone of the theological debate about the story of relationship between historical Israel and the Church. Paul believed himself to have been called to be the apostle to the Gentiles but he had to work out the contrast between the old and the new, the law and the Gospel, Moses and Christ. He was aware of his own background: ‘If any other man thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law a Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless'. (Phil.3:4f) Paul maintained to the end that God had been at work in the past, the law itself had been given by God and God had not abandoned his people Israel . He saw continuity and discontinuity.

In Romans 9-11, Paul reflects on the relation between the Gentiles and the Jewish people. It is the relation between two communities and their existence in the mysterious plan of God. In the course of history the Church picked up that side of Israel 's ‘No' to Jesus Christ. The rituals that were the identity of the Jews, particularly circumcision and Sabbath observance, were abandoned by the Christians. Paul argued that the eschatological unity of Jews and Gentiles in the new household of Christ was the logical implication of one God of Israel. ‘Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised through their faith' (Rom.3:29).

God is one, the God of Jews and Gentiles. The bone of contention was the unexpected and unthinkable claim that the Messiah had died a death cursed by the law, and was resurrected. It posed a shock and a sharp challenge to the way in which the people of God would be constituted and bounded. The perspective began to change in the course of history with various historical circumstances and with the early Christian's experiences.The first Christians had gone through this experience. When the disciples claimed that Jesus was the fulfillment, they were beginning from their experience from the past. The words of Jesus began to take on new meaning and the disciples began to take part in a new way in the story of Israel . The boundary of circumcision was broken but the Lord's Supper and Baptism provided symbolic expression of group identity.

Paul defended his belief that there is no distinction between Jews and Gentiles by appealing precisely to the unity of God and His impartiality. He had to explain the purpose of God which could encompass the crucified Messiah. But he had to struggle with the dialectical tension between Israel 's past and future place in God's purpose.

Romans became a theological tractate on the nature of faith. Justification no longer ‘justified' the status of Gentile Christians as honorary Jews, but became the timeless answer to the plights and pains of the introspective conscience of the West. Paul was no longer seen ‘among Jews and Gentiles' but rather as the guide for those perplexed and troubled by the human predicament.

The continuity of the community with the story of Israel was the belief in one God, the God of Israel, the creator of the universe and ultimate judge of all human actions. The discontinuity was that it became difficult on the part of the Gentiles to think of themselves as Jews. Both the continuity and the discontinuity are indicated through the story of Israel , Jesus and the early church, with Paul as one of the main interpreters. After the Roman empire was converted, the persecuted Christians became the persecutors, and anti-semitism became a paradigmatic problem. To go back to the story of Israel is to note the meaning of the church in the story of Israel as appropriated by the early Christians. It is to draw attention to the primacy of the empirical aspect of the church, and to the church as referring to a concrete group of people.

iii. The People of God': a key to the Narrative Identity of the Church

Different images of the church have emerged over time in a variety of contexts. In the history of Christianity concepts of the Church have been influenced by the form of the Church at any given time. It is possible that the Church too easily can become a prisoner of one mage; an image made for itself at one particular period in history. Every age has its own image of the Church arising out of a particular historical situation. A very Dulles in his influential work on ecclesiology has identified key models of the Church as Institution, Mystical Communion, Sacrament, Herald, Servant. His conviction is that the Church like other theological realities is a mystery. Mysteries are realities of which one cannot speak directly. If one wishes to talk about them, then one must draw on analogies afforded by the experience which provides the models. Depending on the circumstances in both the Church and the culture, one or the other has indeed taken form as a response to a particular cultural context. For example the Church has challenged the culture, taking the side of the oppressed in being the servant church. It has proclaimed its identity as herald, and has acceeded to the way things are conforming to culture in being an institutional church. The images are not exclusive but helpful in focusing the understanding of the Church.

While not denying the power and usefulness of the image of the body of Christ, the image of the people of God is proposed in order to construe an ecumenical identity. To say that the Church is the people of God is not just to name one metaphor among others, because the idea of people of God is implied in the very conception of the Church. The full implication of this can only be rightly understood within the context of the whole history of the people of God. The other metaphors applied to the Church could be said to be qualifications of the basic conception of the people of God. This image is based on the story as expressed in the story of Israel and the story of the early Church. To claim to be part of the Church universal is to claim to be part of the story of Israel and the story of the early Church. That is the key to the formation of an ecumenical identity of a Church.

The concept ‘People of God' is a common one for both the story of Israel and the early church. As a concept it has deep roots in the Old Testament. To concentrate on the Hebrew-Christian legacy of early Christianity might be important in a situation when the Church is becoming more global in its understanding of itself, and also for India where much objection is made to the western nature of Christianity. The present situation in India is similar to an earlier period when the transition was made from a Jewish to a non-Jewish setting. The present period is like the Christian beginnings where the Christians are just a minority but entrusted with the task of being a sign to the whole nation.

Bishop D.K. Sahu
General Secretary
NCCI

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Nicholas Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins and the Practice of Communion ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Lesile Newbigin prophetically saw Christianity moving towards a convergence of three streams, namely, the Sacramental, the Evangelical and the Pentecostal.  See The Household of God (New York: Friendship, 1954).

David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Harold D.Hunter, “We are the Church: New Congregationalism”, in Pentecostal Movements as an Ecumenical Challenge ,ed. Jurgen Moltmann and Karl Josef Kuschel.

The Church of North India , Bishop D.K.Sahu, Peter Lang, 1994

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society,SPCK, Lesslie Newbigin