wfn.org | Missionary "Pact of Nonaggression" Needed,

[PCUSA.NEWS@pcusa.org]

17-September-1997 
97361 
 
    Missionary "Pact of Nonaggression" Needed, 
    Says Russian Church Official 
 
    by Julian Shipp 
 
GENEVA--A prominent member of the Russian Orthodox Church has called for a 
missionary "pact of nonaggression" to deal with evangelical 
"pseudomissionaries" who have entered Russia since the collapse of 
communism. 
 
    Vsevolod Chaplin of the Department for External Church Relations of the 
Russian Orthodox Church made his remarks to the Central Committee of the 
World Council of Churches, which is meeting in Geneva. He was speaking 
during a session devoted to the results of a major conference on mission 
and evangelism organized by the WCC last year in the Brazilian city of 
Salvador. 
 
    The issue of missionary activity in the former Soviet Union and Eastern 
Europe since the collapse of communism is a sensitive one for the WCC, 
which has as members 330 Orthodox, Protestant and Anglican churches in all 
parts of the world. 
 
    The Salvador conference strongly criticized aggressive evangelical 
methods by foreign missionaries since the collapse of communism in the 
former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These activities are denounced as 
"proselytizing" by dominant Orthodox churches in the region whose leaders 
believe that the missionary work is aimed at members of Orthodox churches. 
Leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a prominent WCC member, 
have suggested that other WCC member churches are participating in such 
activities. 
 
    Chaplin stressed his belief that the local congregation should have a 
"central role"  in missionary work. "In fact, our church is now developing 
its own mission in what I would call the largely paganized Russian 
society," he said. 
 
    With the theme of "Called to One Hope: The Gospel in Diverse Cultures," 
the Salvador conference was the culmination of a five-year study project on 
the relationship between the Christian gospel and different cultures. The 
conference emphasized that "all cultures" were "worthy vehicles of God's 
love, and that no culture is the exclusive norm for God's relationship with 
humans," a statement that some have interpreted as being a criticism of 
traditional missionary activity in the Southern Hemisphere, where some 
believe that Western culture was identified with the Christian message. 
 
    Another sensitive issue discussed at the Salvador conference was the 
relationship between the Christian religion and traditional or indigenous 
religions. Salvador, which is unusual among Brazil's major cities in that 
most of its population is black, is also home to an Afro-Brazilian 
religion, Candombl, which has many followers in the region. The city was 
the country's main port for the slave trade and Candombl arose from the 
religious life of the slaves from West Africa who adapted elements of the 
Roman Catholic tradition.  Jorge Luiz F. Domingues of Brazil, one of the 
participants at the Salvador conference, told the Central Committee in 
Geneva that for centuries Candombl had to be practiced in secrecy and that 
even today the relationship of the Christian churches to this religion was 
not free of tension. 
 
    Professor Alexandra Johnston of Canada, another conference participant 
and an adviser to the WCC unit that organized the Salvador gathering, told 
the Central Committee that the event reminded her that the church must hold 
on to two important realities: its distinctiveness from and commitment to 
the culture in which it is set. In such a way, she said, the gospel will 
become neither captive to a culture nor alienated from it.  Instead gospel 
and culture will challenge and illuminate each other. 

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