wfn.org | WCC 8th Assembly: Feature 2/1

[Sheila MESA <smm@wcc-coe.org>]

World Council of Churches
19 December 1997
50th Anniversary and Eighth Assembly Feature Service - No. 2

"Turn to God - Rejoice in Hope"

A personal reflection on the theme of the Eighth WCC Assembly to be
held in Harare, Zimbabwe, 3-14 December 1998
by Thomas F. Best of  the World Council of Churches  Faith and Order
Secretariat

This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in The
Ecumenical Review, July 1996.

A Theme for Today

The World Council of Churches' eighth assembly will gather at a time of
crisis, challenge and opportunity for the churches, for the ecumenical
movement, and for the world.

The theme of this assembly is "Turn to God - Rejoice in Hope"! It is an
exhortation and a challenge to Christians and the churches to proclaim
together their faith, to bring a message of hope and new life to a world
gripped by doubt, meaninglessness and despair.

The theme has been developed with a lively awareness of the
challenges testing Christian faith today.

These challenges are many.  There is, for example, the challenge of a
world situation in which hope and hopelessness vie for ascendancy: the
fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the rise of a democratic
regime in South Africa, the tentative and troubled moves towards peace
in Ireland, all offer the promise of liberation from violence, oppression and
human suffering. These are powerful signs of hope, signs of God's
presence in history.

But powerful counter-forces are also at work: there is a personal
individualism, encouraged by the needs of an apparently insatiable
market, which defines personal and social worth in terms of material
gain. There is a collective individualism, often fed by a long history of
oppression and frustrated hopes, which promotes a particular ethnic,
cultural or racial group at the expense of others. There is a culture of
violence - of death - which defies humanity and reason alike, preferring
competition to cooperation, domination to solidarity and sharing, and
absorbing vast resources in the development of engines of destruction.

There is also the challenge of a church situation in which signs of both
renewal and of decline abound. In the Southern hemisphere churches
are growing; in the North there is the explicit undoing of old anathemas
and divisions; everywhere there are many and mighty examples of
greater unity, of witness, of service, of resistance to oppression and
evil, of faithfulness unto death.

But in the North many established churches are declining; in many
countries, both North and South, new patterns of religious life emerge,
challenging traditional church structures.

There is the challenge of an ecumenical situation balanced between
resolution and resignation. Over the past one hundred years the
churches have learned to reflect, worship, witness and serve together.
There are signs that they are ready to enter a next stage of the
ecumenical movement.  But they hesitate.  They seem strangely unable,
or unwilling, or simply afraid, to draw the consequences of their own
shared experience in this "ecumenical century".

A theme to bring hope
These challenges, and others, will confront the delegates to the eighth
assembly of the WCC. Other matters particular to the WCC itself will also
come together at the next assembly, making it certainly a decisive
moment, and possibly a decisive turning-point, in the life of the WCC and
in the churches' ecumenical journey. The year 1998 will mark the 50th
anniversary of the founding of the WCC. There will be appropriate
celebrations, but also a fundamental stocktaking and setting of new
directions.

The assembly theme will function in this context with a structure and
dynamic based upon a threefold pattern, particular to the Christian faith
and life:

- God turns to us in grace
- We respond in faith, acting in love
- We anticipate the coming, final fullness of God s presence in all of
creation

TURN TO GOD
The God to whom we turn
 
The God to whom we turn is that faithful God who has acted throughout
history to establish and maintain God's world and people.  We turn - we
can turn - because God has first turned to us.  Not our own faithfulness,
but God's faithfulness, is the bedrock of our hope and the source of our
life. Indeed God remains faithful, even if we are not faithful (Gen. 9:11;
Deut. 4:25-31).

To turn to God is to remember the mighty and loving acts of God and
confess that we are called to obedience by God.

In our individualistic age it is crucial to note that such "remembering" so
often takes place in a liturgical setting in the presence of the community
or its representatives.

Responding in active love

Turning to God and God alone is inevitably, also, a turning away from
certain other things, from all the "idols" which clamour for our allegiance
today. The idols of wood and stone denounced by the prophet Isaiah
(40:19-20; 44:9-20) have been supplanted by things far more pervasive
and seductive: by systems of material and social gain which reward
greed rather than generosity; by political and economic systems which
reward those who already have, at the expense of those who have not;
by cultural and psychological systems which reward habits of
domination and control rather than those of cooperation, sharing and
solidarity.

Living within a cultural and social context we inevitably participate in its
systems of value, control and reward: we have a stake in our own
oppression by sin. Thus the call to "turn to God" is always a call to
repentance, to a deliberate turning away from the dominant values of our
society.

This "turning to God" affects every aspect of our lives and all of our
relationships. So it calls us to a new spirituality, expressed not just in
particular devotional acts but in a whole way of life oriented to the living
God.

Through such "repentance", through letting go of ourselves as the centre
of our own life, we establish a new relationship not only with ourselves
but also with our neighbours.

How are we to "turn to" our neighbours?  In the way in which God has
turned to us, in the way of loving kindness. 

"Turning to" our neighbour means we seek to establish justice for him, or
her, or them.  God has acted for our salvation, so we must act for the
good of the neighbour, the community and the whole created order.

Justice is not basically a matter of calculating rights and wrongs, nor of
establishing social programmes; it is fundamentally about relationship. It
seeks to restore a right relationship where this has been distorted, or
destroyed, by abuse of personal or communal power, or by inequalities
in economic, cultural or social opportunity.

At its extreme, justice goes altogether beyond the calculation of rights
and wrongs; indeed, it often appears to contradict common-sense
notions of fairness or even good sense, as when Jesus demands that
his disciples practise a love which goes the second - and not only the
second! - mile (Matt. 5:41; cf 5:43-48, and Matt. 20:1-16).

Because justice seeks the good of the neighbour, and because it works
to redress grievances and correct imbalances within the community, its
final goal is reconciliation. Indeed, because estrangement grows from
injustice and imbalances of opportunity or understanding, the
establishment of justice is a precondition for true reconciliation.  The
Psalmist looks for a time when "righteousness and peace will kiss each
other" (Ps. 85:10).

This means churches will be engaged in struggles for justice. It means,
too, that churches need to consider how far their own lives - as
institutions composed of fallible human beings - actually reflect the
biblical understanding of God's merciful justice, and the biblical vision of
life in community, a community free from domination and coercion, where
each person may freely exercise his or her gifts to the glory of God and
for the good of the community as a whole.

REJOICE IN HOPE!
Living in and by the promises of God

Christian "joy" is not a superficial "positive feeling", nor is Christian hope
a facile optimism; both notions emerged from the experience of the early
Christian communities confronting impossibilities, hardships and
persecutions and discovering that they had, in their life together in Christ,
resources sufficient unto the day (cf. Matt. 10:19).
 
Several qualities of Christian hope are especially helpful when
considering the assembly theme.

Radical Hope

The hope to which we are called is a radical hope. It is, after all, rooted in
God's raising Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, from the dead
(Rom. 1:4).  Such an act is the opposite of something to be predicted by
clever analysis of the present, or "present trends": it makes a radical
disjunction with the present order, offending common sense and
reversing this world's values (cf Mark 8:31-38; 9:30-41; 10:32-45; 1Cor.
1:22-25).  It proclaims God's "no!" to the fundamental power of the cycle
of nature, the power of death itself.

The resurrection is God's "yes!" to Jesus of Nazareth and to the kind of
Messiah he understood himself to be: not an imperious ruler, but a
servant who suffered for others.

The power of the hope to which we are called is the power of Christ's
self-offering love; and such a hope, rooted in suffering, can be neither
triumphalist, nor coercive, nor utopian and 
sentimental.
(continued)