wfn.org | WCC - Listening to people's spirituality

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

World Council of Churches
Press Feature
For Immediate Use
9 July 2002

Listening to people's spirituality : 
WCC consultation looks for new forms of church belonging

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

For further information, please contact Media Relations Office, 
Tel:  (+41.22) 791.61.53   	

**********
The World Council of Churches (WCC) is a fellowship of churches,
now 342, in more than 100 countries in all continents from
virtually all Christian traditions. The Roman Catholic Church is
not a member church but works cooperatively with the WCC. The
highest governing body is the assembly, which meets approximately
every seven years. The WCC was formally inaugurated in 1948 in
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Its staff is headed by general
secretary Konrad Raiser from the Evangelical Church in Germany.

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