"Turn to God - Rejoice in Hope!" An approach to the theme of the Eighth Assembly of the WCC

Winter under cultivation

Is as arable as Spring

Emily Dickinson(1)

1. A theme for today

The World Council of Churches' eighth assembly will gather at a kairos moment -- 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, a challenge to Christians and the churches today, uttered in response to this kairos moment. The theme calls us to proclaim together the Christian faith, to bring a message of hope and new life to a world gripped by doubt, meaninglessness and despair. It calls us to live out our faith in witness, mission and service in response to the injustice and suffering endured by both humanity and the natural world. The theme is, fundamentally, a call to Christian obedience today.

The theme is bold, realistic, flexible and resilient. It has been developed with a lively awareness of the challenges testing our faith, and the capacity for a Christian response, today. These challenges are manifold. 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 and in the Middle East, all offering 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 in the world: 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. It is a culture, for example, which prefers "smart" land mines to no land mines at all; referring especially to the immoral use of such promiscuous weapons, an article in the prestigious journal Scientific American notes:

The great majority of modem conflicts are now internal rather than

international: they are

civil wars, struggles for independerice, ethnic and racial "cleansings,"

terrorist campaigns...

Accordingly, civilians have increasingly become victims of war. In World

War I,

they represented only 15 percent of all fatalities ... ; in today's

hostilities, more than 90

percent of all those injured are civilians.(2)

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, and acting increasingly as if their historic divisions have been healed; 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. Often new "missions" repeat the colonial patterns of one hundred years ago -- only more efficiently, now that the tools of mass communication and mass marketing lie ready to hand.

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, one in which, having advanced from comparison to discussion, they now move together to decision about the next steps on their journey. But they hesitate. They strengthen their denominational structures at the expense of ecumenical commitments. They decrease their support for ecumenical bodies, including the WCC. They seem strangely unable, or unwilling, or simply afraid, to draw the consequences of their own shared experience in this "ecumenical century". Some even dare to speak of an "ecumenical winter".

And there is the challenge of all the false hopes, the idols which beg us to make them powerful by granting them power over us. There are false hopes based on illusions, or on wishful thinking. Many "prophets" will cater to the need, rooted in our anxiety about the future, for simplistic certainties. These will be offered in abundance by the market-place, by political systems and, not least as the next millennium approaches, by "religious leaders" claiming a certain knowledge of God's will. As we approach the year 2000, the Christian virtue of critical discernment will become more and more essential, not only over against the world, but within and among the churches and Christian movements as well.