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FEATURES OF CHRISTIANITY IN WORLD REACH1: PART 1
Encounter, Summer 2004 by Nottingham, William J
I thank the Association for the invitation to present a paper on features of Christianity in world reach. For thirty-five years, my ministry was related to the ecumenical mission of the church. The theme conforms to the course called "Mission in a Global Context," which I taught as a visiting lecturer at Phillips, Lexington, and Christian Theological Seminary upon retirement in 1994, and as Affiliate Professor of Mission at CTS since then. The connection of this topic to theological education and to local congregations in the U.S. and Canada is essential today, in my view. The faithful church will welcome signs of Christian unity worldwide, cross-cultural awareness of the conditions of life on other parts of the planet, a degree of political realism about globalization and peace, and responsibility to witness everywhere to the love and justice of God. Barth said that there is "an irrevocable sense of mission even though it sweeps men and women into the catastrophe of all humankind."2
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Walter Brueggemann edited a book in 2001 called Hope for the World: Mission in a Global Context, based on an eight-week international seminar at Columbia Theological Seminary, which produced a consensus paper called "The Mission of the Christian Movement in the Twenty-first Century is to Confess Hope in Action."3 In a concluding chapter, he writes that among other pastoral tasks:
The mission is to educate the church about the true situation of U.S. citizenship in an empire of enormous power and huge ambitions, to disabuse the citizenry of any "innocence" on the part of U.S. hegemony. This would include a sustained critical analysis of the ideology, propaganda, and euphemisms that give a human face to empire. . . . The mission of the church in the United States includes strong, intentional connections with the ecumenical church in other parts of the world, especially in those societies that are target for abuse and exploitation by U.S. imperialism - to the end that church solidarity will provide a context for alternative political-economic policies by empire.4
This is reminiscent of the article by Gary Dorrien, also a Union grad, in the March 8 issue of Christian Century called "Axis of One: The 'Unipolarist' Agenda."5 It is in this spirit that I propose we begin to think of Christian faith across the world.6
The Peters Projection map will help us locate places indicated in "world reach." Orality and Text have a place here, because in 1569, Gerardus Mercator gave us the maps we are familiar with in our geography books, if anyone can remember when geography was taught in public school, or that we collected through the years from the National Geographic magazine. Orality, unwritten communication, is transmitted by visibility; namely, the superiority complex of Europeans. The Northern Hemisphere dominates the map and therefore our thinking about the world. By placing the equator two-thirds of the way down the map, Mercator made it possible to see better his little homeland of Flanders. The further you go north, the bigger the countries get. The Congo, formerly Zaire, is nearly five times as big as France and seventy-five times as big as Belgium, but you can't tell that from Mercator's map. India is one and a half times bigger than Greenland, but the old maps show Greenland far bigger, about as big as all of Africa. The Middle East looks insignificant. Brazil, as big as the United States, looks much smaller.
Simon Winchester wrote in the New York Times: "Mercator's influence in creating a whole raft of political attitudes in the centuries since is little short of astonishing."7 This has been a characteristic of the way we have looked at things around the world, not least in the modern missionary movement, and we have to beware of it in looking at features of Christianity today, as if the norm of Christian life and faith is located in the North. Like the Peters Projection Map, the Christian map has changed in recent years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, 80 percent of Christians lived in the North. By the end of the century, half of the world's Christians were Africans, while Christian faith is in recession in Europe and Britain. You can judge for yourselves about the U.S. It is certainly true of Canada, where a poll on whether "religion has an important place in your life" showed only 30 percent who answered in the affirmative. The poll shows a still significant 56 percent in the United States.
CHURCHES OF CONSEQUENCE
I begin by a feature of Christianity I find fundamental: "Where and in what way is it consequential?" This is a more familiar question in Spanish: "¿Donde es la iglesia consecuente? " Where does it matter? How is it consistent with its confession of faith? For this, we have to try to consider the spiritual consequences, the preaching and pastoral ministries, as well as service or witness in the larger community. Where does it appear to an observer that it is relevant to its context? Where does the church identify with the social Utopia of the poor? Does it connect with people's movements resisting globalization, or seeking to make it more equitable? How does it relate to human rights? Is it expressing Christian unity? Does it go beyond interreligious dialogue as a problem to be solved, and see it as cooperation for the common good to interreligious living as "the people of God in the midst of all God's peoples"?8 Does it practice the justice which religious communities deserve of each other? Maybe Christian faith is consequential in some way wherever it is found, and I make that caveat to avoid being misunderstood. Theologically, I understand how that case could be made. But in my experience, these representative churches stand out. I am not making a judgment, only selecting some good examples.
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