VISIONS FOR CHRISTIANITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY‘

Autor: Roswith Gerloff
Rok vydání: 2000
Předmět:
Zdroj: International Review of Mission. 89:361-372
ISSN: 1758-6631
0020-8582
DOI: 10.1111/j.1758-6631.2000.tb00217.x
Popis: LOCALLY (HOME) GLOBALLY (OIKOUMENE) I. I begin with three little stories of how "church" can happen in our times. All three are chosen deliberately from our own cultural milieu and the structures familiar to us in the established churches. They stem from other continents or describe people who have migrated to Europe from far-away shores. And they are only a few among the many which, in my work and research, have confirmed to me time and again the reality of the Christian ecclesia in our modem world. They have taken away from me any anxiety for the continuation or the survival of Christ's church on earth. The first story concerns my early encounters with African Caribbean migrant churches in Britain and I first told it years ago in an address to the Basle Mission at one of their annual conferences [2]. In Birmingham, in 1973, I was equipped with nothing but a car, a street map, a telephone book and a Bible as I searched for some of those yet unknown congregations that met in a school or sports hall somewhere around the city. None of the established British churches then accommodated any of these "cults" or "splinter groups". One Sunday morning, I arrived together with some students at a school that had vaguely been mentioned to me as the location for one of the assemblies of the Church of God in Christ. [3] We discovered the building but not the people. Time ran out and my companions had to go back for lunch. I returned an hour later and now found a small Sunday school of adults and children who were sitting in a circle praying, singing and studying the Bible together, all in their best colourful outfits and somehow amazed about the sudden appearance of a white woman. Then two children brought a baby to me, gave me some biscuits and a milk bottle, and began to observe me. After half an hour they had found o ut that I was human and, most important, warm enough to take care of a small child and to mother and feed it. The worship began and among singing, dancing and clapping, many testified about the events of the past week and their experience of God's mercy in those events. The worshippers began to talk about the sisterhood and brotherhood of all God's people because I was present in their midst. Then the lady evangelist who led the congregation asked me to preach because why should I have come, if not to testify about God's love? Why should I have come if I was not Christ's ambassador, God's angel, in the disguise of a stranger? After I had ended, a man stood up and said: "Why were the people so late this morning? Had they arrived earlier, they certainly would have heard more of God-in-our-neighbour by meeting also those who originally had come with our visitor. They would have heard about the vision of a world in which black and white trust one another, because what counts is not the appearance of a person but her heart, which, biblically speaking, is the centre of her life! They would also have heard of a vision of a church in which the criterion for genuine preaching is not the intellectual apparatus we possess but the friendship for a child! Or with the words of Jesus: "Whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name receives me" (Matthew 18:5). My second story comes from Argentina and from a very large evangelical church, one of those which now regards itself as "post-denominational" or as a community which transcends traditional confessional barriers in the rough climate of the capital city. In England we would call it a "community church", in Germany perhaps a local ecumenical project. The Iglesia Evangelista Bautista del Centro in Buenos Aires is, denominationally speaking, a Baptist congregation but one which has experienced a renewal and received "a great flew vision". Church today, they say, is irrelevant if it only circles around its own survival instead of concentrating on the urgent and diverse needs of people in the church's neighbourhood. Renewal in the Holy Spirit means a recovery of the charismata or spiritual gifts of the early Christians and their great task, in the same way as Paul founded a chain of churches in Asia Minor by which "God wandered from place to place and brought faith in Jesus Christ to any city". …
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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