Western Reformers Call on Africa to `Dispatch' Gospel

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 21, 1998 | by Larry Witham

Western evangelicals headed to Africa are calling on the World Council of Churches to return to its roots, claiming that the WCC has put politics before religion and engaged in syncretism.

Evangelical Protestants who believe in the Christian unity movement have called on the World Council of Churches, or WCC, to return to the biblical and missionary spirit of its 1948 founding.

A group called the Association for Church Renewal has listed seven ways the WCC has lost its Christian roots, from downplaying the uniqueness of Jesus Christ to overlooking persecution of believers. Renewal leaders have produced a document, "Proclaim Liberty: A Jubilee," that they plan to circulate this December in North America and in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the WCC will hold its eighth global assembly.

"This is the first time that a delegation of evangelical church leaders who are faithful members of churches in the World Council will go to an assembly to represent their constituents," says United Methodist theologian Thomas Oden, chairman of the appeal. "Evangelicals have been systematically excluded."

The renewal group, formed in 1996, has 4.5 million supporters in eight mainline Protestant denominations. The association argues that the WCC has erred in giving up the missionary spirit and in backing syncretism, or the mixing of religions. The classic example of WCC syncretism came at its 1991 assembly in Australia, according to the Rev. Donna F.G. Hailson of the American Baptist Churches. The South Korean feminist theologian Chung Hyun Kyung gave her speech on the assembly theme, "Come Holy Spirit," by performing a shamanistic dance that evoked ancestral and nature spirits.

The group also, contends that the WCC has helped promote dubious political and economic agendas, liberal sexual morality and traditional women's movements. Western attitudes have so diluted Christian belief, they say, that the Zimbabwe meeting should urge African, Asian and Latin American missionaries to save the West.

"We call on brothers and sisters [outside the West] to reverse the flow of world missions by dispatching the Gospel to us" says the Rev. Parker Williamson, editor of the Presbyterian Layman.

The WCC, which meets about every eight years and includes Protestant and Orthodox bodies, has chosen the theme of "jubilee" based on the Old Testament idea of a new start every 50 years. It will mark the end of the decade of "Churches in Solidarity With Women" and provide a five-day open forum for groups and issues not on the official agenda.

"We believe there is hope for the World Council of Churches" says Janice Shaw Crouse, director of the Ecumenical Coalition on Women & Society. Believers want the council to "repudiate all other gods and saviors" and declare Jesus Christ as "the only truth that sets the world free."

RELATED ARTICLE: Spiritual Supermarket

Two keen observers of the American religious scene agree that the nation's primary trend in faith is an anchorless search for "personal experience."

Belief in God and worship attendance are as high as ever, but the flux within those constants of religious life is unprecedented, report Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow and San Francisco Chronicle religion reporter Don Lattin in separate books based on extensive interviews and surveys.

One in three Americans no longer are tied to the religious backgrounds of their upbringing. "In 1950, only one in 20 left their church background," says Lattin, co-author of Shopping for Faith. "This is a tremendous change in 40 years." Individualistic spiritual search can degenerate into something like "everyone wearing a Walkman." Yet there is evidence that searchers begin to want a more permanent motif than shopping.

"People do get tired of the spiritual supermarket, and they do want to settle down," says Lattin. "The people who do a lot of spiritual shopping can still go back to their traditions."

Wuthnow, author of After Heaven, also describes Americans as shopping for new religious experiences in a "spiritual supermarket." The tradition of finding God in the "space" of organized religion has given way to experimentation with various kinds of religious experiences, regardless of their background.

"I'm not pessimistic about organized religion," Wuthnow says. "It has adapted in the past, and it will adapt again." But he suggests that Americans must adopt some kind of practice or spiritual discipline -- study, meditation, service or prayer -- to gain a benefit for life.

Wuthnow and Lattin agree that religious institutions seeking members must help people find a religious practice or must respond to their desire for personal experience. "Emphasis on personal experience rather than doctrine" crosses the religious spectrum, from Pentecostal salvation to Buddhist meditation.

--LW