Cosmopolitan Christianity
by Heidi Hadsell
An address at the UCC Annual Conference
October 20, 2006
Globalization is the order of the day… work patterns, careers, retirement, finance, education, the patterns of parish ministry, are all affected by global relationships that we are somewhat aware of but that we don’t fully understand. Most seminaries and virtually all universities are now offering courses in globalization, as each discipline and profession struggles with this new reality. The awareness of this global belonging provokes a variety of reactions of course, even for those who are in the best position to comprehend and benefit by it.
For some, perhaps for many, the awareness of the changes in our center of gravity away from the local and even the national, into the international, gives rise to the impulse to cocoon, to withdraw into boundaries that seem amenable to control and comprehension, to go along living ones daily life as best one can, knowing that the sands are shifting underneath. For others, this global reality occasions the attempt to control change, or the effects of change, at the local level, but also at the national level, often through support of the assertion of national power and self interest, and the attempt to impose it on the wider world.
Christian communities participate in both of these reactions. They may effectively circle their wagons, and come to view the church as primarily the source of comfort and nurture, the shelter where one can count on nothing much changing , where worldviews and assumptions long established are not challenged so much as affirmed, and where members of congregations can withdraw from the daily barrage of change and noise so prevalent elsewhere in daily life.
Or, alternatively, churches and Christian groups may attempt to assert a highly simplified version of their worldview, their narrative, and impose it on all the happenings around the globe. Thus they will tend to see in political and military events, and in the process of rapid social change, a battle of absolute good over absolute evil, of truth against lies, the triumph of right over wrong, in what is invariably described as a clash of civilizations. In the United States these groups often view United States as the keeper of the faith.
In a world that increasingly thinks in such polarities, perhaps the hardest thing to do for local congregations and denominations is to carve out and maintain a space and a stance that is engaged in global realities, able to assert its own voice, though willing to be just one voice among many, able to be both a shelter from and a bridge to the wider world. This kind of response may be described as cosmopolitan Christianity. The standard bearer of which in many ways is the apostle paul… with his travels around the roman empire, his insistence that Christianity is not a faith bound to ethnicities, tribes, or geographical locations.
This isn’t the easiest way to be Christian. Its full of ambiguities, and its as challenging as it is comforting trying to figure out how the faith first recounted two thousand years ago relates to life in this very different and very distant age. God is indeed still speaking.. but discerning God’s speech remains quite a task.
To sustain this way of being Christian, one draws upon many resources. There are critical and historical methodologies to help us read scripture, there are historical examples in the life of the church. We can encourage each other within and across denominations, and there is the wider reality of Christianity across the globe as well. It is this wider reality that I want to talk about today, because I think that international Christianity, the world wide web, to borrow a phrase, of relationships that Christianity is and that it provides, is an easily overlooked albeit precious resource for cosmopolitan Christians. The Christian world wide web makes us perhaps the largest NGO in the world, and gives us a reach and a breadth that politicians, businesses and the media would give their eye teeth to have. In spite of all the variety of culture, language, historical experience, politics, Christianity provides for Christians, one common language in spite of all its variety .
There are three challenges which we meet as cosmopolitan Christians with the help of the Christian world wide web, that I will discuss briefly today:
The first challenge is that of renewing the vitality and energy of our worship life in the main line so that others, including our children and grandchildren can find in worship and the life of the church, the meaning and life we have found.
We have an Episcopal Bishop from Northern Nigeria at Hartford Seminary this year, participating in a program in Muslim-Christian relations designed for Christian leaders in places around the world in which Muslims and Christians are in conflict. He and several others were leading chapel the other week and it was his duty to preach the sermon. He got up in front of our rather subdued, New England group, and letting slip something like a sigh of despair, he allowed as how he was happy to preach, but that he didn’t know just how to preach to a congregation in which there was so little noise, so little response, so little sign of life…
Its no secret that much of Christianity in the two thirds world has changed dramatically over the last 20 years, so much so that today independent churches and main line denominations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America are spirit filled and charismatic, often with little to distinguish them in music and worship styles from their Pentecostal, charismatic neighbors. These churches are the source of much of the new vitality and growth that Christianity is experiencing in many parts of the globe.
Often, probably more often than not, liberals in the main line automatically view this kind of Christianity with a certain skepticism, if not downright displeasure and condemnation. Certainly, there are many misrepresentations of the gospel, such as that found in the gospel of prosperity, which should be confronted and even condemned. But many of these forms of Christianity are life giving and faith affirming. And if we don’t condemn them too quickly we can learn from them!
On the dining hall wall at the ecumenical institute of the WCC in Switzerland, is a huge tapestry that pictures an African carrying a baby superimposed on a map of Europe. It was given to the institute by an African pastor, who had been a student at Bossey, and who was dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm for and participation in the Christian faith that he found in Europe. So he went home and created this tapestry which represents Africans bringing Jesus back to Europe.
I think he is on to something. There is so much vitality to tap into around the world that can be life giving to us and to our worship. The psalm says, let us make a joyful noise unto the Lord! Our brothers and sisters around the world can help us to do so.
Interfaith relations, theologies of other religions, the ethics of these relationships is as we are all aware, one the greatest challenge our churches have in this century. I happen to think that this challenge is a blessing to Christianity, as we think again about our faith and how we can give an account of our faith free of the rejection and demonization of those of other faiths. I think we are on the verge of a renaissance of theological reflection, that will encourage constructive relationships and peace making activities everywhere.
Here in the United States we are in the very initial moments of coming to terms with our own religious plurality and with the plurality of religions around the world. Happily there are churches all over the world that have been living in environments which are dramatically plural religiously for centuries. We can, indeed we must, learn from their experiences, take them seriously, use them to think about and critique our own approaches and theologies, engage them in conversation about both implicit theologies of other religions and the realities of life on the ground in interfaith environments.
Inevitably we mostly hear the bad news of interfaith relations around the world. This is what sells. The problems between Christians and Muslims in places like Poso, Indonesia are real, and tragic, and need urgent attention. But there is lots of good news and creative approaches to interfaith relations between Christians and others around the world that are hopeful and creative. Here are several small examples:
We have a required course in dialogue at Hartford Seminary, and our class went to a mosque a couple of weeks ago for the breaking of the fast during Ramadan. I was sitting next to a Christian Indonesian woman who is studying with us. As the Immam started his prayers she whispered the words right along with him, flawlessly. When the prayers were done, I asked her how she knew these Muslim, Arabic prayers. She said, well, in Indonesia we hear them 5 times a day, so I know them. And then she added: these prayers are comforting to me, they remind me of my home which is so far away.
I was lucky enough to be in Indonesia recently, staying with a Christian couple who are both professors at a Christian university in Jojakarta. They recounted how sometime before my visit they had been engaging with children in their Muslim neighborhood, and Saturday mornings the children were showing up with great enthusiasm to learn songs and do plays and other such fun activities. The parents in the neighborhood got concerned because they were afraid that these Christians were trying to convert their children. So, in an act of creative problem solving and peace making, this couple went to the mosque nearby, and volunteered to teach the parents and the leadership of the mosque the pedagogies that the children had found so delightful so that they could use them to teach the children Islam in ways that were fun and compelling.
Muslim prayers comforting a homesick Indonesian pastor. Christians teaching Muslims pedagogies to better teach Islam to their children. These are small examples, but they suggest a paradigm of relationships between Muslims and Christians that is quite different from and even antithetical to the paradigm of a clash of civilizations that is so prevalent in this country. Because we have a world wide web of relationships to draw upon and learn from, we Christians in the United States have the opportunity, the responsibility even, to correct our own assumptions about these relationships and help others in our culture do so as well. Along the way, we can help Christian communities around the world by turning down the heat, rejecting the rhetoric of hate, which is tragically harmful to so many places in which peaceful, neighborly relationships are feeling the pressure of the international politics of hate and fear.
Another challenge of this century, and the last one I will discuss today, is that of moving towards the reality of global citizenship. By this I don’t mean that we cease to be Americans or Canadians, or Nigerians or whatever, but that we internalize the fact that we are, whether we like it or not, also global citizens. One cannot for example think about real progress towards solving the environmental issues of our day, if one thinks only within national borders. One cannot in the end solve questions like the questions of immigration with fences and border guards and legislation, while ignoring the poverty and despair that lead so many to abandon home and family to seek jobs in foreign lands.
Christian international organizations such as the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, and the World Council of Churches, provide us Christians with a way of moving towards the reality and the challenge of global citizenship and responsibility. They provide a forum for thinking and acting together globally, on such issues as global economic relationships, or the environment which sustains us all, and therefore discerning together what the lord requires of us.
The churches of the World Alliance have worked for a decade or more on issues of economic justice, which they deem to be issues that are central to our faith. To date, the response of the churches in the North have been less than enthusiastic. And yet, the challenge remains.
Thinking together globally is an antidote to the cultural captivity which we bemoan in our churches. Participation in these organizations provides us a way to see ourselves, our assumptions, our life styles in a new way, and thus increases our ability to be self-critical and more faithful to the gospel we proclaim.
Well, I could go on and on. You can tell that this is a subject about which I care deeply. The good news is that in order to acquire this cosmopolitan perspective, in order to be cosmopolitan Christians, in the spirit of the apostle Paul, all our congregations have to do is to take advantage of the resources already widely available: World Council, World Alliance, denominational resources, international students, immigrants, traveling seminars and the like. International Christianity, our mutual belonging to this world wide web is a joyful invitation towards abundant life for all.
