Introduction
This paper explores issues pertaining to the relationship between evangelisation, mission and culture. The discussion presupposes a link between individual and corporate understandings of Church and resulting priorities and imperatives for mission. The paper argues that generosity, culture-sensitivity and inclusivity should be hallmarks of evangelisation in all contexts. Particular implications for Catholic education and youth ministry are noted. The paper concludes by highlighting several principles for evangelisation and ministry emerging from the discussion.
The Church’s Mission…God’s Mission
There is an inherent link between one’s conceptualisation of Church and the sense of mission one derives from belonging to the Church. Commenting on this relationship, Newbigin (in Bosch, 1991: 370) proposes that; ‘the Church is the mission which means that it is illegitimate to talk about the one without at the same time talking about the other..’
For centuries, due to the dominant perception that the world outside the Church was evil, hostile and unredeemed, mission was ‘a process of reproducing Churches, and once these had been reproduced, all energy was spent on maintenance’ (Bosch, 1991: 376). In the past decades, however, there has been a shift from images of mission describing it as an activity of the Church, towards seeing mission as an attribute of God. Citing the work of Moltmann (1977) and Aagaard (1973), Bosch states: God is a missionary God. “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfil in the world; it is the mission of the son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the Church” (Moltmann 1977:64). Mission is thereby seen as a movement from God to the world; the church is viewed as an instrument for that mission. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa. To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love.
Mission, therefore, means belonging to and participation in the ongoing dialogue between God and his offer of salvation for the whole world and the world, which craves this salvation. Understood in this context, salvation is ‘..as coherent, broad, and deep as the needs and exigencies of human existence’ (Bosch, 1991: 400). Bosch links the mission of the Church to the overarching mission of God by stating:
The primary purpose of the missiones ecclesiae can therefore not simply be the planting of churches or the saving of souls; rather, it has to be service to the missio Dei, representing God in and over against the world, pointing to God, holding up the God-child before the eyes of the world in a ceaseless celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany. (1991: 391)
Evangelisation and Cultural Imposition
Charles Hill (1992:17), in an article based on an address given at a national gathering of those who work in Catholic religious education in State schools, refers to the Counter-Reformation model of Church articulated by St. Robert Bellarmine in 1586: The one and true Church is the community of people brought together by profession of the same Christian faith and conjoined in the communion of the same sacraments, under the government of the legitimate pastors and especially the one vicar of Christ on earth, the Roman Pontiff.
While sympathetic to the needs of the Church of that time to define itself with clarity and precision, Hill critiques this model on the grounds that it is exclusive, lacks biblical and scriptural roots and reflects little of God’s loving design for the salvation of the whole world or Jesus’ vision for a new humanity (1992:18). And so what drives efforts at evangelisation in this model of Church?
For the Church of this period the purpose of evangelisation was clear. The purpose was to bring people into the Church, to get conversions to the faith. Outside the Church, it was seen that there was no, or at least little chance of salvation. The alternative was to leave people in their sins, and eventually, to torment in hell. Given this situation, evangelisation was not merely a nice thing to do, it was an overwhelming moral imperative. (Hill, 1992) Perhaps this helps one understand the zeal of the early missionaries and their “convert at all costs” attitude. It might also resonate with some when reflecting on dominant themes and motives in their own experience of school religious education or parish missions.
In his article, Hill recalls his experience as a high school teacher in Sydney in 1960. He relates how rigid adherence to a model of Church and mission which required an ‘all or nothing’ acceptance of rules for membership and inclusion, thwarted a potentially important pastoral opportunity with students who did not come from backgrounds where the necessary support structures for Catholic practice were in place. Hill (1992:17) writes:
…my colleague and I took advantage of the compliance of the deputy principal and the fact that the school lay within a couple of hundred yards from the parish church, to arrange a visit for these pupils to go to Confession ….Come the big day, we proudly marched the lads down the road and into the church, where the venerable parish priest and an associate awaited us. Just before the rite commenced, Father stood up before the boys and in his brogue informed us all unambiguously: “Now if you aren’t sure of going to Mass on Sunday, there’s no point in going to Confession here today.” As these children obviously came from homes where support systems for Catholic practice were not in operation, Father’s confessional attracted no customers that day, and we simply marched the contingent back up the road to school, somehow feeling that a commendable if naïve exercise had been shortcircuited and an opportunity missed.
Hill’s missed opportunity was lamentable but at least he and his pupils survived to tell the story. The same cannot be said for the many cultures and thousands of individuals throughout history who have been destroyed by zealous yet cruel and misguided efforts at evangelisation which, in issues to do with content and praxis, have failed to show due respect for culture.
A more startling example of this model of evangelisation in action can be seen in the following extracts from the journals of early missionaries to Latin America. The following extract is cited by Leonardo Boff (1992:15):
“Unless you hear the divine words…God who has already begun to destroy you for your sins, will finally exterminate you altogether”. The first catechism developed on the continent between 1510 and 1521 opened with the revelation of “a great secret, which you have never known or heard: that God has made heaven and hell. In heaven are all who have been converted to the Christian faith and have led a good life. And in hell are “all of your dead, all of your ancestors, your fathers, mothers, grandparents, relatives, and all who have existed and departed this life. And you shall go there as well, unless you become friends of God, and are baptised and become Christians, for all who are not Christians are God’s enemies”.
This is followed by gruesome descriptions of hell, and idyllic ones of heaven, with the object of persuading the Indians to embrace the Christian faith. The Jesuits in Brazil (in Boff: 1992:16) testified:
Our experience is that it is very difficult to convert the lndians by love. But as this is a servile folk, fear accomplishes all”. As a Jesuit missionary testified, “some come to ask health, others to beg that we not cause them to die, out of fear of us, as it has seemed to them that we indeed cause persons to die”.
Some statues of the early missionaries in Latin America depict them with the Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. As Boff (1992:15) asks: What gospel is this, based on the preaching of the reprobation of all in the past whom the natives held dear, on the satanization of what was most sacred to them – their religious traditions – on the terror of death, judgment and hell?
I was living and working in Peru at the time when Latin America was celebrating 500 hundred years since the arrival of Christopher Columbus. With Columbus came the Conquistadors and with the Conquistadors came the Catholic faith, brought to the continent firstly by the early Jesuit missionaries. Peru is a culturally Catholic country with the percentage of people who are Catholic still in the very high nineties. So, in order to celebrate this milestone, Pope John Paul II visited the country. One needs to understand the power of popular Catholicism in Latin America to understand the tremendous impact and significance of a papal visit.
One group, however, was not so pleased by the visit of John Paul II to their country at this period of time. This group was comprised of indigenous people who, at the celebration of 500 years of Christianity on the continent, were lamenting the destruction of their indigenous religious beliefs and culture. This group handed a letter to the Pope and extracts were published in the biggest newspaper in the country. It said:
We the Indians of the Andes and America, have decided to take the opportunity of this visit by John Paul II to return him his Bible. In five centuries it has bought us neither love, nor peace, nor justice. Please take your Bible, and return it to our oppressors. It is they rather than we who have need of its moral precepts. Since the arrival of Christopher Columbus, a culture, a language, a religion of Europe, have been imposed on America by force. (Reprinted in Boff: 1992-xvi)
One can scarcely imagine the controversy caused by the publication of words such as these during the Pope’s visit. It starkly illustrates that the model of evangelization that brought Christianity to Latin America had an enormous social and cultural cost. Five hundred years later the repercussions of this model of evangelisation were still being manifested. Upon returning to Australia at the time of our bi-centenary, I encountered similar sentiments being expressed by groups of indigenous people who were attempting to come to terms with the ongoing implications of white settlement for their cultures and religious traditions.
Boff (1992:24), comments: Without the gospel of fellowship, no message or practice can ever claim the title of evangelization. This viewpoint shows what was wrong with the “first evangelization” of Latin America, in the sixteenth century. It took place in a context not of fellowship but of conquest, domination, and destruction of the other.
Similarly, Bosch (1991: 448), referring to the Church after Constantine as the religion of the establishment and the bearer of culture, describes its missionary outreach as: a movement from the civilized to “savages” and from a “superior” culture to “inferior” cultures – a process in which the latter had to be subdued, if not eradicated. Thus Christian mission, as a matter of course, pre-supposed the disintegration of the cultures into which it penetrated.
This model of mission was essentially concerned with conquest and displacement. ‘Christianity was understood to be unique, exclusive, superior, definitive, normative, and absolute, the only religion which had the divine right to exist and extent itself’ (Knitter in Bosch, 1991: 475).
The appropriateness of these particular approaches to Church and evangelisation for the contemporary context warrants close consideration. In Bellarmine’s Church, for all intents and purposes there existed only one culture, that of Europe. Church, however, should be an original production in the contemporary culture, not a badly fitted import from somewhere else (Kraft, 1980: 318). He warns that:
A church that is merely a “literal” rendering of the forms of one church… will always smack of foreignness, of insensitivity to the surrounding culture, of inappropriateness to the real needs of the people and the real message of God to them. (Kraft, 1980: 319)
Evangelisation is not the same as Church extension. However, during the period that the adage “no salvation outside the (Catholic) Church” was in vogue, this was the quintessence of the Church’s mission. Bosch (1991: 415) writes:
It is the view that lies behind the encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae of Pope Pius XI (1926). Evangelism meant “adding to the Catholic Church the greatest number of newly-baptized”; this happened in stages, via the catechumenate, the probation period, and the introduction in the liturgical life of the church. Evangelism became the expansion of the church through increased membership. Conversion was a numerical affair. Success in evangelism was measured by counting the number of baptisms, of confessions, and of communions (Shorter 1972: 2).
It is also important to remember that we are not looking at models that are totally historical. Even though Bellarmine described this model back in 1586, it heavily influenced Catholic ecclesiology and mission theology right up until the Second Vatican Council. Indeed, there would probably be some people in our pews today who would feel quite comfortable with this understanding. I would suggest, however, that people whose vision for evangelisation and mission is reflected in the previous paragraphs should be urged to leave or stay out of ministry, particularly with youth. The current context is too complex for simplistic, exclusive and rigid approaches, however well intentioned they may be.
Vatican II, the Reign of God and Church
Opening the Second Session of Vatican II, Pope Paul VI (in Conroy, 1999:104), referring to a pilgrim, journeying Church, said that: The Church is a mystery. It is imbued with the hidden presence of God. It lies, therefore, within the very nature of the Church to be open to new and even greater explorations.
The Second Vatican Council describes Church using very different images than those chosen by Bellarmine. The Council does not begin with the Church as an organization, but rather as the “Kingdom of Christ now present in mystery”. It is a mystery because it is a sign of the many faceted presence of God in the world today. The Church is a mystery because it reflects many and various personal experiences of itself. The mystery is experienced one way by one individual or group, another way by another group of people. No individual or group experience is the entirety of the Church (Gallagher et al, 1985:10).
At the heart of the mystery of the Church is the notion of the Kingdom or Reign of God - the divine dream of salvation for all of humankind, God’s royal will or value system being lived out. O’Meara maintains that the Reign of God is essentially about the righting of humanity (1983:26). For O’Murchu, it is about transformation; a new world order characterised by creative relationships of justice, love and peace (1997:118).
There is a special relationship between the Church and the Reign of God, but they are not equivalents. God’s Reign is broader than the Church. Even though the Church strives to fulfil and reflect the Reign of God, there is an incompleteness in the relationship. They are not identical (Gallagher et al, 1985:10). David Bosch proposes that, if one accepts this notion of incompleteness, ‘the church is, at best, only a pointer to the way God acts in respect of the world, and mission is viewed as a contribution toward the humanization of society – a process in which the church may perhaps be involved in the role of consciousness-raiser’ (1991: 1991).
Snyder (1983: 11), calling for Christians today is to be ‘Kingdom people’ not ‘Church people’, argues that: Kingdom people seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice; church people often put church work above concerns of justice, mercy and truth. Church people think about how to get people into the church; Kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world. Church people worry that the world might change the church; Kingdom people work to see the church change the world. (in Bosch 1991: 378)
Gittins (1991: 38) proposes that evangelisation with the Kingdom of God and its realisation as its focus, brings its own goals and priorities: If the motive for mission is the creation and maintenance of the church, mission will be essentially concerned with baptism and church-extension. But if the focus is the kingdom or realm or God, then without compromising the significance of the gift of baptism nor the importance of visible communities of baptized people, there is less likelihood of restricting mission to church-extension.
These images would sound alarm bells in many. There may be too many shades of grey for those who need to see things as ‘black and white’. As one of my students asked, “This is all fine but how do I know whether I’m in or not?” This paper argues that it is these generous, open and inclusive understandings of Church which best set the platform for evangelisation and mission in the contemporary context.
Evangelisation and Dialogue with Culture
At their National Pastoral Congress in 1980, the Bishops of the United Kingdom stated that, ‘It seems that many Catholics do not have a very broad understanding of evangelisation. It is frequently seen as solely the task of extending the membership of the Church, rather than the communication of a living Word which is liberation from everything that oppresses’ (in Hill, 1992:20).
Lack of clarity in the scope of meanings associated with evangelisation is highly problematic in the postconciliar Church. Increasingly the term evangelisation is being used to express the totality of the mission of the Church. As Grasso (in Dupuis, 1989: 207) states: ‘Thus, we may say that everything in the church is “evangelisation”, since the church performs its mission in all that it does.’ ‘Evangelisation’, wrote Paul VI in Evangelii Nuntiandi, ‘is the church’s proper grace and vocation – its deepest identity’.
Vincent Donovan (1997:190) stresses that:
Evangelization is not a call to restore Christendom, a kind of solid, well-integrated, cultural complex, directed and dominated by the Church. It is not an activity set in motion because the Church is endangered, a nervous activity to save the remnants of a time now irrevocably past. It is not a winning back of those people who have become a prey to sin in such a way that the organised Church no longer reaches them.
In the post-Vatican II Church, evangelisation needs to be understood with reference to culture. As Pope John Paul II reminded the Latin American Bishops’ Conference in 1983, the new evangelisation must not only be new in content but also in method. Leonardo Boff (1992:xiv) in his paraphrasing of the Pope’s message to this gathering states that:
….the way in which we produce the good news belongs to the very nature of the good news. Contact with the person and message of Jesus ought to generate an atmosphere of benevolence, of a geometrical growth of all that is human, worthy, and desirable for body and soul. This can be achieved only if the message is participatory: only if the dichotomy between evangelizer and evangelised is overcome, in an evangelization that involves everyone; only if we renounce all cultural imposition in the name of the Gospel….
Evangelisation is a dialogue whereby the evangeliser, who strives to understand the mentality of the people being evangelised, their fears, dreams, their history, is also evangelised and undergoes conversion to a deeper sense of what the Gospel challenges us to become. Donovan (1990:115) proposes that:
Evangelization means bringing the Gospel to bear upon culture – all culture. Whether in the business world, the world of industry, of education, of politics and government – or the world of religion – culture is one of the most necessary determining factors in any endeavour undertaken. It permeates every aspect of human life and human striving. If affects every single thing in which a person becomes involved. In the process of evangelization, culture makes the gospel understandable, and dialogue possible. Evangelization is not proselytism or brain-washing or propagandising or even convert-making. It is dialogue and there are two necessary components of this dialogue for us: authentic gospel, and a true openness to conversion.
Revelation – Dynamic and Culture Specific
Full appreciation of the links between evangelisation and culture, is aided by an appreciation of the Second Vatican Council’s perspectives on revelation. The Council asserted that God has been, and continues to be active in every culture, even before evangelization; God’s presence is experienced in the virtues of people; evangelisation discovers these virtues and further enhances them through the people’s knowledge of Christ. Kraft (1980: 172), referring to the culture-specific nature of God’s dealings with humankind, states:
The people he deals with have specific names, specific life histories, and specific cultural contexts, all of which are taken very seriously by God. And this specificity increases enormously the relevance and impact of the communication both to the original participants and to those of us who later hear and read their case histories.
As Boff (1992: 21-22) records:
The Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum emphatically states: “God has manifested himself since the dawn of creation to our first fathers…watching over the human race in ongoing fashion” (no. 3). After all, “in many ways and at many times has God spoken to human beings” (Heb. 1:1). Saint John is aware that the Word “enlightens everyone who comes into this world” (John 1:4)… All humanity is a temple of the Trinity, without distinction of time, place, or religion. All of us are sons and daughters in the Son, all are moved by the Spirit, all are drawn upward by the Father.
Revelation is a dynamic, continuing process of communication, rather than something that started and stopped in the past and has now become static. As Kraft (1980: 396) states: ‘The livingness of God, the livingness of his receptors, and the dynamic nature of communicational interaction seem to demand a dynamic concept of revelation.’
Donovan maintains that dialogue is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity in the world of today. No community or body on the earth possesses absolute truth or the answer to the earth-threatening problems facing humankind. He states that, ‘We must begin to look on others as “others possessing truth,” so that their truth might become ours, that we all might move out of the isolation in which we have been operating’ (1990:116-117). Donovan (1990: 85) proposes that:
People of every culture receive revelation from God, either in the fleshy tablets of their hearts or from the Word of God, and they can respond to it in faith. And when they do, people of other faiths can recognize it as an authentic response to revelation – whether it be the humble worship of the one God of Africa, or the beautiful reverence for life of the American Indian and the Hindus, or the admirable and total submission to God of the Muslims; or the joy and hope of Christian peoples.
Pope John Paul II, speaking to the Roman Curia in 1986 (in Dupuis, 1989: 223), cites as theological foundations for dialogue; the ‘mystery in unity’ and ‘universal oneness’ based on common origin and destiny of all humanity, the oneness in the mystery of Christ’s redemption and the active presence of the Spirit of Christ in the sincerity of all religious endeavour.
An Essential Gospel
At this point one might ask: ‘What expression of the Gospel fits this culture sensitive, dialogue model of evangelisation?’ Vincent Donovan, himself a missionary in Africa for many years, suggests that the Gospel of evangelization is that message which is the final and fundamental substance of the Christian message, free from many of the cultural trappings that no matter how indispensable the evangeliser may find them, are not part of the essential message.
If this stripped down skeletal core of the Gospel is presented, as dialogue happens, it begins to take on the flesh and blood of the culture being evangelised. Extending this corporeal image he states that: ‘People of every culture receive revelation from God, either in the fleshy tablets of their hearts or from the Word of God, and they can respond to it in faith’ (Donovan, 1990: 85). Bosch (1991: 454), describing inculturation as a kind of ongoing incarnation, suggests that the Gospel being ‘enfleshed’ or ‘embodied’ in a people is ‘..a very different from any model that had been in vogue for over a thousand years. In this paradigm, it is not so much a case of the church being expanded, but of the church being born anew in each new context and culture.’
This reduction of the message is a necessary first step toward a new expression of the whole content of faith. From this final and fundamental substance of the Christian message the whole of ecclesial faith will have to be formulated anew along the cultural lines of actual historical situations. Donovan (1990:30-31) cites the work of Karl Rahner on this theme:
Rahner is calling for, as a necessity for proclamation, a stripping away from Christianity of all the cultural accretions and growths that have attached themselves to it over the ages, all the baggage – a peeling away until we are left with a simple, supracultural, essential content of the Gospel, a salvation event and its meaning for our world, an idea, a final and fundamental substance of the Christian message.
Referring specifically to Christian encounter with other religious traditions, (and equally applicable to encounter with cultures), Panikkar (1981: 59) uses similar images: An authentic Christian encounter with other religions requires a special asceticism: the stripping off of all externals of ‘garb’ and superficial form, and a lonely vigil with Christ, the naked Christ, dead and alive on the Cross, dead and alive in those Christians who dare to come to such an encounter with their brethren. This asceticism entails real mysticism, an immediate contact with Christ which carries the Christian beyond – not against – formulae and explanations.
Too close or simplistic a definition of this core or essence of the Gospel runs the risk of placing limits on the power of the message of Jesus’ life in its entirety. Indeed, images of ‘stripping back’ may be interpreted by some as ‘watering down’, although this is surely not the intention. Stripping back may simply refer to heightened awareness of the cultural and ecclesial contexts in which the Gospel has been, and is currently being, embodied and preached. It is easy to forget that even Jesus lived and preached in a defined and limited historical and cultural context.
Essential to the evangelisation process are clear articulation and grounding of the Gospel’s potential to shed light on deep human, existential and spiritual questions faced by all cultures throughout history. Those profound riddles of the human condition which, today even as in olden times, deeply stir the human heart (Nostra Aetate, no. 1). These most basic questions are being asked by a growing number of persons with a growing sense of urgency (Gaudium et Spes, no. 10). Christian insights into the quest for God and full humanity are given priority. The hearer is invited to spiritual growth, metanoia or conversion to God and the priorities of the Gospel. Charles Kraft describes this as movement towards ‘people of God-ness’.
Priority in this process must be given to Christian perspectives on justice and mysticism. Profound human experience of God is common to all cultures and is their meeting point when other differences abound. As Panikkar (1981:59) suggests:
The aim of the encounter is not to give rise to a new ‘system’, but to give birth to a new spirit, which is both ancient and ever new. Spiritualities are not there to be ‘studied’ (they are not properly the objects of study) but to be lived, authentically experienced.
The effects and fruits of evangelisation and dialogue will be most profound at the level of spirituality, rather than theology. Panikkar further emphasises: ‘There are ex-Catholics, ex-Marists, ex-Buddhists and so forth, but I know of no ex-Mystic. Once transformation due to authentic mystical experience has happened, it is irreversible’ (1981: 22).
Central to this core expression of Good News lies the Christian conception of Christ as ‘not only the historical redeemer, but also the unique Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity….temporal and eternal link between God and the World’ (Panikkar, 1981: 83). When this mystical insight is replaced by a merely historical understandings of the life and works of Jesus, there is a risk that: ‘Incarnation becomes just a little slice of history and ‘evangelisation’ consists in ‘civilising’ others and incorporating them into one ‘Christian’ (and post-Christian) world order’ (Panikkar, 1981: 83).
Cultural Awareness: Two Illustrations
In this section of the paper, I relate two personal anecdotes that serve to illustrate the centrality of this notion of ‘the essential Gospel’ to evangelisation and mission in contemporary contexts.
Example 1:
Some fifteen years ago, before going to work as a lay missioner in Latin America, I attended a lecture in Sydney that had a profound influence on my own vision for Church and mission. The speaker, whose name now escapes me, was a Canadian White Father (Missionary of Africa) who had worked in Africa for 30 years.
He said that after being ordained a priest in Canada, he immediately boarded a ship bound for Africa. He was met at the dock, given a short period of time to get his bearings, and sent to a village to begin work. As the dominant model of mission in those days dictated, the entire measure of the success or failure of his work was how many conversions / baptisms he got.
He lived with this group of people for a period of years. They loved him and he loved them. They cared for him when he was sick and struggling to come to terms with life in his new home. He told them his stories of Jesus. But at the end of five years, when he and his bishop were assessing the success of his ministry, he realised that he had very few conversions to Christianity. He decided that he was perhaps in need of a move if he was going to be successful in ministry. The bishop agreed and organised a move for him. When he told the people of his impending move, they were very sad that he was leaving. What they said changed his whole concept of Church and ministry.
They said words to the effect of, ‘Father you should know our culture pretty well by now. You should know that for thousands of years the teaching authority and wisdom in things related to religion and spirituality come down through the elders. Father you are a very young man!’ And they also said to him, ‘Father you know that in our culture a man is not considered a man until he has had his first son. Father you don’t even have a wife!’ The priest said that hearing these and similar things from these people whom he loved and respected, marked a real Copernican change in his thinking about his priesthood and ministry in this culture.
He realised that if the message and truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ was going to take root in this culture, it was perhaps going to have to let go of many of the cultural trappings that came with being European or Canadian, Australian or Irish. In Africa or anywhere, the essential core of the message of Jesus Christ is relevant and has transformative power. However, responses to this Gospel and possible subsequent expressions of Church, were necessarily going to look different from the type of Church that he had come to Africa hoping to establish. After reassessing the criteria layed down to assess his success or failure, the priest stayed on in that village for several years.
This missionary would appear to be proposing, not just inculturation of the Christian Gospel, but ‘inreligionisation’ (Song in Bosch, 1991: 447). Referring to the Asian context but equally applicable to this discussion, Bosch (1991: 447-48), citing the work of Song, compares the spread of Buddhism with the expansion of Christianity:
Song, using example of the spread of Buddhism in Asia, says essentially the same. No sooner did Buddhism leave the land of its birth than it became Chinese Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism (1977:5; of Pieris 1986:85), intrinsic to the soil and the people of each of these countries. This, Song claims, was truly a mission of enfleshment. Christian mission, by contrast, was a mission of disembodiment (:54). We should never have transplanted Christianity to Asia without breaking the pot in which the plant came, says Pieris. He calls the “inculturation-fever” a desperate last-moment bid to give an Asian façade to a church which has failed to strike roots in Asian soil, because no one dares to break the Greco-Roman pot in which, for centuries, it has been existing like a stunted bonsai (1986:84).
Example 2:
Several years ago I worked in the area of State School Religious Education in the Toowoomba Diocese. One of my tasks was to help the catechists who volunteer to go into State Schools to teach religious education. This is real mission stuff! Most of the students in the Catholic classes for religious education were not churched in any formal sense of the word. Basically, if you didn’t opt out of religious education, you were put into classes according to the denomination mentioned in your enrolment form.
On one occasion I received a phone call from a lady in the west of Queensland asking for advice, as the students in her class were very unreceptive. I asked what she was teaching in her class and she responded by saying that she was only teaching “the basics”. As will become evident, the basics for that wonderful lady might not have been “the basics” that these students needed to hear.
Three weeks later, at the request of this lady, I went to visit her class. I walked into the classroom, where waiting was a group of mixed Year 9 /10 students on a hot summer’s day, in a very small confined space. The lady began her class. The topic for the lesson was the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. I am not saying that there is no place for the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary in a catechetical religious education program. And what’s more, I would never dare question the centrality of these beliefs and practices to the faith of this wonderful catechist who in her way of thinking was only teaching kids “the basics”.
“The basics” for a person who is a “womb to tomb” Catholic of Irish stock may include a strong emphasis on Catholic cultural practices such as the Rosary. However, these unchurched children needed to hear a different version of “the basics”. They needed first of all to hear about Jesus Christ. They needed to hear His Gospel and the central message of His life. They needed to look at the potential that this Gospel could have for enhancing their lives. Whether or not any of them would ever get around to incorporating the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary in their spirituality is doubtable. So what I had to say to this lady was that if she continued to teach her version of the basics, that is, to presume a readiness on the part of the students that was just not there, she was going to continue to have problems and be unsuccessful.
Just as the presentation of an essential, core Gospel is central to evangelization in foreign mission countries such as Africa, the same imperative is upon us who work with young people here in Australia. Graham Rossiter and Marisa Crawford wrote a book several years ago prophetically called Missionaries to a Teenage Culture. If we continue to ignore the needs and readiness of youth, which may be vastly different to our own, we will continue to find that the number of young people in our churches is declining.
Tradition and Culture in a Universal Church
Emphasis on the centrality of the ‘essential Gospel’ to evangelisation, may be questioned by those who consider that it overlooks the important notion of tradition – the faith that has been lived out in our Church since the time of the apostles, the ‘reservoir of community experience’ (Boys, 1989:193). The authentic experience and tradition of the Christian community are also central to evangelisation and cultural dialogue.
However, close scrutiny of just what is included as tradition is imperative. Jaroslav Pelikan (in Boys, 1989) warns that, ‘Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. It is traditionalism that gets tradition a bad name!’ In a similar vein, Nida (in Kraft, 1980: 320) argues that, ‘The Christian position is not one of static conformance to dead rules, but of dynamic obedience to a living God.’ Tradition understood in this way grounds faith in human experience which is essential to dialogue between cultures.
Christians should feel that their church is an original work within their own culture. Smalley (in Kraft, 1980: 321) refers to such a Church as:
…a group of believers who live out their life, including their socialized Christian activity, in the patterns of the local society, and for whom any transformation of that society comes out of their felt needs under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures.
The principal purpose of the Church is to transmit Christian meanings and the eternal message of God, not the preservation of traditional cultural forms. As Kraft (1980: 315) warns: ‘It is crucial that each new generation and culture experience the process of producing in its own cultural forms an appropriate church vehicle for the transmission of God’s meanings.’ Specific beliefs and practices are vehicles that should be assessed, altered and, if necessary, updated, to ensure the preservation of this transmission. It is the content of Christian faith, not the form in which it was originally or has been traditionally expressed, that is sacred.
Referring to the term dogma as it is used in Christian theology, Panikkar (1981: 52) states: A dogma is certainly a consecrated expression considered to be the bearer of unfathomable truth. Yet faith is not in dogmas, but in the ‘thing’ expressed in and through them. Dogmas are means, channels, and do not claim to exhaust, let alone freeze, the truth they try to convey to those who are living in the context of the tradition which has ‘proclaimed’ the particular dogma.
Lloyd Geering (1999) believes that the relationship between the tradition of faith and cultures has always been characterised by fluidity and dialogue. He states that:
…Jeremiah and Augustine and Martin Luther didn’t have the same beliefs at all, but they’re all people of faith, great faith, and they belong to a tradition of faith. That is why the Judeo-Christian tradition which is now some 4,000 years old, has a continuity in it, running through it, and yet it is changing to meet the needs of the cultural environment through which it is passing.
Referring further to the tradition of faith in varying contexts of time and culture, Geering uses the analogy of a river running through the fields of time ‘gathering things from the banks as it’s going along and also dropping things and so on. What is permanent is simply the continuity of the river rather than what is in it. With the flow of the river, the water even changes’ (1999). Contact with new and diverse cultural contexts enriches the tradition of faith, which by definition, is never static and unchanging. As Anthony Gittins says, ‘To have roots is not, of course, to be root-bound: that implies immobilization, fixity, being rooted to the spot’ (1999: 35).
It is of great comfort to many Catholics that they can travel around the world, attend Mass or visit Churches, and find that, with the exception of language, things appear remarkably similar. This was my first reaction to visits to Churches in India. Upon further reflection, however, I have wondered about the impact and appropriateness of ritual, liturgy and symbolism originating in Europe, for the Church in India, Africa, Papua New Guinea etc. Might there be ritual and symbols inherent to these cultures which may speak more powerfully to local Catholics? Would this use of more culturally appropriate symbolism detract from the central mysteries of faith? These are important questions for emerging Churches.
Thauren (in Bosch, 1991: 448) suggests that this process of accomodation or adaptation, in contrast to inculturation, is often limited to ‘..accidental matters, such as liturgical vestments, non-sacramental rites, art, literature, architecture, and music.’ Bosch (1991: 448) suggests that the ramifications of mere accomodation of culture are manifold:
First, accommodation never included modifying the “prefabricated” Western theology. Second, it was actually understood as a concession that Third-World Christians would not be allowed to use some elements of their culture in order to give expression to their new faith.
It is my experience that local Churches are divided over the extent to which principles of inculturation should extend to liturgy, sacraments and various Church disciplines. Conservative voices warn against ‘contamination’ from other religions and aspects of local culture, while more moderate perspectives embrace some cultural awareness as long as central, universal Catholic symbolism is left untouched. The danger with this latter position, however, is that efforts at inculturation will become token and decorative. Universality does not necessarily mean uniformity.
The Role of the Evangeliser
Haight (1985: 175) links the mission of the Church to the person of Jesus: Once again Jesus Christ is the specifying and meaning-giving centre of the Christian Church, but now a dynamic historical sense. The Church exists in order to do in history or the world what Jesus did in his lifetime.
In the words of Paul VI in Evangelii Nuntiandi (1976:7), Jesus was “the first evangelizer,” and to evangelise is basically to do what Jesus did – proclaim a great hope, the Reign of God. Jesus says of his mission: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (Jn 10:10) Accordingly, evangelists are charged to offer the world the Word who defines himself primarily as Life. Galilea speaks of the need for Christian evangelisation to be animated by a “mystique” in the original sense of the word – a spirituality, which will penetrate us and identify us with Jesus’ mission, and which will become our deepest and most radical motivation for that mission (1988: 4).
So mission in Jesus’ name must be about Life. Jon Sobrino, the Latin American theologian, says that this communication must be done joyfully and the message must be a joy to hear. If our message is not “Good News”, bringing joy to all who hear it and if we are not joyful messengers, then we are working out of our own model of evangelization and not that of Jesus. He warns that: “A church shrivels up and dies if it no longer sheds light on peoples’ lives” (1989).
Gerald Arbuckle (1983) uses the analogy of the sower or gardener to illustrate the role of the evangeliser in a culture-sensitive model of evangelisation: The evangelizer as the sower offers the seed of the good news to a people. Like all good sowers, he or she must prepare the ground, seek advice from knowledgeable people about the best time and methods to sow the seed of the Gospel, nurturing it when growth emerges, but avoiding too much care lest the young plant becomes overly dependent.
As the Gospel and cultures are both modified or changed through interaction, so also is the evangelizer as the sower. The good gardener is affected through contact with the earth, for there is joy and grief at the success and failure of earthing seeds. The evangelizer is no different; the more he or she gives to the earthing process, the more he or she is enriched through faith contact with both the culture and the Gospel.
Implications for Catholic Education and Youth Ministry
Belonging to Church
Cultural considerations also need to extend to the ways in which people associate with the Church. I remember the struggles of a religious community in Latin America on this issue. The community was comprised of both American and Peruvian Brothers. The American Brothers, through their formation, were very committed to attendance at daily Mass as a non-negotiable part of religious life. The young Peruvian Brothers did not necessarily share in this priority and were much more relaxed on the issue. The community eventually needed to discern just what was central and essential to being a Brother in Peru at that particular point in time.
Extending this discussion to the Australian context, I could not but be impressed by the huge number of people who attended Mass on Easter Sunday in my parish. Most parishes would note that Mass attendance doubles at the traditional times of Christmas and Easter. These people consider themselves as Catholic and belonging to the Church. It is perhaps lamentable that they don’t come to Mass more often but does this make them less Catholic? A universal Church needs to accept and tolerate a variety of modes and ways of association.
I often ask groups with whom I work if they would like to see young people, children and students, in Church. I invariably get a resounding ‘yes’, which is often followed by sighs of frustration, anger or futility which betrays a certain lack of hope. I next make the suggestion that I think we can include our young in Church, but whether we do or not depends more on us than on the youth themselves.
I don’t think that we are ever going to see young people (or older ones for that matter) return in their droves to Mass attendance with any great regularity. There are as many sociological factors mitigating against denominational worship in contemporary Australia as there are religious reasons for the decline in practice. The key question for consideration is to what extent does this lack of regular attendance at Mass exclude young people from membership of the Church. Our youth challenge us to be as generous as possible in our vision of Church, generous enough to include the many of them who will never formally affiliate with a worshipping community. St. Augustine, back in the 5th Century, stated that “the Church consists of the fellowship of the whole world” and “I speak all languages because the Church speaks all languages” (in Hill, 1992:18). Such a vision for Church is articulated in many of the documents of the Second Vatican Council.
Measuring Success or Failure
Like it or not, however, many in the Church evaluate the success or failure of religious education and the commitment of teachers in Catholic schools, on criteria related to Mass attendance. For some, the decline in practice among young people leads them to question the future of Catholic education as we know it. In particular, Catholic secondary schools are singled out for stinging critique due to this simplistic analysis of effectiveness. For example, Schaefer in his scathing assessment of the effectiveness of Catholic education in Melbourne writes that, ‘Only 6% of 18-24 year-olds attend Mass on any sort of regular basis… We could say that Catholic schools in Melbourne have a 94% failure rate’ (2001:5).
Mass attendance cannot be taken as a yardstick to measure this success or failure of evangelisation and youth ministry. If this is our sole criterion, I fear we are going to keep thinking we are failures. However, proclamation of and witness to a Gospel-centered spirituality will be attractive to youth who are desperate to know that there is more to life than the merely superficial. I recently read a document published by the World Council of Churches, and one small section really spoke to me. It advises:
A youth ministry should never become a nervous effort to keep young people in or win them for the Church. A style of life that is inspired by the Gospel and a genuine care for a new generation is all that is required. The message of the Good News is strong enough to excite, engage and commit those of all ages.
Religious Education
Pope Paul VI in Evangelii Nuntiandi (1976:67), stated that evangelisation loses much of its effectiveness if it does not consider the reality of the people to whom it is addressed '...if it does not use their language, their signs and symbols, if it does not answer the questions they ask, and if it does not have an impact on their concrete lives.' (n.63) In previous generations it was widely presumed that 'Catholic culture' was a feature of the home life of the majority of students in Catholic schools, and that the language, signs and symbols of Catholicism were familiar to all. This is certainly no longer the reality.
Religious education should not be presumptive in content and must allow space for searching and questioning. A difficulty with many contemporary approaches to religious education is that attempts are often made to provide answers to questions that students have never, and in many cases, will never ask. As Charles Kraft warns: ‘We are to re-create the scripturally endorsed theologising process, not simply to transmit the theological products of yesteryear ‘(1980: 403). Religious educators need to be in touch with youth culture, familiarising themselves with language, signs, symbols and questions of today’s young people (Holohan, 1999: 59). The alternative is irrelevance to the students and their real concerns.
Emerging Principles for Evangelisation and Mission
I offer the following as key principles for evangelisation and ministry emerging from this discussion:
1. Since the Christian faith never exists except as “translated” into a culture (Bosch, 1991: 447), evangelisation is always contextual. Failure to acknowledge the needs and priorities of the cultural context in efforts at evangelisation will, at best, render the Gospel irrelevant for the hearer and the process ineffective, and, at worst, damage the culture who may see evangelisation as destructive imposition.
2. Lack of dialogue with or ignorance of the culture receiving evangelisation will result in failure and frustration. Gallagher warns that failure to listen to culture risks ‘…unreality and irrelevance. To ignore the human hearer is insensitivity to the Incarnation’ (1997: 141).
3. Any imposition of one culture on another is foreign to Gospel priorities and misrepresents the praxis of Jesus.
4. The Gospel of evangelisation should, as much as possible, be free of ‘cultural trappings’ that, no matter how indispensable to the personal faith of the evangeliser, are not part of and can cloud the essential message. In other words, in order to give priority to the key concerns of the Gospel, the evangeliser is called to heightened awareness of the cultural context within which his or her Christianity has been nurtured
5. Respect for freedom of response to evangelisation must have priority over perceived needs for adherence to set patterns of response. ‘There is no universally applicable master plan for evangelism, no definitive list of truths people only have to embrace in order to be saved’ (Bosch, 1991: 420). The success or failure of evangelisation cannot be judged according to set patterns of response.
6. Church membership defined in terms of regular association with a worshipping community, is a desired but not indispensable response to evangelisation and can be envisioned in more than one way. As Panikkar (1981: 82) argues: ‘If it be true that ‘outside the Church there is no salvation’, this ‘Church’ should not be identified with a concrete organisation, or even with adherence to Christianity.’
7. Inculturation should extend beyond token and decorative elements to engagement of the Gospel with the deepest levels of culture. This can have implications for the Church in areas to do with ritual, symbol and manners of association.
8. Inculturation is essentially the work of the Holy Spirit and the local culture. Neither the missionary, nor the hierarchy, nor the magisterium controls the process’ (Bosch, 1991: 453). The role of the missionary or evangeliser is ‘temporary, secondary and advisory’ (Fleming in Bosch, 1991: 456).
9. The above-mentioned principles are equally applicable to Catholic education in Australia as they are to mission in Africa or South America. That is, awareness of and dialogue with culture, is a necessary starting point in all fields of evangelisation.
Conclusion
This paper has explored issues pertaining to the relationship between evangelisation and culture. It began by exploring links between Church and mission, and considering historical situations where evangelisation was little more that cultural imposition. Such models were critiqued as being exclusive, rigid, often destructive and inappropriate for contemporary contexts.
Generous, open and inclusive understandings of Church, such as those described by the Second Vatican Council, were proposed as models which best set the platform for evangelisation in contemporary contexts, where dialogue with and respect for culture are imperative. The paper illustrated the importance of cultural sensitivity and dialogue to evangelisation by considering two anecdotal examples from vastly different mission contexts. The roles of the tradition of faith and the evangeliser in this dialogue process were also discussed.
The paper concluded by considering some implications for Catholic and youth ministry which encompass church membership, measurement of success or failure and the content of religious education. Several key principles for evangelisation and ministry, emerging from this discussion, were also proposed. It is my hope that the paper may serve as a framework for further discussion on the topic.
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Wayne Tinsey is a lecturer in Religious Education at Australian Catholic University Notre Dame (Freemantle) and is completing his MA (Theology) through McAuley ACU. He also holds a doctorate in RE through ACU.
