HVK Archives: Relaunching Evangelization
Relaunching Evangelization - The Observer
Ram Swarup
()
5 July 1997
Title: Relaunching Evangelization
Author: Ram Swarup
Publication: The Observer
Date: July 5, 1997
Western arms, prestige and policies have been the greatest factors in
recent centuries for the spread of Christianity. But those methods are
losing some of their importance and they need to be supplemented modified.
The Mission strategists have been discussing other methods of spreading.
They have examined world's non-Christian population sector by sector, and
ideology by ideology to find out what makes some of them unbending, others
resistant, and some others relatively soft with 'holes' through which they
could be penetrated more easily. They have also been discussing conditions
which favour Evangelization.
Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization mentions several conditions
favourable to missionary activities.
It mentions "personal advantage" as a great motivating force when people
believe that "they may advance materially or socially by becoming
Christians"; this is "true particularly in situations where the missionary
is a member of a society that offers educational and material advancement."
Similarly, conversion attracts "marginal groups or individuals who know
they can improve "their status in society, as, for example, the Harijans of
India."
It mentions other psychological factors which help Evangelization. For
example, when people are under great mental stress, when they are sick and
the doctors and the nurses around are missionaries, they are more prone to
missionary influence.
Similarly, when people are lonely and lack community life as they do in
great cities, or when they are away from their village, or when they are
cut off from their cultural milieu as Asian students are in British and
American universities, they are more receptive of a missionary who may be
around to befriend them at the moment.
One very important condition mentioned is some great demographic and
"cultural dislocation" under which people "become more open to the message
of the gospel". An example is cited of Kampuchean refugees living in Thai
camps, who are becoming Christians in great number.
Under similar conditions, insecure and under great pressure and with no one
to speak for them, Hindu Namasudras and Buddhist Chakmas of Bangladesh
living in camps managed by missionaries are easy targets of their labour.
Some missionaries are sorry that they could not take full advantage of this
opportunity, for in the Islamic climate of Bangladesh, they could not
guarantee personal security to the converts for which they offered to
become Christians.
Recent dislocation in Sri Lanka has been a great help to missionaries. They
have been very active in refugee camps.
Unsettled conditions, and general insecurity have greatly helped the
missionaries. Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh are easy targets.
Missionaries are not allowed to convert Muslims, but they can do it among
the Hindus.
It keeps the missionaries in humour without any harm to the Muslims.
Another example of this dislocation is when a country is invaded and
subjugated politically and faces great political upheavals and people lose
confidence in their culture and embrace the religion of the invaders
willingly or unwillingly. This happened in South and Central America,
Africa and the Pacific islands.
Lausanne Committee is not something unique that operates only in faraway
America and Europe. Those who share the same thoughts and have the same
aims, are everywhere.
They are active in every corner of India. In Mussoorie, for example there
is a small, but financially equipped organisation with similar aims. From
one of its publications we learn that "before Russia invaded Afghanistan in
1980, there were innumerable non-believers there. Today some reports
indicate that their numbers may have gone beyond 10,000."
About China, it tells us that "before Communists launched their cultural
revolution in 1979, Christians numbered five million. Today, some
estimates say that the Chinese church might be 50 million strong."
Communists have been doing the work of the Missionaries.
By waging war on Confucianism and Buddhism, they have greatly facilitated
the work of Christian missionaries. They destroyed more than half a
million shrines of the Buddhists.
The same source speaks of the "phenomenal growth and the ,evangelical
breakthrough" of the Korean Church. Christianity has almost taken over
South Korea and has been repressing its traditional religious with a strong
hand. There are already reports of some Buddhist monks having taken refuge
in India.
About India itself, it says that the "missiologists and church historians
have to answer this question: Why did the gospel succeed in Nagaland and
Mizoram, but fail to win the rest of India?" It adds further that "the
present phase of anti-Brahmanism sweeping through the country offers the
greatest Evangelistic opportunity of this century."
Lausanne Committee is neither new nor alone in the field.
Missiology is an old science widely practised. New missionaries follow old
strategies, and old missionaries come from diverse denominations.
The Catholic church which has been the longest in the field is also
searching new methods.
Today, the Church does not pour venom on non-Christian religions as freely
and in the same style as it did before. They new approach is deceptively
courteous but full of craft. Now its new official line is that "The
Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy" in other
religions-though it is another matter and a sad commentary on Christianity
that in the last 1900 years it found nothing true and holy in anyone of them.
But if you bring up this point, the Christian apologists think you are
unreasonable.
The Vatican Council says: "The Church proclaims and is duty bound to
proclaim without fail, "Christ who is the way, the truth and the life": and
that in him alone "men find the fullness of their religious life."
Declaring it quite as pompously, the Pope said during his visit to South
America in 1992 that the mission of the Church "is to preach the gospel and
give the chance of eternal life to everyone." As a good shepherd, the
Church must go on increasing its flock and should not relax on the
proselytizing front: Holy Stubborness.
In his recent book Crossing The Threshhold or Hope, the first ever written
by a Pope, Pope John Paul speaks of the problems connected with
Evangelization and proselytizing.
The Pope is aware of the difficulties particularly in this post-colonial
period. But it would not make him relax. He speaks of the "Holy
stubbornness" (everything in the Church is holy including Inquisition); he
believes that the world already belongs to the church and it must claim it
boldly; he quotes Luke (12.32) where Jesus asks his "little flock" not to
be afraid and where "your Father is pleased to give you the Kingdom."
Telling them to be courageous, he reminds the missionaries of Jesus that
"the gospel is not a promise of easy success." As the end, he gives the
call for "A great relaunching of Evangelization".
All this shows that there is only a change of tactics, not of larger aims,
that the so-called new Vatican line is not a serious thing, that the
conciliatory words said about other religions are a pretence, that they do
not mean the end of an old era but the beginning of a new onslaught under
different slogans and labels. The fine words are nothing but a camouflage.
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