We have decided what to love: justice. The Women’s Forum participants present their message to the Assembly.
The need to improve the relationship between church as institution and the church as movement has been raised during several Assembly lectures, Bible studies, forums and program reviews.
Dr D. Preman Niles, in the first D. T. Niles Memorial Lecture, said, “In the conflicts that flare up between church as institution and church as movement, the ecumenical movement has either taken one side against the other or attempted to go it alone without the support of the churches.
“Neither option is desirable if the ecumenical movement in Asia is to grasp and sustain the challenge of prophetic ministry and costly discipleship as a call to the churches.”
The Rev. Dr Hyunju Bae, in her Bible study on “The Prophetic Challenge to the Church in Asia”, said the call for the church to respond to the prophetic calling derived from its discernment of the times and from its firsthand experience of all the layers of accumulated problems in Asia.
However, the church often became the target of criticism, as it made mistakes by uncritically reinscribing injustice and discrimination within itself.
She said, “The eyes of the local churches are sometimes not clear enough to discern the prophetic commitment both inside and outside them, and sometimes they even condemn it.”
Dr Bae said, “It is sometimes the case that prophetic Christian individuals do not receive the spiritual and moral support from the church, rather finding themselves misunderstood and even mistreated. No wonder that many of them fall into disappointment and disillusionment about the church!”
The true miracle that the Holy Spirit performed, she said, was found in the building of the first faith community that lived up to the alternative prophetic vision which covered economic and politico-cultural dimensions of the communal life.
“‘The leader’ of the earliest churches was the one who was in charge of what we call now ‘advocacy’, giving the voice to the voiceless, making them visible, and taking side with them. To realise that prophetic advocacy was part of
The report from the People’s Forum, held in Kuala Lumpur April 12-13, accused the ecumenical movement of becoming empire-building and ecclesial-techno-bureaucratic.
“Instead,” it said, “the ecumenical movement must amplify the voice of the voiceless and accompany them in their struggle.”
It said, “The abandoning of Urban Rural Mission has resulted in the grassroots being alienated from the ecumenical movement.”
Absence of the poor in the ecumenical movement questioned its very nature, purpose, meaning and existence and it needed to redefine itself, the forum said.
CCA had lost its engagement with basic communities and people’s movements and should reclaim its involvement with transformational grassroots organising.
Dr Niles said the church needed to embrace an understanding of its position as scattered communities, to understand its place among the nations and view itself as the people of God in the midst of all God’s peoples. He said the church should have a positive appreciation of plurality as within God’s plan for creation and its place and mission within it.
Then it would understand the call to prophetic ministry as an imitation of the example of Jesus, who confronted the empires of the world with the Empire of God, which had the expendables, the least, as its centre of concern.
He said, “We have to abandon the debilitating confrontations between church as institution and church as movement. On the one hand, church as institution is primarily a community of worship that besides other things is able to spiritually support and sustain the church as movement. “On the other, the church as movement is called to manifest the prophetic ministry of the church with all the marks of discipleship.”
Stephen Webb
~ Berita Terkini CCA Assembly 2010 April 18
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