From Bangalore - Christianity in India must rethink itself

P. Ninan Benjamin has since returning home to India sent those attending the meeting in Toulouse various articles he has written. He is a freelance journalist and works with the Bangalore Initiative for Religious Dialogue and you can find out more about BIRD and read other articles by Ninan Benjamin on his blog.

Benjamin's starting point for the article I quote from here was disagreement with a statement by Rev Dr Richard Howell General Secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship of India. Richard Howell was also at the meeting in Toulouse, and has in an email he's just sent us stated that the article misquotes him and that he has always held that conversion comes from God.
Of course I hope very much that they have through this process learnt much about each others' perspective on Christianity in India. I couldn't not wish that any of us become anything less in terms of our convictions as a result of meeting and discussing, but I sense that it is possible to also become something more, to have new horizons and sensitivities opened up as a result of the experience. Perhaps that's too utopian, but believing it's possible is why I believe in unity. However I realised once more in Toulouse that it is often those who come from our own contexts but who represent very different convictions to our own within that context who we find it most difficult to accept and be opened up by in discussion and dialogue. Perhaps I should be writing that in the first person singular rather than in the rather more anonymous "we".

Anyway here are two extracts from what Ninan Benjamin has written:
"...Some forty years ago, a brilliant Danish Professor, Dr Kaaj Baggo, in the United Theological College, Bangalore, made history when he said: “Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists should never give up their religion for the Christian Church.” On the other hand the Church should humble itself and find ways of identifying with other groups, taking Christ with them Christ, he said, was not the chairman of the Christian party. If God is the Lord of the universe he will work through every culture and religion. We must give up the crusading spirit of the colonial era and stop singing weird hymns like “Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war”. This will lead to Hindu Christianity or Buddhist Christianity."

And Benjamin ends his article from May:
"...Christianity in today’s India with a renascent Hinduism faces an unprecedented crisis. If it is alive to the situation and sensitive to the signs of time, it has to rethink itself, reorient itself, and rediscover its basic substance and interpret that in terms acceptable to the Indian mind and genius."