We spent a lot of time today on introductions and it was fascinating, profoundly moving and gave almost too much food for thought.
Hopes were expressed about what impact a possible code on conversion might have on hearts and minds, that if Christians managed to achieve some consensus on this issue it would also serve as a source of inspiration to others.
And so we ranged from Nepal and Myanmar, to a passionate plea about the situation of Dalits in India, to religious plurality in Malaysia and Leicester, a recognition of the challenges facing once homogenous populations - like former East Germany; and the joys and difficulties encountered in many contexts when working with converts from other religions. Some spoke of the duty Christians have to share the gospel good news, others of the need to root all conversion in the dialogical relationship.
The thought I shall take back to my own Euroepan secularized context came from a professor of missiology from Sweden who has a particular interest in mild or soft forms of religion, especially as that relates to multiple belonging - for instance if a husband practises a mild form of Christianity and a wife a mild form of Islam.
This is the first time I've heard this expression (I must get out more!) and it's helped me to reflect in some ways on what I tried to do in pastoral ministry - linking it in to radical openness and radical acceptance of others but also holding it in tension with what the
French Reformed Church would call a theology both of conviction and of debate. Don't think I can unpack that just now but I suppose these are jottings for me to go back to later and try to make sense of in my own spiritual journey. Perhaps too somewhere along the line in the search for my own religious roots I would also have to say that I have a mild form of Judaism that is somewhere in my Christianity. Hmm that really is a new thought to me.
Over supper I had a much "harder" discussion with a Pentecostal colleague about European attitudes to fornication, adultery and living in sin. It was actually a really good and very honest conversation because I didn't try to be something I'm not and neither did he. The realities of pastoral ministry always put belief into a certain tension with human life as it is being lived here and now. I shall leave Toulouse particularly grateful for this mealtime ecumenical dialogue - eucharisto - maybe if I finally ever manage to make it to the USA I'll make it to his church in Tennessee, I hope so.
I recognize that part of my reality as a post-modern Christian living in a secularised context means that something is lost - part of my heritage perhaps. I am proud of much that Christians in the URC and the ERF have done, but recently when I was re-reading Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd I realised that many of the things that make sense and give meaning to my life will soon be lost - for instance who sings hymns anymore? As a matter of course Gabriel Oak in the book is pictured as reading his Bible and saying his prayers, in a simple straight forward, structured way; he sings in the church choir. The simplicity with which he does that and of course the lack of modern distractions to take him away from it are already in some way lost to my generation. It seems to hold him together through the deep crisis of his seemingly unrequited love for Bathsheba and her marriage to Troy. His practising of Christianity doesn't make him a moraliser, it gives him structure and meaning, and means he cares enough to want to shield Bathsheba from Troy's infidelity. (And sorry great as the film is with Julie Christie and Alan Bates you will probably have to read the book to get an inkling of what I mean. hmm isn't inkling a lovely word?)
Anyway the idea that many European Christians - and perhaps others in secularised contexts too - are living with loss is an idea that interests me. What do we do to cope with that? Run away, turn to politics, give up on everything, try come what may to maintain dying institutions - or dare to continue to find new ways to pray and read the Bible and bear witness to the meaning we have found?? Apologies I really don't seem to be able to stop myself sermonizing.
