Mission Conference in Cyprus Explores Transformation and Tradition
Episcopal News Service. February 18, 2003 [2003-033]
Margaret Larom, Staff member of the Episcopal Church's Office of Anglican and Global Relations
(ENS) Under the theme "Transformation and Tradition," more than 100 participants in the Anglican Missions Organizations Conference in Cyprus were told that "the world cries out for signposts that community is possible--across all divides."
Using the "lovely vision" of Isaiah 19, Prof. Christopher Duraisingh, who spent 10 years on the mission staff of the World Council of Churches and now teaches at Episcopal Divinity School in Massachusetts, wondered whether "the transformation that God wills for us is highway-building. What would it be if people were drawn together so they could walk back and forth in a transformed community of mercy, justice and peace?"
Duraisingh, who began as a lay evangelist in the Church of South India, argued that this transformation can't happen unless, like Peter in the Book of Acts, we learn to cross borders and discover that God has no favorites. "What would it take for the Anglican Communion to genuinely speak multi-vocally, to be a sign and instrument of God's reign?" he asked. "How do we promote at this time a genuinely polycentric ecclesial communion that is a missionary movement?"
Missionary history, he added, is the story of how the Gospel blossoms in a thousand ways, in many different cultures and contexts. If we do not enable dialogue among different cultures, he said, we could be charged with imprisoning or domesticating the Gospel. "Therefore we need each other within the Communion for a decentered but committed relationship within which mutual challenge and enrichment of our faith, worship and missionary witness is promoted."
He invited participants to think of tradition as a verb or a process, rather than a noun, since the Greek root word "tradition" means to "hand over" or to "hand on," showing a dynamic essence that is essential to the transforming power of the Gospel.
Where is the fire?
In the opening plenary February 12, Bishop Simon Chiwanga of Tanzania, who just completed a term as chair of the Anglican Consultative Council, asked, "Where is the fire that ignites us to share the good news of our faith with others?" He answered the question, "It is a search for wholeness--the wholeness glimpsed in the central crucified and victorious figure of Christ. This quest also drives us to seek to continually renew our vision for mission, to make sure that our passion for mission is not driven simply by human motives, however humanitarian they might be."
He added, "This quest can be the fire that drives us to participate in the mission of God in God's world, which is reconciliation and restoration of all people and the world to himself."
Edwina Thomas, a lay woman from the United States who is director of Sharing Our Ministries Abroad (SOMA), responded to the bishop's presentation with a personal testimony, describing her own conversion to mission as a call to love people "who are not like me." She underscored her absolute dependency on biblical reflection and intimacy with Jesus Christ for strength to carry out the work of mission.
"Mission is a cycle," Thomas said. "You can't engage in mission without reflection because it drives us back to God continually. My challenge daily is to seek God. I firmly believe mission is about relationships and my first relationship is with Jesus."
United witness
Chiwanga shared his conviction that the Anglican Communion's rootedness in worship and prayer has enabled Anglicans to come through our conflicts in biblical and theological understandings as "a more vital, more relevant, and more influential church."
He added, "Not that we have solved those conflicts in interpretation of Scriptures and our theological convictions, declaring a victor and a vanquished, and dividing the spoils of that war. Rather, I see us Anglicans as engaging together in mission without needing first to 'solve' hot button issues as such."
Chiwanga said that he is convinced that "as a church we emerge from these conflicts stronger than we were before, because different views grow out of all our efforts to find the best way to do mission. They grow out of an intense discernment of God's mission for us in our respective contexts." He said that "mission today is about solidarities in action--solidarities across borders of language, experience, culture, wealth, liturgical expressions." He said that "more and more of us are realizing that we don't need to agree on human sexuality in order to advocate for persecuted Christians; we don't need to have the same churchmanship to combat poverty; we don't need to agree on our theology before working for peace and safety in Sudan."
"Our hope and future as an ecclesial community is our united witness and participation in God's mission," Chiwanga concluded. "If we do this, we will be effective signs and instruments of transformation and tradition."
(Full text of Chiwanga's speech available at http://www.anglicancommunion.org/acns/.)