Ministry and Mission in the Changing World

Ministry and Mission in the Changing World Annual Diocesan Clergy Conference, July 24-26, 2007

Chennai- Bangalore Diocese

Introduction

I am happy that we could all gather together for our Annual Diocesan Clergy Conference here at Kottagiri. Let’s first of all thank God for bringing us all here and also for the manifold blessings with which He is leading and guiding us day by day. Thank you for coming. I welcome you all to this conference.

We have selected the theme, “Ministry and Mission in the Changing World”. This is a contemporary topic and covers a wide area. A theme is chosen to focus our attention to it through out the Conference and through various deliberations. We have with us Dr. George Zachariah as the main leader. He is a member of our Church, a friend to each one of us and a professor of theology at Gurukul Theological College, Chennai. He can speak to us as a learned scholar, with his experiences within the Church and outside and from a layman’s perspective. Though the topic is a wider topic, we will understand it mostly in the context of the Mar Thoma Church and our priestly ministry in contemporary Indian society. The Conference will be a blessing only when we prayerfully participate in it with an open mind and with a spirit of enquiry and achieve understanding by allowing the Holy Spirit to move in and through us. You will observe that apart from our formal leader we ourselves are both leaders and delegates at this conference. The core purpose is to enable us to introspect where we are and where we ought to be. Therefore, it is my humble prayer that this Conference will strengthen our spiritual journey from ‘being’ to ‘becoming’ with spiritual nourishment and with a deep commitment to the very cause for which God has called and sanctified us.

1. Changing World

We live in a changing world. Globalisation has brought greater momentum for the change. Change is inevitable. It is also rapid. Mr. Rajesh Sud an Executive Director of Max New York Life wrote, ‘Any change especially when it cuts across the fabric of a system torn between a rapid past and an enchanting future needs to be supported by attractive incentives.’ These incentives are indeed attractive and the face of Indian and Global society is changing. Do we as a Church and its clergy, understand the impact of the emerging social and economic trends in our society in order to have a more meaningful and relevant ministry and mission?

Let us note the following:

1. Today there is a demand and acceptance of Indian skills worldwide. With the globalization of the job market, there are opportunities for new jobs within the country itself.

2. Modern science and technology are moving ahead at a dizzying pace. New frontiers are being crossed by science and some of these frontiers have serious implications for our faith and lives.

3. New developments have emerged in Life sciences such as human cloning and embryonic stem cell research. They pose questions. What does it mean to be human? What is God saying about these things? Science can help us to fulfil our dreams and at the same time it can also end up as a nightmare or great disaster.

4. There is an increase in the number of working women. Joint family has given way to nuclear families. The norm of the day is for both husband and wife to work and earn their living. Thus there is a growing awareness among women that it is possible to carve a career while managing a family. In some cases husbands depend on the income of their partners.

5. Increased income is leading young couples to seek independence from their parents. The modern tendency is to spend the family income on fashion, health, fitness, education, fast food, housing, car etc…

6. The parent-centred family has today become the child-centred family. Children have started to earn more than their parents.

7. Traditionally religious and cultural values were imparted to children and grandchildren by parents and grandparents. Now parents have no time and grand parents are not living with them. New technology has taken over this role. We have CD’s, Internet, websites and Google etc….

8. The Joint Family used to offer financial protection to all its members against unexpected incidents. Family support included prayer and trust in God. Now the family is being replaced by financial planning and insurance policies.

9. There is a growing tendency among parents to utilize their time and income to provide quality education for their children. They are not reluctant to sacrifice the time spent in personal devotions, family prayers and congregational worship to this goal.

10. Though women have greater financial and emotional freedom due to career opportunities and better education today, gender discrimination persists in large segments of society.

11. Today the cell phone, television and internet are extending their reach to every nook and corner of India. As a result people everywhere are better informed. They have higher aspirations. Technology has made a great and significant impact on the lives of people including those in rural areas.

12. India is considered the world’s youngest country. It is estimated that more than 50% of India’s people are under the age of 25. By 2015, there will be about 550 million teenagers in India. Today Indian Youth is filled with fresh confidence, fuelled by high expectation.

The changing face of Indian Society is bringing with it new challenges and opportunities. Can we set right meaning and direction to these changes? Our country is emerging as a new India where women and children will claim more importance, youth will be holding the future, rural folk will have more demands, and where product and service offerings will be tailored to new profiles of consumers. It is in this context that we need to look into the ministry of the Church in our parishes, our student centres and our mission fields.

2. Person and Work of Clergy

We are Christians and clergy. Are we only men of action or are we also people of God’s Word? Do we make God’s priorities our priorities through our daily prayer and devotional habits? Do we wait for God’s timing? Are the people guided by our lives and re-instructed through our preaching and teaching to discern God’s ways, resulting in right living and renewal? Today God wants to use us, as he used Nehemiah, to build the crumbling spiritual walls in our world. This would include the devotional life that you and I lead. If you are neither concerned about the broken walls nor prepared to acknowledge their existence, you cannot begin to rebuild them. Ruined walls do not glorify God.

The person and ministry of the Clergy depend also on ministerial formation. We select candidates for our ministry from the cross-section of the present members of the Church. If there is erosion of values and spiritual death among the members of individual families, the candidates coming for ministry from among them may not have proper commitment and the real vision that we expect from them. They live in a competitive world where merit is strictly measured. Education is considered by some as a tool for earning a livelihood and the means to material prosperity. Such people will see the ministry as a road to material benefits. What is actually needed from the clergy is exemplary living with a life of simplicity and a spirit of sacrifice. A basic spiritual upbringing is necessary at home and in the local parish in those whom parish priests recommend for theological education from time to time.

“Ministerial Formation” is not mere academic excellence. The very fact that students are required to stay in the seminary points to the fact that the attention is to be given to personality moulding and character formation. Behavioural traits are to be watched in the seminary campus. Disciplined life is part of the ministerial formation. Only a disciplined person can be a disciple of Christ. How else can one deny oneself, take up one’s cross and follow Jesus Christ. It is ridiculous if some tend to say that “I follow Paul, another ‘I follow, Appolls’, and another “I follow Cephas, still another “I follow Christ’. We all belong to Jesus Christ. (I Cori 1:12) Self righteous people close themselves to God. Self sufficiency is a myth and those who crave it will never be satisfied. The self is to be crucified. Jesus asks Peter, do you love me more than these?(John21) Ministerial Formation is to know Jesus Christ and Him crucified.(I Cori 2:2)

The migration of our members to different continents and the present material prosperity of our people have necessitated the increase in the number of worship places in our Church. This in turn has brought in more number of clergy to the ministry. The responsibility of the ordained ministers is to be with the people of God, to comfort them in their agonies, to embolden them in their aspirations, to enable them to affirm their faith in Christ, to exhort them in times of need and to nurture them so that they in turn get involved in the pastoral ministry to the world. It is generally heard that priests and bishops are not accessible to the people. Is it true? The status, power and authority attached to the priestly ministry should not isolate these leaders from the people. Bishops and priests are not necessary if they are not ministering to the people in the name of God. Ministry is centred on the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Here Jesus is the model. He gave fellowship to the community around him and facilitated the people to derive their strength from God and be involved in mission. (MTT 28:19-20, LK 10:1-12, 17-20) Jesus manifested simplicity of life and walked to the Cross fearlessly. According to Bishop Ananda Rao Samuel “suffering undeservedly for doing good, is characteristic of total commitment and true involvement in personal ministry”.

3. Commitment of an Ordained Minister

When we consider Ministry in the changing world, each ordained minister needs to understand that he is expected to update himself in his reading and learn to equip himself for the challenges of the modern day. This has to reflect in his sermon preparation and also in the order of worship. Computer literacy has become a requirement if one has to minister in the e-world. The parishioner sitting at the pew on Sunday morning might have already clicked on Google News, which aggregated news headlines from all over the world appearing on different websites. Today there are legions of preachers including tele-evangelists airing the Gospel on satellite television. The possibilities of the electronic world are tremendous. In our fast changing world, privilege goes with responsibility. The ordained minister has the responsibility to discern what is right and wrong. When opportunities are there for economic gain and material prosperity, the ordained minister has to show the way for a biblically sound Christian living. “Christianity is more than a new understanding. It is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something which cannot be seen without Christ”, said American Theologian Stanly Hauerwas. (Book: Resident Aliens). St. John in the Book of Revelation writes to the seven Churches to be true to their calling as they faced changed situations at the time of persecutions in the first century. Suppression of truth, withdrawal from the realities of the world and being exclusive are not the real signs of ‘being the Church’ in a changing world.

4. Members of the Church

A question that is often raised is: Is the membership in the Church decreasing? There is a tendency to say that pastoral ministry does not provide the comfort, consolation and security that people desire these days. So, at least some people look to charismatic groups and other revival movements for comfort and consolation. Some people attend services in the Church and run to charismatic groups after that. Can we easily dismiss these movements as emotional and sensational? This is now a form of spirituality that is widely practiced. They provide people an opportunity to have intimate fellowship and prayer. They emphasise lay leadership. Faith healing and publicity are there. Some even raise money for evangelistic work. What is lacking in our mainline Churches now?

The crisis of pastoral ministry is due to the failure of the established churches in the mission of community formation and community living. A communal group is not community. The Church should be at the service of people in their search for meaningful communities that are empowered to live in harmonious relationship with nature and among people of different faiths without sacrificing the values of the Kingdom of God. We need to evaluate the role of our prayer groups in this context. What we need is a spirituality that reflects God’s concern for the entire creation.

Consolation is not the end of misery. For St. Paul, consolation is the protective power in the midst of the struggle for the establishment of the Kingdom of God (2Cor 9:8). We need to empower the people. We are called to participate in God’s mission of community building in villages and cities. The local parishes have to transform themselves to become communities that are rooted in Christ and where life is shared in all its abundance with others in the name of Christ (John 10:10, Acts 3:1-10)

5. Pastoral Involvement in Community Living

It is to be admitted that for a long time the Christian community in India, particularly the St. Thomas Christians, remained as an exclusive community. Pastoral ministry was very challenging when the reformation took place at the time of Abraham Malpan in the 19th century. It was necessary then to keep intact the membership of the Church, nurtures the believers in true faith (Orthodoxy) and to add new members when people expressed their desire to join the reformed group. As years and decades have gone by there is now a spirit of complacency prevalent among clergy and a spirit of self sufficiency on the part of the laity due to material prosperity. There is a tendency on the part of the parishioners to resign membership even on matters of small inconveniences or difference of opinion. On the side of the Clergy, is it becoming evident that such cases are accepted without any attempt to give them a chance to reconsider or persuade them to realise that membership and loyalty to the Church are significant for their Christian growth? It is only natural that there are some dissatisfied people in a community but the ministry of the priest is to bring reconciliation so that fellowship within the community will be very strong. There should not be anyone unwanted in the fellowship. Christ’s command is to love even one’s enemy. A priest is to be available to all. In the Eastern Churches there are no set working hours for the priest. He is to be available to all, round the clock day and night through out the year. He is given a parsonage to stay. The ministry is like that of prophet Jeremiah – to be with God and to be with people at all times, both in the ups and downs of human experiences.

The world today is fragmented though we speak highly about globalization. There are so many people in our parishes who live alone, crushed by their loneliness. More and more people seem to have lost their balance because their family life has been unhappy. Widows and single parents need support. There are so many who are looking for a sense of belonging and a meaning for their lives. These days we need many micro communities which will welcome the lost and the lonely people offering them a new form of family and sense of belonging.

Communities are first of all places of communion before becoming places of co-operation. A community is a living body. The Church community should be a living sign of joy and celebration which paves way for all human communities to rejoice. If people are accepted with their limitations as well as their abilities, the human community gradually becomes a place of liberation. There is an intrinsic identity and solidarity between the community of Christ (the Church) and the community of the people.

6. Local Parish and Eucharistic Living

Generally, when believers join the Church, they continue the Christian life through community worship where the Eucharist is celebrated. The Eucharist is a prophetic protest against existing unjust and sinful structures. Poverty, caste, hunger and unjust suffering are unfortunate realities of life for a large number of people. The global system today is greedily exploitative, where as the Eucharist reminds us of care and sharing in love. The world’s system of relationships torments people and fragments nations, where as the Eucharist builds communities. The global world exhibits parochial interest whereas the Eucharist is universal and points to a single large fellowship in the Kingdom of God. The international scene today is marked by the tendency towards arrogant domination where as Eucharistic living is a sacrament of humble service in participation and co-operation.. The sacrament of Holy Qurbana is for sacramental living

The Eucharistic Community is called to increase hope in the midst of hopelessness, enlighten people in places of darkness and enhance life in the midst of violence and the culture of death. This sort of community living is a sign of resurrection. Think of the millions of people that gather around the Eucharistic table across the world every week; they have the potential for transforming the world.

There is a great need now to review the role of the ordained ministers in the modern changing world. In the present pattern the whole ministry is centred around ordained ministers who have a central role. Instead the role of the pastor is to articulate and motivate the pastoral concern of the Christian community to the world. Therefore the priest’s role is to equip and empower the people of God for pastoral ministry to the whole world.

7. Traditional Understanding of Mission

The word Mission has become a catch word of our time. It is a word which is widely talked about in the ecclesiastical and non ecclesiastical circles. Traditionally the word mission was used in the ecclesiastical circle to denote the practice of sending persons to far away lands to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The main goal was numerical church growth with a view to adding as many persons as possible to the Christian fold without much regard for social and cultural growth. Dr. Gnana Robinson in his book “A Voice in the Wilderness” brings out following characteristics of the traditional understanding of mission.

1. A sender receiver relationship

2. The assumption that the sender possesses the full truth and has the inescapable commission from God to bring this truth to the receiver some how or the other.

3. The receiver is the heathen, who still walks in darkness and has no knowledge of the truth. If he does not receive the truth in the way the sender possess it, he will die in sin and looses eternal life. Hence the urgency of mission.

4. The revelation in Christ is final and once for all. This means that outside the institutional Church there is no revelation of God. There is no true revelation in other religions.

5. This world suffers under the powers of the devil. Men and women should therefore flee from this world if they have to inherit the eternal life. It is not the responsibility of Christians to seek involvement in politics. The Kingdom God is beyond this world. This earth should first disappear. Only then will the Kingdom of God will be established.

6. God works in this world through the Church, in “Word and Sacrament”. It is therefore not correct to say that the God is present among other people and religions and that he works among them.

7. Endeavouring to change the political and social structures is not our task. Individual conversion is the main thing. When individuals change, structures will also change.

8. Righteousness is the gift of God. It is therefore in vain that men and women struggle to establish justice in the world. People’s struggle for justice, awareness of slavery and bondage, as well as education for liberation are thus not Christian.

9. The Gospel is not influenced by the context. The search for a contextual theology is wrong. Indigenization, enculturation and dialogue with other faiths and ideologies are also, therefore, wrong.

It is not surprising that this sort of traditional understanding developed at a time when society was feudal in nature. The proponents of this model favoured the dominant class in society and explain spirituality as characterised by dichotomies such as material-spiritual, inner–outer, and personal-social.

Today, this attitude towards mission has changed. Asian Christians in general are now taking their context seriously. By re-reading the Bible they have come to a new understanding of the concept of God, human, world, culture, religion, Church and missionary responsibility. Have we noted this change in our mission fields? Missionary Achens have a God given responsibility to instruct and educate the evangelists along this line within a Transforming Vision.

8. Present Day Context of Mission

Let’s now look at the present mission and ministry of the Mar Thoma Church in the mission fields of India. More or less till the 19th Century Church life remained confined to Kerala. Right from the beginning of the 20th Century members of the Church came to be gripped by missionary zeal and desire to spread the gospel to the places that God led them to. It is with gladness that we can now speak of having mission centres across the length and breadth of the country. Now there are communities of believers in various language areas with some of the leaders of the local community serving as ordained ministers and evangelists. Yet a large number of evangelists even now come from Kerala. Our training Institutes are there to motivate more and more people from the villages of India to come and have training for the mission and ministry. It will be appropriate here to introspect about what elements are given significance for the furtherance of the Gospel. When the people are embraced as the members of the Church it is quite essential that we have landed property and infrastructure facilities for community worship and other community activities. This should not belittle the importance of human centred action where believers are given proper Christian nurture and brought up in community where they will experience holistic development. Here we need to affirm the basic need of sending evangelists, preaching the Gospel and accepting the believers. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is liberative and life giving and life affirming.

The following are some of the contextual issues that are vital to a proper understanding of mission.

I. Poverty,

II. Caste

III. Religious Fundamentalism

IV. Religious Pluralism

V. Ecological Crisis

VI. Globalisation

There are two billion people that are forgotten and invisible in our world, who lack the basic infrastructure for living such as drinking water, primary education, health services, roads, electricity, transportation etc.

9. Mission Perspectives

Mission belongs to God. Human beings are called to participate in God’s mission. This participation will be meaningful only with an adequate understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ and by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Gospels narrate how Jesus lived in history, moved through the villages of Galilee and responded to the cries of the poor and the marginalised. The life of Jesus Christ is an enactment of his message. This is the model for all people engaged in mission. There are theologians, who take John 20:19-23 as the basis of mission instead of Mathew 28:18-20. For us both are important. In our mission fields every believer is drawn into active discipleship continually and we emphasise the imperative to live as a community of disciples in the world as the first fruit of the Kingdom of God

When we consider Mission in the Indian context and in the modern period we need to consider also a paradigm shift. The word paradigm stands for the entire constellation of beliefs, values, and practices shared by all members of a community. A Paradigm gives direction and a frame of reference for intellectual activity at a given time. There is a change in paradigm as we face new realities. But this change is never smooth. There will be questioning and hesitation on the part of the members when a new paradigm is developed. Priests and missionaries need to have courage and confidence to embrace the newer paradigm. This is much needed in our mission fields today.

The following are some of the areas where we need a new paradigm as we face newer challenges.

I. Mission as Humanisation

II. Mission as Solidarity

III. Mission as Evangelism (Witness)

IV. Mission as Development

Mira Kamdar in her book “Planet India” describes India as a developing country and a global powerhouse. “As a very fast growing democracy, India is transforming the world by touching the lives of people in more ways than it is presently known. There is no challenge we face today, no opportunity we have covered where India does not have critical relevance”.

India is fast becoming an important centre for research and development for scores of major multinational companies. Yet the greatest challenge for India is to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Eradication of poverty remains the challenge at a time when India’s youth filled with fresh confidence fuelled by high expectations, believes that the future belongs to them. It is in this context that the Student Chaplains’ of our diocese ministering at 12 different centres, have the critical task of giving meaning and direction to the process of globalisation and empowering our youth and our students to commit their lives for the growth of the Kingdom of God. I can see here how a team ministry can develop when the clergy working in the three areas of parish ministry, student ministry and mission fields in this diocese, join hands to meet these modern challenges and come out with a holistic vision of the ministry and the mission of the Church in a changing world.

10. Conclusion

It is clear that as ordained ministers respond to new challenges in a community, their understanding of the Gospel deepens and widens. This newer understanding of the Gospel compels us to express our mission holistically, embracing all aspects of life. Mission is an endeavour of the Christian community to celebrate life as God’s gift. Life is to be preserved and God’s purpose is to be fulfilled. According to Jurgan Moltman, “Where Jesus is, there is life. There is abundant life, vigorous life, loved life and eternal life”. An ordained minister has to denounce systems and structures that diminish and extinguish the lives of many. An ordained minister has to initiate and support values, practices and institutions that affirm and enhance life. Thus the ministry and mission of the Church become the sign and sacrament of God’s life-affirming and life-fulfilling mission.