•
The Challenges of
Michael McCabe
in City Limits:
Eds. Joe
Egan and Thomas R Whelan
What challenges does globalisation pose for mission in the twenty-first
century?
A comparison of the views of two theologians from different continents;
Michael Amaladoss (
Michael Amaladoss
The problem with globalisation is not the process itself (“the process
of something becoming global”). This
could be for the good – e.g. socially responsible capitalism, humanised science
and technology. Rather the problem is
with what is becoming globalised – irresponsible liberal capitalism which
benefits the rich at the expense of the poor, and materialistic technology
which exploits and destroys nature. Mass
and rapid communication provides a global market-field for rich capitalists to
play in, finding cheap labour in poor countries to provide increasing
profits. With profit as the ultimate
norm, multi-national companies are more powerful than many nations. What we have therefore is not the globalisation
of well being and abundance, but the globalisation of poverty and injustice.
It is not only the poor who suffer from this form of globalisation. The rich too are impoverished since consumer
goods are becoming homogenised producing a popularised culture (“artificially
thrust on the people through the skilful use of the media by marketing managers
to maximise their sales and profits”) as
distinct from a popular culture (the creation of a people).
What are the challenges facing
mission?
Two central tenets underlie his approach to mission:
1.
The Good News of
Jesus directly addresses the world-views and value systems of our cultures and
through them seeks to influence the choices that we make in the economic and
political spheres
2.
Any vision of
mission in today’s world must arise from the point of view of its victims – the
poor, the marginalised and the oppressed.
They are the mediators of the challenging demands of the Good News.
The key challenge in mission
today is to create a counter-cultural
community offering an alternative way of life that gives
witness to and promotes the reign of God
in the world.
A counter-cultural community – one that is
critical of the present, being prophetic and challenging people in the name of
a vision of what they ought to become by embodying that vision. More concerned with the quality of witness
than growth in numbers or building up the institution. The liminal communities of the Church’s
history are limited in their effectiveness – by their nature they cannot be
models for people in the world. What we
need today are counter-cultural communities that are involved in the world,
being both models of God’s reign, and
models for God’s reign. Religious institutes have tended to become so
task oriented that they no longer have much symbolic impact.
An alternative way of life – the vision of
human life on this earth as proposed by Jesus in the Gospel. He sees three aspects of this:
a)
the affirmation of life – affirming life before death
as much as life after death. It is not
only the poor that have their lives diminished.
Even the rich are dehumanised by consumerism so that life loses its
meaning and becomes a burden and an alienation.
Indeed the whole of life on the planet is under threat. Affirmation of life, then, requires affirming
the unity of creation (the interrelatedness between human beings and nature)
and affirming human freedom and creativity as these find expression in culture
b)
the affirmation of life in community – to discover life
profoundly is to become aware of it as sharing, as gift, as love, as
community. The forces of globalisation
create, by contrast, a competitive world marked by a culture of individualism
and anonymity. The kind of community that mission must give witness to is not
based on geographic, ethnic, cultural or religious unity, but modelled on the
triune life of God and held together by “bonds of love and mutual
acceptance. It is not only comfortable
with multi-culturalism but sees in it creative variety and the richness of the
human race.
c)
the awareness of transcendence – globalisation
spreads a secularised culture of modernity, a culture that absolutises human
autonomy and rejects the transcendent (or at least reduces religion to a
private, psychological affair). The
challenge then is to bring an awareness of transcendence, not as something beyond
or additional to the cosmos, but as the depth or roots of the cosmos and of the
human. It is the transcendent in the
immanent: God is not above or beyond us, but with us energising us for life in
the world, leading it to fullness, groaning in the very forces of the cosmos,
giving birth to a new humanity of freedom, fellowship and justice in a new
world order.
Promoting the reign of God in
the world – counter-cultural missionaries must not only model the way of living
based on the Gospel, they must become involved in bringing about the
transformation of the world they must
seek to change the course of history.
They must be leaven, salt and light to the world. But how?
Not by relying on political, economic or military power, but by
augmenting their significant moral power by seeing the followers of other
religions as allies rather than enemies.
Robert Screiter
The advent of globalisation is determining the infrastructure for
mission in the twenty-first century. It
is distinctive in the extent of its reach, the intensity of the
interconnectedness it has created, the velocity with which information and
capital are moved, and the impact it is having.
Some major consequences
significant for mission today:
a)
The changed
understanding of territory and the decreased significance of the nation-state.
b)
The sundering of
the link between culture and territory (with increased migration of peoples and
the incursion of global cultural forces on local communities). Culture as territory has ever decreasing
significance.
c)
Homogenisation –
through its communication network globalisation interlinks the world and
communicates the same message. This
homogenisation in turn leads to…
d)
Fragmentation –
social arrangements in local settings are disrupted, creating resistance and
heightening the sense of the particular and local. In the very process of breaking down
distinctive cultural identities and flattening our differences, globalisation
provokes the kind of reaction which accentuates differences and gives rise to
division and fragmentation.
These present new and urgent challenges
for missionaries:
It calls for a
radical re-thinking of both the form and the content of the mission ad gentes. Regarding the locus or place of mission, the
“compression of space” created by globalisation invites us to move away from
the territorial concept of mission and to redefine ad gentes as ad extra
(that is, simply going out from where one is), or ad altera (that is, to those who are made “other”).
The new context
also challenges missionaries to reach out in new ways and undertake new ministries
which can counteract some of the negative consequences of globalisation. The Church and missionary institutes should
use their resources as trans-national and non-governmental organisations to
bring people together in solidarity of the human family and form networks of
support and advocacy. By the way in
which they live and operate international institutes/congregations should show
that trans-national organisations need not be oppressive, but can bring together
human and material resources for the betterment of human beings.
We need to respond
to the consequences of fragmentation – where people reshape and reconstruct new
identities to resist the encroachments of globalisation, where refugees and
displaced peoples have to rebuild lives and heal memories. Here the task of mission is that of
reconciliation – restoring human dignity and healing broken social
relationships. For Robert Schreiter,
reconciliation is the metaphor for mission in the twenty-first century. In a world characterised at once by closer
interconnection and greater fragmentation, the capacity to “break down the wall
of hostility which divides us” (Eph 2:14) is the outstanding challenge of our
time.
This challenge of
reconciliation has two connected theological challenges; dialogue and the
theology of religion. “In a world where
fragmentation constantly threatens the quality of life together dialogue
becomes especially important not only to understand the other, but to create
the atmosphere of trust that will make communication and co-operation
possible.” He believes that the
heightened pluralism that globalisation creates through interconnection will
bring fresh insights into pluralism itself and help us articulate an adequate
and faithful theology of religions.
Comparison and Critical
Assessment
Amaladoss offers a more gloomy analysis of globalisation while
Schreiter’s approach seems more nuanced.
For Amaladoss, globalisation in its contemporary form (in terms of its
content more than its means) appears threatening, oppressive and
alienating. It is a demonic power which
must be exposed, resisted and counteracted.
The problem is in what is becoming globalised rather than the new
information technologies through which it is happening. Its evil can be seen in the priority of profit
over persons, in an ever more pervasive consumeristic culture that puts
material possession and personal comfort before community relations and quality
of life.
This pessimistic view may be due largely to the perspective from which
Amaladoss writes – the two thirds’ world which has suffered more than it has
benefited from the globalisation process.
Given this negative view it is hardly surprising that his approach to
mission today is one of struggle against the forces of globalisation. This global transformation can be achieved by
a network of cross-cultural and inter-religious communities where
inter-religious dialogue and interculturation and key dimensions of mission.
McCabe’s view is that this vision is valid but limited – it seems to
oppose church growth and the service of God’s reign while the two seem quite
compatible.
Schreiter on the other hand adopts a more conciliatory approach to the
phenomenon of globalisation. While
acknowledging its ambivalence and the evils it has perpetrated on the poor, it
represents the world order with which the Church has to deal and within which
it must define its mission. In the
dramatic transformations effected by globalisation he sees both a challenge and
opportunity for missionary congregations and societies to think differently
about mission – to abandon the concept of mission as a territory to be
Christianised and reach out to the “others” who are around us. While few missionaries today would see their
mandate as that of Christianising a territory, the question remains as to where
Schreiter’s invitation leaves the quite specific command of the risen Christ to
make disciples of all nations.