Into All the World: Shaping an Agenda for Tomorrow’s Church
AS ONE reflects on the commission to go “into all the world” in this important anniversary year, one is drawn to the question of the contribution that Christian theology and the churches can make to the urgent task of building a coalition of traditions to protect human dignity and promote human flourishing. That there is a need for such a task I take as self-evident and I will not spend time arguing that case. Sufice it to say that according to the Human Development Report 2016 “even with all the impressive progress in reducing poverty over the past 25 years, 766 million people, 385 million of them children, lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013. Poor nutrition causes 45 percent of the deaths among children under age 5. Yet one-third of the world’s food is wasted every year... Unless the world tackles deprivation today, 167 million children will live in extreme poverty by 2030, and 69 million children under age 5 will die of preventable causes.”
There is, of course, disagreement about which values and institutions can best deliver the kinds of policies that will promote human ourishing. However, notwithstanding ideological and values-based disagreements, it is important that the conversation continue. Moreover, the church has a key role to play in animating and structuring this conversation, as one of the central ways in which it enacts the commission to go into all the world.
In what follows, I will first discuss aspects of the contemporary socio-political context in which Christian faith is lived, focusing brie y on the return of religion, religious pluralism and the re-politicisation of religion. I will consider the importance of this context in shaping an agenda for tomorrow’s church, highlighting that, notwithstanding the relative inhospitality of the political realm to religious voices, it is vital that the church continues to participate in public political debate on matters of value. I will focus on the how, rather than the what, in terms of shaping this agenda since, as I shall argue, if the church is to be a credible and distinctive voice in this post-secular, religiously pluralist and economically unjust world then the manner in which it engages in public discourse on values, whether they be shared or contested, is of great significance.
* Full article available in printed copies.
Linda Hogan
is Professor of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin.