Henk Pieterse: The Necessity of Intercultural Theology

Today's post is written by Dr. Hendrik R. Pieterse, Associate Professor of Global Christianity and Intercultural Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

In September, I was privileged to be able to launch a two-year transcontinental initiative in intercultural theology, supported by a grant from the In Trust Center for Theological Schools and a matching grant by my institution, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

The focus of the project is to encourage and facilitate deep-running theological exchange between North American scholars in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions and their sub-Saharan African counterparts. Key outcomes of the project are the strengthening of intercultural Wesleyan/Methodist communities of theological inquiry, the generation of fresh scholarship, and the production of innovative scholarly resources—all in the service of a global Wesleyan/Methodist movement whose diverse witness today demands the theological contribution of all.

In approaching this work, I am guided by two convictions:

(1) The future of theology in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions is intercultural. As with theology generally today, Wesleyan/Methodist theology finds itself in an unprecedented moment. Theological production in the Wesleyan/Methodist traditions is more widely distributed and culturally diverse than ever before, with unrivaled capacity for dialogue, mutual learning, and collaboration.

(2) Theological isolationism perpetuates theological ethnocentrism. A polycentric Wesleyan/Methodist witness calls for a polycentric approach to theology.

Such a polycentric approach to doing Wesleyan/Methodist theology finds a promising model in intercultural theology. With deep roots in missiology and world Christianity studies, intercultural theology attends closely to the hermeneutics of cross-cultural communication and the dynamics of culture, context, and power in theological dialogue across boundaries. In short, it offers a ready model for theological exchange in a Wesleyan/Methodist theological community that now spans the globe. There simply is no reason for not doing our theology “connectionally,” through a global “web of interactive [theological] relationships,” to adapt the language of the Book of Discipline.

This is of particular note for North American Wesleyan/Methodist theology, which thus far has tended to be rather insular. I believe the time has arrived when engaging Wesleyan/Methodist scholarship in Africa and elsewhere merely out of courtesy or curiosity—as an option and not an obligation—is no longer adequate.

Why should this be so? To begin, the fact is that the crisscrossing forces of globalization, denominational ties, personal relationships, professional partnerships, and, yes, theological networks have given us all a stake in one another’s lives.

Further, and in a more theological vein, if theological isolationism breeds theological ethnocentrism, then the notion of a self-sufficient theological tradition is never far behind. By “self-sufficient” I mean a tradition that views itself as having within itself all that is required to pursue the theological task in today’s world. Others elsewhere are welcome to join in, the reasoning goes, but our theological work does not depend on their contribution. I fear this has all too often been the tacit disposition of North Atlantic Wesleyan/Methodist theology.

Intercultural theologians demur. They reject the idea of a self-sufficient tradition. All theological traditions are contextual and thus partial, fragmentary, and incomplete. This means we all need one another’s insight and contribution and, when necessary, one another’s correction in adequately interpreting our shared faith. Indeed, there are theological insights into the meaning and relevance of the Wesleyan/Methodist message that one can gain only through conversation with a colleague from another cultural context. For just this reason, intercultural theologians insist, all theology should be intercultural theology, with dialogue (or, as I prefer, polylogue) as its primary modality.

There is something very Wesleyan about seeing things this way. After all, at the heart of our connectionalism lies the idea of a worldwide community held together by relationships of radical interdependence, mutual learning, and mutual accountability. Should these commitments not characterize our global community of Wesleyan/Methodist theological inquiry as well?

The fact is no one of us today can render a theological account adequate to the depth, scope, and reach of the Wesleyan/Methodist heritage by relying on only one contextual expression of it, no matter how prominent. We truly need the counsel, collaboration, and correction of a worldwide theological collegium to do our theology responsibly. Think how much richer and fuller—and dare I say, more plausible and more persuasive—our theological labor would be wherever we are!

As an intercultural theologian, I submit that all Wesleyan/Methodist theology today should be intercultural theology. And the mode in which we pursue such theology should be dialogue—or, to use our own parlance, “conferencing.” It is in the spirit of these convictions, and with great humility, that I enter the project noted at the outset.

Recommended Reading: Slovakia Decides to Leave UMC, Join GMC

The Slovakia District of the Czechia and Slovakia Annual Conference decided on Oct. 15th to leave The United Methodist Church and join the Global Methodist Church, according to an announcement from Bishop Patrick Streiff of the Central and Southern Europe Central Conference, the presiding bishop for the Czechia and Slovakia Annual Conference. Like the decision by the Bulgaria-Romania Annual Conference, the decision was taken without reference to provisions by the Book of Discipline for the separation of branches of the church outside the United States.

While Bishop Streiff announced the decision "with great sadness," the decision is not unexpected. Slovak Methodists were among leaders of the Eastern Europe Wesleyan Covenant Association, along with those from Bulgaria and Romania. As Streiff noted, Slovak leaders had declined to participate in a roundtable process about the future of the Central and Southern Europe Central Conference. And at the Czechia and Slovakia Annual Conference meeting in May, the possibility of separation was openly acknowledged.

The Czechia portion of the now former Czechia and Slovakia Annual Conference intends to remain in The United Methodist Church.

Regionalization and Connectionalism: The Early Church

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. It is the first in a five-part series based on a presentation by Dr. Scott to the Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

The Book of Discipline introduces the Standing Committee thus: “Section XVI. Standing Committee on Central Conference Matters, ¶2201. General Provisions¬¬--1. The General Conference recognizes the differences in conditions that exist in various areas of the world and the changes taking place in those areas…” This introduction raises two questions: How should we understand “the differences in conditions that exist in various areas of the world”? And, how should we understand “the changes taking place in those areas”?

This series of posts will be talking about regionalization, or how the church responds to “the differences in conditions that exist in various areas of the world,” especially as this practice is shaped by “the changes taking place in those areas” – that is, current events within and beyond the church.

Questions about regionalization in today’s United Methodist Church connect to two related problems in church history that go back to the early years of Christianity: How should Christians uphold the local relevance of the church and the unity of the church (or, we might say, connections among local churches) amid cultural and regional diversity? And, how should Christians preserve connection among churches in a way that avoids control of the weaker by the more powerful?

Related to the question about local relevance and trans-local connection, Andrew Walls wrote about the “indigenizing principle,” that impulse in Christianity which pushes Christians to relate to their surroundings, and the “pilgrim principle,” that impulse in Christianity that reminds Christians that they are part of something broader than their local surroundings. For Walls, these two principles stood in dialectic tension with one other and have since the early days of the church.

Indeed, while we often think of the early church in idealized terms, it was a church with a great deal of cultural diversity, which mapped onto geography and theology. There were Jews from Judea and from the Jewish diaspora in Jerusalem at Pentecost, Jewish and Gentile believers in the time of Paul, Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking theologians among the so-called “Church Fathers,” and five major episcopal sees by the fifth century, each leading a branch of the church. Each of these geographic differences reflected varying cultural, linguistic, and theological traditions.

Amid this cultural, linguistic, and theological diversity, how did the church maintain its local relevance and its broader connection? First, it must be said that diversity helped ensure local relevance. Diversity meant that believers in different locations could not only worship God in their own languages but also bring their own cultural traditions to their practice of Christianity and use the resources of theology to speak to the issues around them.

At the same time, there were various means of unity that connected these local or regional expressions of unity with one another. I will mention five, and I will return to these five means of connection throughout my posts.

The first means of connection is itinerants, those who travel. Obviously, Paul and other early missionaries did much to knit the very early church together. Later, itinerant teachers and eventually monks would take up similar tasks of traveling from one region to others to build up the church. Migrants, either temporary or permanent, also created linkages among regions.

We know Paul not only from his travels but his letters, which point to another form of linkage: writings, whether these be letters or the exchange of theological essays. Writing allows people to be in conversation with one another, even when not face-to-face.

Money also connected Christians across cultural and geographic differences. Paul’s collection from among the Gentile churches for the poor of the Jewish church in Jerusalem is the most notable instance, but it gets at something important: money can be a form of connection and potentially a way of uniting different Christian groups.

As the church continued to develop, bishops became important symbols of the unity of the church, its connection across geography. Through their collegial recognition of one another, bishops recognized that their churches were not merely local institutions but part of a broader community of faith.
Eventually, the church began to call together bishops and theologians for church councils, first on local or regional bases, and eventually on a much broader basis starting with the council of Nicaea in the fourth century.

Interestingly, these means of connection could also be means of ensuring local relevance. Itinerants could help each church they visited speak directly to its setting, as Paul did at the Areopagus. Paul’s writings were writings to specific communities, intended to help those communities address specific issues in their lives of faith. Money was shared not only across churches, but at least occasionally among the rich and poor within local church communities. Bishops not only upheld the unity of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church throughout the world, but also worked to ensure the unity of the church within the local areas under their supervision by mediating a host of day-to-day conflicts. And while we think of the grand ecumenical councils, councils happened in local areas as well. Thus, means of upholding the connection of the church may also be means of upholding the local relevance of the church.

While these five means of connection and local relevance have recurred throughout church history, there is no one permanent or normative solution to the question of how to ensure both local relevance and trans-local connection. This is a question that each generation must answer for itself, a driving tension throughout church history.

The second question I raised—How should Christians preserve connection in a way that avoids control of the weaker by the stronger?—is deeply related to the first question about relevance and connection. Too often, connection has been achieved by the exercise of power. The more powerful dominate those with less power, forcing them into unity on their terms.

In this way, questions about relevance and connection are deeply tied to the secular settings of the church. We may think, of course, relevance is about relating the church to its secular setting. But we must be aware of how secular power also impacts the practices of unity in the church.

We see examples here in the early church as well. Cultural chauvinism drove the Judaizers to try to insist that Christian unity be achieved through the imposition of Jewish practices onto Gentile believers. Economic power in the church in Corinth turned the practice of Holy Communion, perhaps the deepest expression of the unity of the church, into an exercise of class distinction. And political empire under Constantine ensured that the edicts of the Council of Nicaea were promulgated not just as teachings but with the force of the state.

Thus, as we consider how relevance and unity are to be achieved together, we must pay attention to how cultural, economic, and political power—in the church and in the world—influence the development of the church itself.

One last framing comment is in order. Note that connection or unity can be understood in various ways. For most of the early church, the concern was with spiritual unity, that is, mutual recognition of one another as siblings in Christ and fellow members of Christ’s body, the church.

With the gradual development of the hierarchy of the church, alongside this concern for the spiritual unity of the church arose a concern for the structural unity of the church – that is, not only recognizing one another as fellow members of the body of Christ in a spiritual sense, but recognizing one another as belonging to the same church organization or structure.

In modern times, the rise of the concept of denomination as a means for understanding the nature of Protestant churches tends to put the emphasis of the question of unity on structural or organizational considerations, since denominations are themselves organizations. This has implications not only for the connection of the church, but for the relevance of the church as well, since structure brings with it questions of authority and decision-making, which have an impact on relevance.

But this structural side of questions of connection and relevance is only one side. When I discussed the means of connection and relevance, at least two of them—itinerants and writings—are largely relational and not structural. Money may be an expression of either structure or relationship. We must keep this relational dimension to the questions of relevance and connection in mind.

In the remaining posts in this series, I will look at how these dynamics played out in the history of Methodism and continue to play out in the church today.

UM & Global Collection on Mission and Food

A new UM & Global collection is now available. This collection examines the connections between mission and food: its production (through agriculture), its provision (in relief efforts), and its consumption (as a means of community-building and connection). The essays, reflecting contexts in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the United States examine various forms of food-related mission.

The collection includes ten posts by David W. Scott, Jack Amick, John Walter Ngoy, Caleb Kanyimb Mbaz, Nan McCurdy, Temba Nkomozepi, Maria Van Der Maaten, Jonathan McCurley, and Elliott Wright. As with other collections, there is a set of discussion questions at the end of the volume, intended to help church members, students, and others reflect on the ways in which the church should engage in food-related ministries.

Recommended Reading: Church Trauma Program Spreads Across Countries and Cultures

United Methodist News Service reported this week on the spread of a church-related program to help trauma survivors. The program has its roots in work carried out collaboratively by Congolese women and Harper Hill Global, a US-based non-profit led by Rev. Neelley Hicks. Hicks and Congolese women have been collaborating through the Mama Lynn Center to bring healing to Congolese women affected by rape.

From her awareness that work, Nigerian United Methodist leader Doris Adamu Jenis requested Hicks expand her work to Nigeria. Hicks collaborated with Joan Gillece, director of the Center for Innovation in Health Policy and Practice, to develop an online course that Jenis led in Nigeria and Uganda.

The program was so successful that Gillece asked Hicks to bring it to the United States. Hicks agreed, and developed several different versions of the curriculum, including a Native American one written by United Methodist clergy Rev. Carol Lakota Eastin “Morning Skyhawk” and the Rev. Michelle Oberwise Lacock “Morning Star Spirit.”

Thus, this curriculum spread from the Congo to Nigeria to Uganda to the United States and to Native communities within the United States. At every step of that way, women led the work.

This story is important because it shows a model of mission that spread from Africa to the United States and is not just about exporting "spiritual vitality" from Africa. There is a trope that reciprocal mission between the United States and Africa should involve Americans sharing financial resources and Africans sharing their spiritual resources. This example is significant because it points to other possibilities.

African leaders and African societies (and other leaders and societies around the world) are innovating missional approaches to problems including mental health, public health, climate change, poverty relief, and more. Missional efforts in the United States can and should look to countries around the world for best practices in mission and not just for spiritual vitality.

Political context and the meaning of church

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries. This piece originally appeared as a commentary on the United Methodist News Service site and is republished here with permission. 

The United Methodist Church aspires to be a worldwide church. Yet both because of the current separation happening within the denomination and its changing international composition, it finds itself in a time of rethinking what it means to be a church, and a global church at that.

“Church” is one of the most foundational terms used by Christians, but the meaning of that word may not be as universally agreed upon as one might expect. First, church can be used for three different levels of Christian gathering: local congregations, denominations and the church universal. The United Methodist Church is a church in the second, denominational sense.

While the nuances of theological understandings vary, there is at least an intuitive common meaning of congregation and the church universal: a gathered Christian community and the body of all Christians, respectively.

Not so with the other category. While most Christians could point to a denomination, they might be harder pressed to give a definition, and those definitions might vary widely. There are historical reasons for this uncertainty. Congregations have been a feature of Christianity since its beginning; denominations have not.

One might think of a denomination broadly as a middle level of church that unites local congregations and is a part but not the whole of the church universal, but this still leaves a lot of room for divergent understandings of how a denomination should go about uniting congregations and how it should interact with other denominations and broader society.

Moreover, the exact meaning of denomination is heavily influenced by context and the political and cultural factors at play in each context. Political contexts and their effect on the religious landscape mean that The United Methodist Church’s identity as a denomination means different things in different branches of the church.

Not only are there are different understandings within the denomination of what it means to be a “church,” but these different understandings go along with different strategies for how to be a successful church. Here, the notion of religious marketplaces — how religious groups behave in their social and political contexts to grow and thrive — is helpful. Even if talking about religion as a marketplace is inadequate theologically, it highlights issues of fit between an organization (such as The United Methodist Church) and its environment.

Because of differing political and religious landscapes in the United States, Africa, Europe and the Philippines, United Methodists in those different regions have adopted different postures toward political leaders and the general populace, part of divergent strategies to help the church succeed in the sense of attracting members and avoiding outside interference.

The United States

The concept of denomination came into its own in the United States, fostered by the American principle of separation of church and state. In the United States, there is minimal government regulation of religion (most of what does happen is through tax laws), and religious identity is seen as a personal choice by Americans. That does not mean that Americans view faith as solely a private matter — there may be public and political implications of one’s faith — but ultimately, one’s choice of faith is minimally constrained by political or other public forces. The United States is thus close to a religious free market.

In the United States, The United Methodist Church (and its Methodist predecessor denominations) has functioned as a leading competitor in the denominational marketplace. American Methodism’s goal has always been to grow and appeal to the masses. Unlike other traditions (Mennonites, for example), Methodism was never content to be a niche player in the religious marketplace. At times, this has led to conflict or compromise (as in dropping early American Methodism’s opposition to slavery), but the goal has been consistent: to be a major denomination with an extensive membership.

Historically, American Methodism has been successful in achieving this goal. Methodism (across denominations) was the most popular variety of Protestantism in the United States at the end of the 19th century, and The United Methodist Church remains the second-largest Protestant denomination. It is the most nationally distributed of any major denomination, crossing all regions of the country.

The United Methodist Church in the United States has, of course, experienced a prolonged loss of members over the course of its lifetime. Yet part of what has made that experience so painful for U.S. members is because it represents the loss of a former dominant position in the American religious landscape.

There have been myriad proposals for how to reverse the membership decline in the United States, but they all have several features in common: They are focused on appealing directly to individual potential members, usually through the preaching and programming of the church. None of them address the denomination’s relationship with the government. While some of these reflect on the “brand” of United Methodism, very few of them talk about the role that the church plays in the public square. These strategies to retain and gain members are about appealing to individuals’ choices across broad swaths of the American public.

Europe

The United Methodist Church functions very differently in Europe. Most of Europe has a long tradition of state churches supported by the government. In some instances, state support has recently ended, but the legacy remains. In that context, The United Methodist Church has functioned as a “free church,” that is, one that people freely choose to join (rather than doing so because it is the government-set default). Indeed, in several countries, Methodism helped pioneer the idea of religious freedom.

But free churches are necessarily small. The state church, as a government monopoly of sorts, will always have the dominant position in society. In such a setting, Methodism has never aspired to win over the masses, as it has in the United States.

Instead, The United Methodist Church has sought to avoid the stigma of a being a “sect,” a label that would bring popular aversion and possibly government interference. The goal is survival and ideally modest growth, but not becoming a dominant player in the religious landscape, which is not possible.

To avoid the label of “sect,” United Methodism tends to emphasize its ecumenical relations and its contributions to the common good. Both these habits demonstrate that the church is willing to get along with and benefit others, rather than being closed-off like a sect.

But this approach of being a good citizen is a very different model of engaging the religious marketplace than American churches’ appeal to the interests of individuals as free consumers. It is a different set of strategies with a different end goal.

Africa

People might look at the lack of a state church in most African countries and conclude that they are free denominational marketplaces, as in the United States. Yet such a view misses two important points about how religion functions in most African contexts.

First and foremost, while religious identity in the United States is a personal matter, in most African contexts, it is a public matter. That is, one’s religious identity is not merely chosen independently as an individual but is instead connected to other elements of public and communal identity — family, tribe, political party, occupation, etc. In some instances, these communal aspects of identity determine denominational identity more so than personal choice.

Second, while freedom of religion does exist in almost all African countries, there still tends to be a heavily regulated religious marketplace. There are no state churches, but the government actively intervenes in religious affairs for a variety of reasons, sometimes personal to the leader but mostly related to the government’s understandings of good of the society, including preservation of social order. Because religious identity is public, the government has an interest in regulating it.

Thus, there are various instances of African governments interfering with religious organizations, including through permitting and legal cases. Churches also often seek to use state intervention, through government officials or the police, to resolve religious conflicts within their own body — something that an American church would almost never do, except in the instance of lawsuits, which are not seen as a form of government intervention.

The goal for The United Methodist Church in many contexts in Africa is still, as it is in the United States, to appeal to the masses. Methodism tends to be growth oriented, carrying the idea that all should be welcomed into the church and that a growing church is a healthy church.

But this growth is pursued in slightly different ways. Because religion is seen as public rather than personal, Methodism emphasizes not only the personal benefits of worship, community and spiritual care, as it does in the United States, but also how the church engages with and contributes to the overall good of the society, mostly through education and health care. In many places throughout Africa, Methodism is the church of civil society, engaged in building better communities. That is one of its prime selling points. This public image of Methodism both helps attract followers (as groups and individuals) and staves off government interference, though Methodism often ends up interacting extensively with the government around the public services that the church provides.

Philippines

Unfortunately, in the interest of space, I will touch only briefly on the Philippines. It is probably somewhere in between the United States and Africa. There is a relatively free market for religion in the Philippines, a legacy of U.S. colonialism. Yet the government is more likely to curtail religious speech on political issues, and the Filipino religious marketplace is structured differently than the U.S. religious marketplace. One might think of it as an oligarchy: The Catholic Church and the United Church of Christ in the Philippines exercise dominant positions within Filipino society. Within that context, Methodism is a specialty religious provider characterized by education and healthcare, just as education and health care is central to the church’s public face in Africa.

Conclusion

The upshot of this variation among political contexts in which The United Methodist Church operates is that there are different understandings of what it means to be a “church” and different strategies pursued to be a successful church. To the extent that the church is characterized by regionalization, these divergent understandings and strategies can coexist. To the extent that the church is characterized by centralization, there is the potential for conflict among these strategies.

One instance of such implications for how issues play out in the denomination is around sexuality: In the United States, denominations must respond to changing demands in the religious marketplace in a society that increasingly accepts gay marriage, but where there is also a good portion of individuals with traditionalist understandings of marriage, thus leading to conflict about how best to appeal to the masses. In Europe, to avoid the label of “sect,” there is pressure to follow majority opinion (whether conservative as in Eastern Europe or progressive in Western Europe). In Africa, it is important to be seen as contributing to social stability, and when the government has identified the heterosexual family as central to social stability, there is pressure for the churches to toe that line. In the Philippines, questions of sexuality are less relevant to Methodists’ identity as a specialty religious provider focused on education and health care.

Each of these strategies makes sense within the political and cultural logic of its context. The challenge comes when the church tries to come to agreement across contexts.

Recommended Reading: What Church Splits Can Teach Us About a Dividing America

Many commentators, including in posts on UM & Global, have noted the parallels between divisions within Methodism and divisions within American society. Certainly, that is true historically, especially for church divisions around slavery preceding the Civil War. Commentators then use this historical parallel to reflect on the significance of present-day conflicts in both church and society, seeking to better understand each in the light of the other.

In this vein, it is interesting to read Russell Moore's article in Christianity Today last month, entitled "What Church Splits Can Teach Us About a Dividing America." Although Moore is well-known as a Baptist and has recently been embroiled in conflicts within the Southern Baptist Convention, his article actually begins by focusing on The United Methodist Church. Moore uses the UMC to note that present polarization runs through the middle of most communities, rather than mapping neatly onto geographic divisions, as in the pre-Civil War era. Moore also writes about those directing their anti-institutionalist rage at denomination structures. While he does not connect this point to the UMC, he certainly could have as well.