Desacralizing the Christian Proclamation in the Global City

Abstract

The paper aims to argue that the Christian message is not totally lost and discarded despite the increasing resistance of an increasing percentage of peoples who turned away from the religious language in the way they deal with their day-to-day life. The paper then proposes that the proclamation of the Christian message may take a ‘desacralized’ form for it to sound relevant to the daily concerns of the people. The desacralized proclamation of the Christian message has to focus on the talk about human values where the community of persons of different religious affiliations – whose members share resources, skills and strengths – may come together and talk about their common concerns. Together, they would confront the same challenges and commonly respond to the impending calamities. In the process, there will develop an atmosphere of trust and open communication of private lives and practices, including religious ones. It is most likely that the religious-others would inquire about Christian beliefs and rituals. This is the moment to heighten our proclamation and bring it to a higher level in which we could discuss the specificity of Christian Catholic values. The initiative must come from them and must be viewed as God’s grace at work, as the Holy Spirit infusing the religious-others with the lumen fidei. The initiative cannot come from us who proclaim. Otherwise, all our actions, while living in community with them, might be construed as part of a proselytizing scheme.