Report on the World Mission Conference Athens 2005

Abstract

Rapid assessment of an event like a world mission conference is always difficult; but I suspect that Athens 2005 will resist easy evaluation for sometime to come. Viewed from one angle, it was a seminal gathering, marked by an unprecedented breadth of participation and a new emphasis on reconciliation as a framework for mission. Viewed from another, however, the Athens conference simply added nuance to previous themes, with little opportunity for shared reflection on the direction of mission in the 21st century. My own reflections are in two parts: First, I will offer three observations about the overall shape of the event. These will be followed by four observations regarding the potential contribution of Athens 2005 to the church's thinking about mission. 1. Surely the most striking thing about this conference was the diversity of its participants. This was, for example, the first such gathering to include a large number of representatives from Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, and their presence was by no means marginal. Asian Pentecostal theologian, Wonsuk Ma, set the tone in the opening plenary when he stressed the desire of his tradition to learn from the historic churches and to engage more fully in ministries of social justice thus challenging stereotypes about Pentecostals. This was also the first world mission conference to be held in a predominantly context. In his welcoming address, Archbishop Christodoulos, of the Church of Greece, spoke of a new era in World Council of Churches-Orthodox relations as a result of the work of the Special Commission on Participation in the WCC; and he thanked conference organizers for their attention to Orthodox sensitivities. All of this made for unusual encounters. I attended one synaxis in which representatives of Pentecostal and churches that have quarreled vigorously over Pentecostal mission practices that the regard as proselytism spoke of their great commonality, especially their shared focus on the work of the Holy Spirit. When asked to name a highlight of the conference, a friend told me of attending a healing service where a Coptic priest anointed a woman from a Pentecostal church in Latin America. In addition to these traditions, the Roman Catholic Church was also present with a sizeable, fully participating delegation. This meant that the major renewal movements of the past century--Pentecostalism, liberation theology, the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II, as well as the ecumenical movement--were officially present at the same meeting, and with an apparent desire to be more complementary than competitive. It is not surprising that marks of a renewed church figured prominently in the conference's Letter to the Churches. 2. The conference theme--Come, Holy Spirit, Heal and Reconcile! Called in Christ to be Reconciling and Healing Communities was clearly chosen in light of particular historical events, including the end of the cold war and the subsequent proliferation of ethnic conflicts, the end of apartheid and the work of truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa and elsewhere, the genocide and subsequent attempt to rebuild social cohesion in Rwanda, and the AIDS pandemic with its obvious demand for ministries of healing. The previous world mission conference at Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, was held in 1996, which was after the end of apartheid and the genocide in Rwanda but too close to those events to allow for real reflection on them. This was not the case, however, in Athens. To take only one example, the attempt in Rwanda to heal memories and construct a viable future that involves both perpetrators and victims figured prominently in three of the nine synaxeis that I attended. No conference, of course, can do justice to all the signs of the times; but Athens paid less attention than I would have expected to certain trends and events, including the now-global experience of religious pluralism (to which I will return later) and the obscene and rapidly growing disparity between rich and poor that is a mark of economic globalization. …