HOW RELEVANT IS RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN A GLOBALIZED WORLD

Today, many missionary congregations run the risk of rendering themselves as ordinary people working to fill up the spaces left by the old. Those who enter religious life today seem to replacement of the dearth of manpower in the Northern sphere. There is a complete confusion of religious orders. The paradigm seems to change. It is no longer North to South flow, but South to North, South to South, East to south, there is no dominancy and superiority complex that was established by the missionaries of two centuries ago, who packaged the gospel in a military and colonial ransacks, going out there to bring light to those possessed by the devil and living in darkness.

The intention of going out was to bring the good news but with hidden intentions of looking for raw materials for their industries, labor, and systematically and systemically grounded to constantly provide. The missionaries then dared to tell the indigenous to close their eyes, and when they opened their eyes they fund that their land was surrounded by the white men with guns pointing at them, and land occupied and turning the natives into slaves of the missionaries and business commodity of export in a new name of slave trading with stock markets in Portugal, Spain under the tutelage of the holy men of the holy see of Rome under the then popes and princes of the church. These are some of the challenges we have to face today as we address these stimulating, provocative reflection and food for thought.

Religious life today live in a typical global village, what we have to commonly call Globalization, a revolution of ideology, technology, communication and evangelization. The religious congregations have to be in sync with this reality, lest they become irrelevant and close shop. Living today in the world seems like living in the village, where people of diverse nations and culture extend literally themselves to the others and creating an ambient of a common home. Globalization today can be compared like a double edged sword for the religious. On one has, its comes with virtues for those who are sober and focused not to get lost in the market places, it tears borders, unites and divided humanity, eliminates poverty and secures world peace, because it’s now east to know what is happening where.

Today the religious community have to create paradigm shifts as far as ecological crisis is concerned, the amazon is burning, the lungs of humanity, that now has to have a radical shift in the way of having a religious identity today. Will the religious remain in their chapels praying or they get to work by being contemplatives in actions. All creation is groaning to produce a more united and fraternal world (Cf. Rom 8:18-23). The relentless pursuit of profit and disregard of moral and ethical considerations create artificial needs and promotes consumer’s mentality, reinforcing a secular lifestyle and this the religious life has not been spared.

Immigration today is the in-thing on the global for a discussions, you ignore it and it comes knocking at your door. People from different cultures not only are in much closer contact today, but also are oftentimes forced to live alongside each other. Many of our cities are inhabited by groups of people of widely diverse cultural origins and religious affiliation. We have become centers of multiculturality and supermarkets of plural beliefs and divergent values, we have people who walk into church, look at how beautiful they look, take photos, and move out, believers without belonging, poverty migrating from rural to urban areas, stretching resources, and amenities, creating slums, crime of all kinds from robbery to terrorism.

We are being confronted with the challenge of secularization where the religious are slowly turning to the world as a point of reference for the explanation of the mysteries of life and for the search for is fulfilment. Extreme forms of secularization makes the world the exclusive, and reject any transcendent, point of reference, the words of Pope Benedict XVI, the “tyranny of relativism”. Secularization manifests itself more powerfully as a lifestyle than as a doctrine, a lifestyle that shows little interest in our openness to, if at all, the transcendent and relies more heavily, often exclusively, on the world as the source of human fulfilment.

The effect of this in the decline of vocations which are becoming scarce in the Western Europe and North America, and the few that there still are tend to join the newer and more conservative religious congregation. This comes along with the lack of vitality and creativity and fear of taking risks and assuming new initiatives. Stagnation sets in and there is great uncertainty about the continued relevance of our life and mission.

This makes many think of a perception that the religious life is no longer a meaningful life-option, with a reluctance or unwillingness of the youth today to make a lifelong commitment. Today’s youth no longer see the religious life as a relevant option through which they can channel their idealism and generosity.

It looks as if the religious belong to the past; the future belongs to the new lay movements, the lay movements have replaced the religious as the special forces in the church, for the lay movements over the religious congregations especially those religious congregations which, in the mind of these sectors of the church, have overemphasized the reforms of Vatican II and have consequently opened up too much to the modern world.

Sometimes we domesticate the religious life by considering the religious as simply a workforce or employees of the hierarchical Church. This empties consecrated life to specific character as a charismatic gift and prophetic voice in the church. This undermines the relevance when we lose the specific identity which can no longer play its specific role in the church and in the world.

Today we need a post-religious life. The church is no longer the church of the West with its American spheres of influence and its export to Asia and Africa. The church has become a polycentric Church. Europe is no longer its exclusive center. Other centers are emerging: Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. One expression of this fact is the formation of the regional or continental conferences of bishops, even if their role in the church is not yet fully recognized or accepted. It is no longer possible to simply give directives from the center and that it is necessary to take into account the concrete situation of the local Churches.

There is also a demographical change or what we commonly call population shift from the north to the south of the world. The church has shifted from the global North to the global south (Latin America, Africa and Asia) with multicultural membership and multidirectional mission. The dominant culture of the congregation, which was usually European culture, where the mother province in Europe was largely transported and copied in the mission provinces in America, Asia, Africa, Oceania.

Theology is now having new terms or let put it this way that is now being contextualized and now speaking of inculturation and building up of the local Church in the world. There are many modalities as there are cultures. Even in religious congregations the charism of the founder could find the different expressions among the various cultures of different people. This comes to be seen as religious congregations are no longer composed of members from different nationalities all learning congregation’s way of life shaped by dominant culture, but members from different nationalities sharing the richness of their cultural diversity. Gradually the religious co congregation becomes nit just the home of one culture but the place for the interaction of various cultures.

This means that order and harmony in religious orders are threatened when they become truly multicultural. When multiculturality replaces mono-culturality as the substructure of religious congregations, uniformity and order, and in a certain sense, religious orders become what we can say religious disorders for certain.

A multicultural membership raises the question of the differing understandings of elements of the religious life, like prayer, community, use of money and the vows. The questions start to rise: what does voluntary poverty mean when one has been forced to live in poverty all his/her life? What does poverty mean when one has more money or comfort in the religious community than his or her family in the village? What does obedience mean to someone who belongs to a culture where one never decides on his or her own? What does obedience mean to someone who belongs to a culture where one is expected to always obey one’s elders?

Today Europe is no longer the sole supermarket of vocations or missionaries. This has entered into what we call in missiology reverse mission, now those who gave missionaries can no longer do so, but have to come to terms of receiving missionaries from the foreign lands where they were to come in and do the same thing they went out to do.  South to North, south to south mission in contrast to the past where mission was largely a north to south reality. The missionaries claimed to bring the gospel to the lands and lived among the natives. The claimed to bring the gospel of Jesus, but unconsciously also carried along what was viewed as a superior culture, buttressed by advanced scientific knowledge and developed technology. It was difficult to distinguish between missionary’s activity and colonial rule.

The world church is no longer neatly divided into the missionary church here and the mission churches there, but a fusion of religion and spiritualties. Mission has become multi-directional, a movement from all directions and to all direction. Hence, this creates disorder in religious missionary orders. The question we need to confront ourselves with is: Are we not just replacing European missionary personnel with Asian or African missionaries, while the way of doing mission remains basically the same?

We need to network amang religious congreagations in the Church and in the world. We need to become international in membership, not because there is now dearth of vocation in the North, but being open to diversity of the kingdom of God. We need to witness that the kingdom is a kingdom of love that includes absolutely everyone and, at the same time, is open to the particularity of every person and people. It is possible for people of different cultures and nations to live in communion and solidarity, in peace and harmony.

The religious congregations can play a prophetic role in fragmented world and be a source of hope for world often torn by cultural, ethnic and racial conflicts, violence and wars. To promote international or intercultural religious communities is based not just on the scarcity of vocations in some parts of the world, but on the fact that the heart of the religious vocation is the call to witness to God’s kingdom and be a prophetic voice in human society and a source of hope for the world.

The ideal of course not internationality or mere presence in the congregation or community of members from different nationalities or cultures. Nor is it merely multiculturality where the ability of members from different nationalities or cultures to simply co-exist side by side each other. The ideal, rather, is true interculturality, that is, the congregation or community which allows the different cultures of community members to interact with each other and thereby mutually enrich the individual members and community as a whole.

This will be characterized by three things: The recognition of other cultures, allowing the minority cultures to be visible in the community, respect for cultural difference, that is to say avoiding any attempt to level off cultural differences by subsuming the minority cultures into the dominant cultures, and then the promotion of healthy interaction between cultures in seeking to create a climate where each culture allows itself to be transformed or enriched by the other.

The genuine intercultural community is one where members from different cultures truly feel they belong. This kind of community doesn’t happen by chance, or by simply putting together under the same roof people of different nations or cultures. Rather, a true intercultural community needs to be consciously created, intentionally promoted, carefully cared for, and intensively nurtured. It requires some basic personal attitudes, certain community structures, and particular spirituality.

Consequently, members need a specific program of formation, both initial and ongoing, which prepares them to live effectively and meaningfully in intercultural community. Indeed, it is essential that members are convinced that interculturality is an ideal to be sought after and value to be promoted. The other is intecongregational collaboration that brings aparticular richness to the local church with a different style of presence of the diversity of charisms of religious congregations. This presents to the local church with proper coordinated ensemble of diverse charisms.

This should not just be a strategy of mission, but about MISSIO DEI, God’s mission first and foremost, and that our call to mission is but to share in God’s mission. This calls for proper collaboration with all others who are similarly called by God. Whereby we come to realize that mission is larger than what each individual or each congregation can do. It is even larger than what all congregation together can do. Collaboration is real stuff of mission. We collaborate not because mission is God’s in the first place and the primary agent of mission is God’s Spirit.

This mission has to involve the educated, highly motivated and actively involved laity in church running. The laity have increased today because there is a scarcity of priests, both in the north and in the south. This has led to the expansion of lay ministry in the church many lay people have begun to occupy ministerial and administrative positions which were once also exclusively held by priests. It’s an apostolate in its own right, based on baptism rather than derived from the temporal order. Hence the emergence of the so called new lay movements, where lay people take upon themselves to evangelize culture and transform society.

Religious congregations have always had groups of lay people associated with them: the third order, tertiaries, associates, affiliates. People who are attracted by the charism or religious congregations and who wish to share in their spirituality and collaborate with their mission. This raises the question of a lay expression of the charism of the Founder which goes beyond the confines of a religious institute or even of religious consecration. Another form of religious collaboration is partnership with autonomous or independent lay movements, religious congregations properly collaborating with or supporting the mission of the laity.

Partnership with the laity also reminds religious that religious consecration is not an escape from the world but entails involvement with the world, and that religious consecration needs to be lived in the context of the daily life situations of people: family, children, school, neighborhood, workplace, etc. It reminds them that their vocation of witnessing to God’s Kingdom includes a call to transform and renew the world in the light of the Gospel, and that this vocation and mission is to be lived in the midst of the joys and hopes and griefs and anxieties of real women and men in an often broken and fragmented world.

Realizing that transforming the world involves one to become concrete, practical and effective, it will entail getting enmeshed in the socio-political-economic realities of human society. It is here that partnership with the laity becomes crucial.

© Don Joseph Baptist Nyamunga, fsa