World Ecumenical leader, Rev Samuel Kobia has preached the valedictory sermon at the 112th Maramon Convention, which took place 11-18 February at Maramon, Kerala, India.
The World Council of Churches (WCC) General Secretary exhorted that the global mission of the church does not sit comfortably with contemporary forms of globalisation. He affirmed, however, certain values underlying western liberalism.Organised annually by the mission and evangelism wing of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church of Malabar, the week-long event, which brings some 200,000 Christians to each session, is the largest Christian gathering in Asia.
The WCC general secretary proposed a clear distinction "between the calling of the church to a global witness and the [modern] forms of globalisation, which are not at all the same thing".
Kobia characterised modern globalisation as "associated with free-market economics and the consumer culture promoted throughout the world by commercial media". Often "conveyed and defended by militarised western powers", this form of globalisation includes trends towards the "economic and social Darwinism of a dog-eat-dog world".
"We in the Christian churches have been called to a global task" too, Kobia said, "a task of evangelism, the preaching of good news, that is relevant for all nations and the entirety of God's earth". Both these attempts to globalise cannot be confused even if "some colonial empires and other expansionist powers of Europe and North America have claimed to act internationally as agents of Christendom".
In spite of some "unholy alliances" of the past and the "sad fact of history" that "too often churches have accepted the imperial view of Christ's call to take the gospel into all the world", if the gospel of Jesus Christ "is to be 'globalised' in the way he instructed, it cannot be achieved [...] by forcing one culture's values upon another culture", Kobia affirmed.
However, Kobia suggested that efforts need to be made to "discern those values underlying western liberalism that can still be affirmed".
