Interview: Head of the European Evangelical Alliance

|PIC1|The European Evangelical Alliance is based in 35 countries around Europe and slightly beyond: it includes Turkey, Russia and Israel. They also currently incorporate Central Asia, where Kazakhstan is also a member.

Christian Today caught up with the General Secretary of the EEA, Gordon Showell-Rogers, as he joined 100,000 Christians for the Kirchentag, a five-day Christian conference currently taking place in Cologne, Germany.

CT: You are here in Germany for Kirchentag. What are you hoping to get out of it?

GSR: We want to strengthen what the World Evangelical Alliance and the Evangelical Alliance Germany are doing, especially with Micah Challenge - the global movement of Christians pressuring our governments to deliver the Millennium Development Goals.

With the G8 also meeting in Germany this year, I wanted to see if we could help to strengthen the Micah Challenge vision and other things on the G8 agenda, including the deep concern that many of us feel about sustainable development and climate change.

CT: So you are working a lot on the MDGs?

GSR: Yes, we are very committed to them through Micah Challenge at national and international level. We've worked hard to help national alliances to see the importance of engaging, bringing the issues to the grassroots. Some of the MDG-related issues are on the list of priority issues that we monitor at the European Union.

CT: How switched on to the MDGs are the churches at the grassroots level?

GSR: It varies considerably from country to country but the context is largely an evangelicalism that has not engaged in issues of poverty and justice but has tended towards an emphasis on personal salvation and personal spiritual growth alone.

And one of the things we are trying to do at European level is to help people open up the Scriptures again and re-discover some of the things we had given up.

I think theologically in the last couple of hundred years, evangelicals have tended to neglect whole tracts of Scripture and leave them to theologians of a more liberal persuasion: we are re-discovering those Scriptures again, which is exciting to me.

CT: Which MDGs are you focusing on in particular?

GSR: The poverty issue and the HIV and Aids issues are critical ones for me. HIV and Aids is a scourge which is not only personally devastating, but is also economically and socially devastating in sub-Saharan Africa. And we must do anything we can to help to address that.

The UN said a couple of years ago that if we didn't take immediate action in the former Soviet Union, China and India there could be similar pandemics there. So Russia and Ukraine are one concern for us at the European level.

CT: Do you think the G8 will follow their promises on African aid with action?

GSR: Politics is always the art of the possible. One of the things that helps politicians to set their standards higher is people of real conviction expressing in reasonable ways their deep concerns. Evangelical Alliance is committed at global, European and national level to the political process, to conversation, persuasion and reason, as opposed to the violence we saw in Rostock.

It's always difficult to know ahead of time how much influence we will have, but by engaging seriously you help politicians to set the bar high. Politicians need to find compromise solutions against the agenda with which they are presented. If the agenda is minimalist then the response will be minimalist.

CT: Kosovo is awaiting a UN vote on its independence, despite the threat of veto from Russia.

GSR: Yes, the Balkans is a very complicated part of our region with a very long history of deep animosity. It is a region in which every single people group has been victim at some point and suffered so finding solutions to long-standing historical tensions is not easy. I think that the UN proposed solution is a workable solution which is the best possible solution in the circumstances and I would personally welcome it very much if it were accepted.

In any case we will pray and work towards a peaceful acceptance of the UN proposal and encourage others to accept that as well if that becomes an international solution.

Evangelicals are actively working together in Kosovo, there are national Evangelical Alliances in Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina, and very active Alliances in Bulgaria and Greece. We are very committed to the Balkans and have done a lot of reconciliation work, bringing people together from across the many different perspectives in the region.

CT: You've got your annual assembly coming up in Greece in October. What issues will you discuss there?

GSR: We will elect a new President, and we will set our direction for the next five years. I hope that will include a serious commitment to continuing our engagement with the European Union, raising the concerns of our constituencies all over the EU.

We hope that we will also grow an even greater sense of vision for what Europe could be in the early 21st century. A critical issue in Europe at the moment is identity. Europe is struggling to work out who we are and who we want to become and that same struggle is reflected within the nations of Europe. So we will be looking at European identity and how much influence we can have in the debate about the future of Europe at this stage of history.