Too grounded to communicate?

I arrived late at our 'lunchtime theology' yesterday and had to eat my baked potato right under the nose of our speaker. Good job I know him well and he's such a decent bloke! Stephen Bevans, Catholic missiologist from the US with a great approach to thinking theologically about mission, was introducing his latest book An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective. Get yourself a copy!

The thought which hooked me in his presentation and our discussion afterwards was about contextualised theology. We all agree that theology (at least Christian theology) has to be contextualised to make any sense. But then comes the problem. If my theology is so contextualised (expressed in my mother tongue, using my own cultural idioms, resonating with the life of my community, expressing my own inner deeply personal experience of divinity and life) then how on earth can anyone else be expected to make any sense of it! Now I undserstand why I struggle with Friedrich Schleiermacher - he was German! But more seriously this does open up a very interesting discussion about the inter-cultural dialogue of inculturated theologies.

On Pg. 187 Bevans writes, "To do theology from a global perspective, ironically, is to look to the local. ... We need ... the blossoming of theologies in every part of the world, in every historical situation , among every social group." The real challenge is then the "cross-pollination" of these theologies - in such a way as retains the integrety of each?

On the move - 190 million

Doing some research for a short presentation I am giving later this week I discovered an interesting, and challenging, fact. I bet you didn't know either. Apparently more than 3% of the world's population lives in a country different from the one in which they were born - that's 190 million people! Given that most people, even those living in situations made difficult through poverty or insecurity, prefer to stay put, it is quite staggering that three out of every hundred human beings is a migrant

Statistics are interesting but what I find really fascinating are the personal stories behind the statistics, and here we have a veritable gold mine of 190,000,000 stories! Some are real success stories, the African lad who loved football and now plays for Arsenal, the Russian entrepreneur living in a rather nice pad in Chelsea, and the nurse from Malawi who works in Sweden and sends home half her salary to support the family. Other stories need to be rated triple X, the Bangadeshi girl wobbling in high healed shoes and too much make-up on the streets of Mombay waiting for her next male customer, the illegal farm labourer hiding in a barn in Lincolnshire, and the political activist who had to seek asylum far from home

The statistic I have still not found, however, is how many of those 190 million women, men and children are Christians. How many million 'unintentional' missionaries do we have in the world? And, whatever number there are - and there are millions - who is supporting them, training them, praying for them? Will they ever feature in the historoes of mission? Some of those personal stories are great - the Ethiopian girl who reads Bible stories to her employer's children in Saudi Arabia, the Chinese student who became a Christian in Canada and now leads a church in China, and the Ghanian nurse who prays (as long as the law allows!) with her patients in Bristol

Living in a strange place is never easy - but those who do enrich our communities, deserve our friendship and must be protected when the world turns nasty.