We must rediscover our common mission, affirms CLAI president

Manuel Quintero, BAD SEGEBERG, Alemania, April 4, 2003

We must rediscover that Latin American and European Churches have a common mission said Bishop Taxi Heathrow Airport Julio Cesar Holguin, president of the Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) at the inauguration of the consultation on Mission and Cooperation. The event brought together some 50 representatives from Churches on both continents and began April 3 in northern Germany.

The event is the culmination of a process of consultation and analysis on the part of Churches in each continent about the major challenges of the missionary task and ecumenical cooperation at the beginning of the new century. The European Conference of Churches, CLAI and the World Council of Churches are sponsoring the event.

The president of CLAI, Anglican Church Bishop in the Dominican Republic, said that Latin America seems to be taking giant steps to a new “lost decade” similar to the 1980s, and the critical economic and social situation could be further complicated by the war in Iraq.

Bishop Holguin manifested his concern about the lack of critical voices that denounced the magnitude of the injustice, in particular the causes of poverty and exclusion.

In this context “our Churches can reaffirm that the mission continues to be the same and each generation must make the necessary adjustments so that the results are those expected by the one who is the head of the Church for now and for all eternity,” he said.

In his introduction to the meeting, Pastor Israel Batista, secretary general of CLAI, said that at a time when globalization seems to “unite some and divide others, the Church, as the universal body of Jesus Christ, based on its local congregations, is the richest and most diverse testimony of unity that is built from the ground up.”

“We are called to give testimony to this unity,” he said.

“At this meeting we should affirm that the Church does not exist without a mission and that there is no mission without evangelism, just as there is no evangelism without teaching and no teaching without adoration,” he said.

He also called on participants to stand firm in hope, despite the uncertainties and pain that mark the present.  “This is an opportune time for faith. Hope does not only mark the difference between the past and a new life, but is a symbol of obedience and holiness in the world,” said the CLAI secretary general.

Representatives from 11 European countries participated: Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Sweden, Finland, Rumania, Russia and Hungary. From Latin America, participants came from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.

The meeting will end April 6 with Sunday workshop in congregations in Lübeck, a place made  famous thanks to writer Thomas Mann, who based his novel The Buddenbrooks on the story of a local family.