"Listening and Evangelizing" by Larry Benfield
‘Indaba’ is a Zulu word for a gathering for purposeful discussion. In many non-Western cultures, when there has been a major breaking of the community bonds, as when theft occurs, the entire community gathers and talks it out until everyone has been heard.
The planners of this Lambeth Conference decided that instead of meeting to vote on issues, as Western-style democracies tend to do, the bishops would gather in Indaba groups to talk things out. Thus, on Monday we began meeting in assigned groups of forty much as local villagers might do. We met twice, often in crowded, very warm rooms, for over an hour and a half each time. In my own small group we struggled with our role as bishops in overseeing worship as the church simultaneously passes on the faith and responds to varied local cultures.
The overlay of Indaba groups where everyone has a voice on to the grid of a conference timetable has limitations, and those limitations were evident Monday. In at least one Indaba group, the bishops were tried to decide what would go into a statement from the group rather than focusing on hearing everyone. People with experience in Indaba kept calling us back to its purpose. How each group can present a report that then feeds into a more general conference report written by a committee remains to be seen, especially when the Indaba experience is that if several villages (or several groups) are engaged, every last villager can attend and join in talking it out.
Victoria Matthews is the new bishop of Christchurch in New Zealand. Monday she appeared in an interview on the Lambeth Journal, the video journal of each day’s activities that was shown on a large screen in the Big Top. She eloquently spoke of the potential power of the Anglican Communion in being catholic, reformed, and global. We Anglicans are able to offer good news to people who reject the authoritarian nature of some churches that becomes oppressive and the fundamentalism of others that is too ready to narrowly define who is acceptable. And in being global, we can reach all parts of the world in a way that many independent churches cannot. It was one of the most succinct reasons I have recently heard of the importance of Anglicanism in evangelism.
And it was Anglican evangelism that capped our day as well. Brian McLaren, the American author of “Everything Must Change” and “A Generous Orthodoxy,” talked Monday evening about how the modern world is fast becoming a new emerging world in ways that are as profound as were the changes five hundred years ago when modern civilization came into being. The church must respond to these changes or be left on the roadside to die. He is insistent that young people are not interested in our internal debates, but instead are looking for someone to respond to the needs of the world: the crises of hunger and disease, corrupt governments, greedy corporations, and the place of the marginalized. And like Victoria Matthews, he gave his reasons why we Anglicans are in a particularly good spot: we understand the good news of Jesus Christ; we have begun seriously looking at fresh expressions of Christianity; we have global flexibility; we have a liturgy combines beauty, mystery, intelligence, and clarity; and perhaps most importantly of all, we are hungry for change and growth. In response to a question about the issues that consume the church, and specifically the ordination of Gene Robinson and how young people view our struggle, he suggested that it is time that we stop looking at these items as theological issues and start looking at them as missiological issues. Various parts of our Communion have to realize that responses around the world will vary; we each must find our own way to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ. We will continue this sort of reflection in the coming days.
