Over the Horizon?

Decades ago I volunteered and journeyed overseas as if mission was somewhere else, over the horizon. The missionary encounter between Christianity and the home scene was not part of my curriculum. Whilst my youthful attention stretched from Chile to China, I often forgot that God’s missionary agenda was unfolding in my homeland. Now, decades later, an encounter with Maori spirituality is as important to me as previous involvements with peoples and traditions from Asia. This is a time for me to affirm a unity, harmony and identity in local indigenous culture and in Christian tradition. Catholic people, missionaries included, struggled in the past with such notions. They failed to see that faith must be lived and expressed in the style, language and idiom of every culture. In the 1950s and 1960s we gave little credit to an emerging Maori Catholic perspective in Aotearoa New Zealand. Convert believers were expected to be passive consumers of a mono-cultural missionary package from the other side of the world. Yet the church now declares that a faith that does not become part of the indigenous culture remains alien. People have a right to their heritage. It is established through privileges granted from ancestors. Inculturation means a constant effort to present the Christian message in ways that penetrates, renews and challenges the heart of a culture, recognising all the legitimate values and symbolic modes of expression. We now speak of a church commitment to cultures, to fulfil and transform them from within, never to ignore, belittle or destroy them. There are consequences. A preferential regard for one group, culture or model is no longer the option. Culturally diverse ways of living the Gospel, and diversity in Christian life and practice is expected. Such thinking has, I believe, the potential to re-energise and re-vitalise mission and evangelisation among us.

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