By Fr. Jeremy Miller, O.P.

The Forty-Second Annual Minister’s Week of Emory University was held from January 17-19 on the campus. The three-day colloquium attracted about 500 participants and a panel of international scholars. Ministers’ Week is an effort by the Candler School of Theology to meet the increasing need of on-going education of the clergy in the southeast to recent trends in theology, Church and mission. A majority of the participants at this colloquium, whose theme was “Changing Mission, Changing World,” were themselves graduates of Candler.

The missionary experience of the church in Latin America was a central focus to the theme of Changing Mission. Dr. Jose Miguez-Bonino, recently elected president of the World Council of Churches and a member of the Joint Working Group (WCC-Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity) was a keynote speaker along with Mortimer Arias, former Methodist Bishop of Bolivia, who resigned the episcopacy to minister to Bolivian tin miners. Archbishop Donnellan delivered the opening benediction at the address by Bonino.

Bonino is one of the foremost interpreters of Latin American liberation theology, a movement in theology to which Catholic theologians such as Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay and Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru have contributed greatly. Bonino outlined for the participants the general lines of the concerns of liberation theology by analyzing a particular crisis faced by North American missionaries to Latin America, namely, ministering to a very different culture from the highly technological American and Canadian settings, and an uncertainty among many missionaries as to what should be the foremost concerns of the gospel. The missionary is often caught in a web of suspicion. He may be suspected by his Church Mission Board at home when he shares certain “new ideas;” he is often suspect by the Latin Americans as a representative of a colonializing power.

Thinking mostly of Protestant missionaries, Bonino mentioned that the early mission to Latin America brought along with it the “progressive” ideas of the American ethos such as ideas of democracy and free enterprise. Christian ideas expressed within American cultural overtones were welcomed initially, but then a reaction against “Americanization” set in and with it a resistance to the Christian missionary effort. This has fed the crisis of identity.

Christianity, as understood within American culture, is not the proper place to begin one’s reflection on mission in Latin America. One must begin with the idea of “solidarity in suffering” and the struggle for a new life, a more human life, in Latin America. God calls all to liberation from all forms of oppression. The question to the missionary is, “how can you assist us, from the gospel, in our struggle toward human dignity?”

The church must participate in God’s liberating project in the human, political and moral sphere. Until issues are understood through the filter of liberation, the missionary focus in Latin America is blurred with North American concerns and values. The Christ of the Gospels “exalts the poor,” is the “liberator of captives.”

This is a starting point for thinking out missions, not a proposed solution. The call to liberation is a way of looking at the problem more accurately, according to Bonino. “But liberation is also your problem,” he told the audience. You too are part of a system which puts one in bondage. “We in Latin America have nothing to teach you. But you may have something to learn from us.” The way liberation theology would define mission, Bonino ended, “is availability for the struggle for liberation.” We all need to be liberated. Are we, as Christian ministers, available?