Niki Seth-Smith thinks the Missions of Charity have some lessons to teach the UK about Christian evangelism.
The British Church is losing track of its sheep. That’s the word being whispered from Priest to Bishop, from the village chapel to the spires of St Paul’s Cathedral. While the ‘statistical proof’ for such a decline in British Christian belief may be suspect, the reaction of the Church is very real. Voices are being raised, urging the Christian community to don their holy armour in earnest, go out on the streets and seek souls.
There is a fear that while the dominant faith takes care not to tread on the toes of minority religions, many of these minority faiths – notably Islam and Hinduism – are gaining ground in Britain.
The Christians I’ve met in Kolkata have assumed that I, a British woman, am a Christian. They’re surprised to hear that not only am I not a believer, neither are my parents or the majority of my friends. Take a look at the stats, and this won’t seem so surprising. Britain’s last national census (in 2001) pointed to a secular nation, with over a third of Brits (36 per cent) identifying themselves as having a “Humanist outlook on life”. In May of last year, just as the shock waves from the census were dying down, Christian Research published a study predicting that within a generation active Muslims would outnumber Sunday church-goers in Britain by 3:1.
Needless to say, such attempts to quantify belief are deeply suspect. For the majority, ticking any box on forms aimed at dissecting the demographic entails a half-lie. Although church attendance figures may be more concrete than those gleaned by surveys, they take no account of the variety of ways in which Christians are now choosing to worship. But while the slippery statistics may have limited use, the Church’s reaction to the apparent weakening of the Bible’s influence is certainly revealing.
There is a growing feeling within the Church that Christianity in Britain is too occupied with the perceived demands of political correctness and community cohesion to take a strong stance and reach out to new converts. Rev. Nezlin Sterling of the New Testament Assembly in London made headlines earlier this year by calling on Christians not to “walk on eggshells” when other faiths were “unrelentingly” spreading their message. Rev. Andrew Dow is another strong advocate of a more pro-active Church: “We need to recover our nerve,” the rector, based in Cheltenham, declaimed. “We need to refute the lie that to be evangelistic is to be a bigot or a fundamental fanatic.”
Living in Kolkata, Mother Theresa’s city, I’m in a unique position to witness the work of one of the most renowned Christian evangelical networks in the world: The Missions of Charity. There are currently 19 mission centres in the city, working under the motto: “Wholehearted and free service to the poorest of the poor”. There are missions dedicated to vulnerable women and children, to the sick and dying, and to those simply in need of shelter and care. However, while the Missions of Charity can be held up as the evangelical ideal made flesh through their ability to reach across caste, race and religious boundaries, their history in the community clearly demonstrates the problems surrounding such unambiguous evangelism.
The Hindu Right has a long history of opposing the Missions on the grounds that they are threatening the majority and ‘true’ faith of India by conducting forced or ‘interested’ conversions. The BJP has accused the Missions of targeting Dalits and tribals, using their traditionally underprivileged status as a point of leverage. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (an extremist organization dedicated to Hindutva) has been more strident in its critique of the Missions, even opposing the government’s decision to give Mother Teresa a state funeral in 1997. While the Missions may have found a refuge from violence in their home city, there have been times when Sisters and Brothers in other states have lived in fear – most recently in neighbouring Orissa, where the murder of Swami Laxmanananda, a staunch opponent of conversion, triggered off a wave of ‘retaliatory’ attacks on Christian organizations, including the Missions, in August of last year.
Why should the British Church heed antagonism in India against Mother Teresa – arguably the saint of modern Christian evangelism? Surely the issue of coercive conversion takes a backseat in Britain, where those lacking the minimal essentials of life constitute a tiny fraction of the population. It’s true that Christian bodies offering basic aid such as the Salvation Army have an extremely limited sphere of influence in comparison to their Indian counterparts. But the “poorest of the poor”, as the Church recognizes, are not only the financially weak but also those in need of emotional support.
The Evangelical Alliance - the largest body serving evangelical organizations in the UK – believes that the number of Brits searching for emotional or ‘spiritual’ guidance is on the rise in the wake of the global recession. Dr Justin Thacker, a doctor of Theology, spoke on behalf of the EA: “With the global financial crisis, it has become obvious that many people are searching for answers to life’s deep questions. Western materialism has not provided the answer, and therefore there are many who are currently searching.” According to Dr Thacker, the EA is firmly with vocal figures such as Rev. Sterling and Rev. Dow in their belief that the time is ripe for spreading Jesus’ word to non-believers.
The invitation to seek converts without shame and offer ‘spiritual’ succor to those cast adrift by post-recession upheaval could be seen as a carte blanche for emotional exploitation. While there is no formidable Hindu Right in Britain to fight tooth and nail against such ‘illegitimate proselytizing’, there is a strong argument that the UK is becoming increasingly hostile to any perceived intrusion of religion into public life. It was a Brit, after all, who wrote the controversial polemic ‘The Missionary Position’, depicting Mother Teresa as a political opportunist who adopted the guise of a saint in order to fulfill her primary aim of harvesting money and souls for the Pope. The author, Christopher Hitchens, came not from a religious background but from within a strong tradition of British atheism, championed by the likes of Richard Dawkins.
The National Secular Society is the leading British campaigning organization against the ‘undue influence of religion in public affairs and education’. Not only does the society view faith-based welfare as coercive, positioning itself against what it calls the ‘soup for prayers’ phenomenon within public services, the NSS has recently taken a controversial stance towards baptism as conversion without consent. Terry Sanderson, the President of the NSS, sees the popularity of the society’s ‘debaptism’ forms (more than 10,000 have been downloaded so far) as evidence that: ‘(British) people are not just indifferent to religion…. …but are actually becoming quite hostile to it’.
A more pro-active approach to spreading the word of God may bring unbelievers in Britain flocking back to the faith. Yet such a push for greater evangelism within the Church must be tempered by consideration of the issues at stake. Talk of ‘not treading on eggshells’ and refusing to bow down to the P.C. ogre grossly underestimates the probable tensions arising from such a trend. Examining attitudes towards one of the most powerful and influential Christian evangelical networks in the world, the Missions of Charity, highlights the problems associated with the evangelical position. The majority of Brits today are no longer church-going Christians. Those calling for a strong, evangelical Church must accept this fact and take the current climate in Britain into consideration.
- - Niki Seth-Smith is a British journalist with The Statesman. ‘Battling for Souls’ is the third in a series viewing Kolkata through a Londoner’s eyes. - -
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