Much Christian Growth in Asia is Superficial: Theologian

Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010 Posted: 10:12:49PM HKT

The perceived growth of Christianity in Singapore and other nations in Asia is not an unqualified blessing in the view of an Indian theologian.

"Much of the numerical Christian growth in our nations is superficial," said Dr Vinoth Ramachandra in a series of lectures he gave at Trinity Theological College which the college compiled and published as a book in 2009.

This was the same year a South Asian Christianity researcher who was invited to give the lectures that year had concluded that the quality of the large number of conversions in recent years in Singapore is questionable.

“Large churches (including those that send out many cross-cultural missionaries to other parts of Asia) seem to have little transformative impact on their neighbourhoods and culture,” said Dr Ramachandra, stressing that the primary task of the Church is not ‘missions’ and discipleship – what he described as activism.

Rather the Church’s task is “simply being the Church; a radically new community in which social, cultural and economic barriers between peoples are broken down and men and women learn to love their traditional and personal enemies,” the Secretary for Dialogue and Social Engagement for the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) said in ‘Church and Mission in the New Asia: New Gods, New Identities’.

Failing this a church becomes nothing more than a ‘religious club’, he warned in the compilation of the TTC Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia 2007 annual lectures which he delivered.

The primary way whereby “the Church participates in the missio Dei (God’s mission) is through the day-to-day involvement of its members in the life of commerce and business, science and technology, the arts and the media, farming and ecology, politics and government,” he said.

For this reason, the theologian added, the Church faces the challenge of “expressing what the Lordship of Jesus Christ means in [Christians’] rapidly changing economic, cultural and political contexts.”

In the book the Sri Lankan theologian highlighted areas where Christians today may have fallen prey to ‘the spirits of the age’ amid their ‘evangelical busyness’.

He said that Christian reflection on such issues is probably the most urgent missiological task today.

The following is a list of some of the areas he highlighted.

Most Christians, he said, have been taught a Gospel which has been presented in purely individualistic terms.

"The issue we face is not why we should be socially involved, but whether our present social involvements (the daily work that we do, where we have chosen to live, where we shop, how we earn and spend money, our voting habits, and so on) are Christian or un-Christian, that is, whether they serve God's purposes for the world, or actually run counter to them," the theologian said.

Dr Ramachandra also took issue with the fact that most churches make extensive use of church-based programmes in evangelism.

Such programmes involve replacing the culture of the evangelised rather than using the biblical approach of identifying with that culture and giving all that is good, true and beautiful in it a new direction towards Christ and critiquing and resisting all that is contrary to Christ’s Kingdom, in the words of the theologian.

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Edmond Chua
edmond@christianpost.com