The View From Austria, 2002

Week of Monday, September 23, 2002

For the second year in a row it was my pleasure to travel to Austria this summer for the annual meeting of the Theological Students Fellowship of Europe. About sixty seminary and religious studies students from sixteen countries gathered at Schloss Mittersill two hours south of Munich to enjoy lectures, Biblical expositions, seminars and fellowship. The largest group was from the Netherlands, the most inspirational were the four Ukrainians who traveled fifty-five hours by train just to be there, the most encouraging development was a group of nine people from Bulgaria, while the most unusual delegate was probably the Mongolian woman who was studying in Poland. How refreshing it was to find myself to be one of only two Americans at the conference.

As diverse as they are, these students only represent the tip of a large kingdom iceberg. TSF, to use its acronym, is part of a much larger student movement called IFES—the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (www.ifesWorld.org). IFES is a global fellowship of international, interdenominational, and indigenous student movements founded in 1947 to raise up a Christian witness at every university in the world. Today IFES numbers about 300,000 students in 143 countries.

Part of following Jesus necessarily involves knowing, engaging, learning from and rejoicing over this global scope of God's kingdom. In the first chapters of the Bible, when God intervened in human history to call out a people for Himself, He made His global intentions and love for the entire world crystal clear. To Abraham He promised, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). We have just seen in the minor prophets the past twelve weeks how even when speaking to the nation of Israel, the prophets also spoke about and to the surrounding nations and the entire world. When we arrive at the last book of the Bible and John's vision of heaven, we read about “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language” (Revelation 7:9). Jesus Himself urged his followers to take His Good News to “all the nations” (Matthew 28:19). To be a Christian, then, is to take your place as part of a worldwide family.

Conversely, we impoverish our Christian lives to the extent that we remain stuck in our own narrow little spiritual worlds, imagining that our church, country or ministry is God's last and best hope for the world. We have a word for this, ethnocentricity, the idea that our own ethnic identity is the gold standard by which all others are measured. Not true. My meeting in Austria reminded me that the Spirit of God is alive and well; He blows wherever and whenever he chooses (John 3:8), and that is assuredly far beyond the narrow confines of what a friend of mine refers to tongue-in-cheek as “deepest, darkest Palo Alto.”

Attending a meeting like this also provides a jarring reminder that much of what you see and think depends upon where you stand. I plied my Dutch friends about their legalization of drugs, physician-assisted suicide, and what it is like to live as a follower of Jesus in a thoroughly secular culture with such a strong Christian history. In turn, they queried me about the ramifications of America's super-power status around the world, how some Europeans viewed our 911 disaster, and their deep reservations about rumors that we will attack Iraq. If you think we have a problem with Muslims, think about Germany and the Netherlands, both of which now have Muslim peoples that approach 15% of their population. Delegates from places like Croatia, Bulgaria and Ukraine just want a place at the world table. In Finland it is easy to feel like a pawn of global politics (despite the global clout of Nokia). In Sweden legislation was just passed that, if actually carried out, would make any perceived derogatory speech against gays a crime. And the Mongolian woman studying in Poland? She proudly gave me a pin of her national hero, Ghengis Khan.

Put a bit differently, attending a global smorgasbord of a meeting like this challenges me to ask what parts of my identity are truly, genuinely Christian, and what parts are merely American, ethnic, political, white, male, western, and so on. Those latter attributes need not be construed as always bad, as the politically-correct police might have it. But it does mean that the proper concerns of God's kingdom are different (but not separated) from the vested interests of country, race, ethnicity, economic status, geography, and so forth.

I also took some measure of consolation to see that many of the problems that these believers have in their churches around the world are the same sorts of problems that we have here in America. In Bulgaria you can find the same sort of denominational bickering that we have here—Baptists and Pentecostals distrust each other, and the Orthodox does both. But there are also wonderful examples of mutual support and encouragement across these same denominational lines. On what is called “culture night” the last two years, the Dutch believers were nothing short of brilliant in how they poked fun at their own proven propensity to factionalism in an otherwise small group of Christians in a small country. Check out the “Really Re-Re-Reformed Dutch Church.” That, I am told, is the near literal translation of one of their denominations. Juha from Finland struggles against the rising tide of a very secular culture, cultural lethargy about spiritual matters, and also problems associated with a moribund, ossified state Lutheran church. Thank God for his witness there in Turku. Eastern Europeans would be hard to beat in their personality cults and petty jealousies among leaders. Virtually every believer at the conference struggles in their own unique setting to work out the thorny issues surrounding the relationship of the church to the state.

Perhaps all this is just human nature. Some of these problems emerge because Christians in some parts have had to live with a survivor's mentality as a minority group among atheist or Muslim majorities. But problems, even severe ones, are not new, and they should not surprise us. Christians sometime long for the golden days of the “New Testament church,” but that is just an illusion and a fantasy. Read Paul's letters to the believers at Corinth and you learn about a Christian community with factions, lawsuits among fellows believers, incest, the influences of the surrounding pagan society, and so on. So, my theological student friends from around the world remind me, in some odd way, that when I get discouraged about problems with the church here in America, I need to remember that the grass is not greener any other place. We should not excuse our shortcomings, but also, perhaps, not be too hard on ourselves. The story is much the same all around the world.

In Austria I was reminded of the salutory effects of a global vision, a sense of modesty gained from appreciating different perspectives, and the reality that no church in any country is perfect or even much better or worse than my own. The Lord whom we worship is lord over all creation, cultures, histories and peoples, both far away and here at home. Truly, He has the whole world in His hands.

The Journey with Jesus: Notes to Myself Copyright ©2002 by Dan Clendenin. All Rights Reserved.