MY PILGRIMAGE IN MISSION
Walter J. Hollenweger
I was as born in 1927 in Antwerp (Belgium) because my father was a steward on a British ocean liner. The British hired their crews in Belgium. When the great slump in 1929 broke out, foreigners lost their jobs first and my parents had to return to Switzerland, where my father was unemployed. So there was great misery in the family
1. From Bank Clark to Evangelist
I decided not to be as poor as my father. Instead I wanted to get comfortably rich. I began an apprenticeship at a private bank in Zurich. I also worked at the Zurich Stock Exchange. This was important. It allowed me to read the Financial Times and other economic and financial literature. So I began to understand the mechanisms of international finance and trade.
As it was usual at the time, I was sent to the Sunday school of the Swiss Reformed Church. But there was utter chaos at this Sunday school. 300 children were shouting and making noise so that I didn't understand a thing. I protested at home and said to my mother: If I have to go to Sunday School instead of playing football then I want at least to learn something. So my mother transferred me to a Pentecostal Sunday School, where there was discipline. An old lady told biblical stories. I liked this very much. Automatically I became youth leader in the Pentecostal Church and conductor of the Youth Choir. Although I listened regularly to reports of missionaries on furlough, I never felt a call for Overseas Mission. God spoke in another way to me. He told me that it was not my calling to work at the Stock Exchange in order to make rich people richer. On the contrary, he wanted me in his service as a Pentecostal pastor. This I did not like at all, because I knew that Pentecostal pastors could not become rich - at least at that time. So I wrestled with God for two years until I suddenly had an experience which the Pentecostals call "baptism in the Spirit". It was a kind of fire experience similar to the one Blaise Pascal describes in his famous memorial. It was found after his death, sewn in his jacket. The details of this deep and shaking experience are of interest to all Pentecostals. However, the result was that I gave up my resistance to the call to the ministry. Together with my future wife I went to the International Bible Training Institute (England) (1948/49). After my return to Switzerland I was offered a fantastic banking career that I declined. Shortly after this I was ordained pastor of the Swiss Pentecostal Mission.
We experienced a considerable revival in Zurich. The congregation doubled in a short time and many people were healed. I asked those who were healed to give testimony. The Zurich police got knowledge of this and sent regularly detectives to my meetings. I suggested to the witnesses that they gave their address and telephone number so that the police could check on the truth of their testimony. The police did this several times and found the testimonies to be true. I invited the new converts to bible courses in private homes so that they got to know the older members of the congregation. Most of these new participants didn't have a bible. They had to buy one. That means, I had to start from the very beginning and explain to them what the big numbers (the chapters) and the small numbers (the verses) meant. They spoke without shame about their newly acquired bible knowledge in the office or the factory which provoked the question: Where did you learn all this? - In the Bible course. Their colleagues asked whether they could also come to the Bible course.
In spite of this considerable success I was not convinced of my own biblical competence, in particular since I had no access to the biblical languages. In using the official translation of the Reformed Church of Zurich (the so-called Zurich translation which was also extremely influential on the King James Bible)[i], I was struck by the critical notes in this Bible. For instance, there was a note on Mt. 1:16 stating that according to old Syriac manuscripts Jesus was the son of Joseph, or that the story of the adulterous woman in John 8 or the end of the Gospel of Mark were missing in the oldest manuscripts. At that time I had no access to scholarly commentaries. Also my teachers from England and my colleagues in the pastorate didn’t have a clue how to deal with such information.
I therefore asked a Presbyterian pastor with a university education what he thought about these notes. He answered: Don’t believe this. These notes have been written by unbelieving professors of theology. That was a great deception. I thought: Even if unbelieving professors wrote them this does not disqualify them. The question is: Is it true or isn’t it? I decided to find out for myself.
I prayed and fasted several weeks together with my wife. We came to the conclusion that I should pass the Swiss Matriculation Examination with Greek, Latin, French, German, Mathematics and many other topics, that I then should study theology at the University of Zurich and that my wife was to take up her former profession as private secretary to an industrialist. My former teacher, Donald Gee, and an American friend, David J. Du Plessis, for whom I had interpreted many times, encouraged me in this.[ii] Both warned me and said: Don’t go to America to a so-called Christian University. Make your studies in your own country. Otherwise you will never be taken seriously.
Nevertheless, I still was a part-time Pentecostal pastor. On Sundays I held meetings, in the evenings I taught Bible courses and during the day I studied at the University.
2. Pastor and Missionary Executive
As a pastor of the Swiss Pentecostal Mission (1950- 1958) I was ex officio a member of its mission committee. This committee was responsible for sending and overseeing missionaries. Already then I realized that in most cases indigenous evangelists, who worked under the missionaries, had a markedly better education. At any rate they were better equipped for missionary and educational work than the Swiss missionaries who in general had only an elementary education.
I remember one particularly telling story of well meaning but uninformed mission policy. In Switzerland the majority of people did not go to High School, but instead learned a trade. During their apprenticeship they went two days per week to school. There they not only learned the theoretical basis of their trade but also German, French or English and other topics. This system has been a blessing for Switzerland and is the backbone of its quality industry. The Pentecostal mission committee thought: what is good for Switzerland is also good for Lesotho. They collected money in order to build a school for apprentices in Lesotho. They hired a Swissair plane and flew the whole infrastructure down to Africa. When they arrived the African Christians were not amused: You never asked us. And anyhow, who are the students and who are the teachers at this school? And how will the running costs be met? Since these questions are unanswered, we give you a week to pack your rubbish and fly it back to where it came from. The Swiss committee was angry: Here, we see again, they said, how stupid and ungrateful these Africans are. It did not dawn on them that in the kingdom of God money is not enough. We also need understanding and patience.
As a pastor I did not follow the Pentecostal party line which meant telling young female converts that a Christian woman had to have long hair (1 Cor. 11.6), that all jewelry, even wooden necklaces were an abomination before the Lord.[iii] I also questioned the widespread conviction that the Bible was written for us. If it was written for us, why was it not written in German? And why was it addressed to the Romans, the Corinthians, and the Galatians, to Theophilus, to Timothy or to the seven churches in Asia Minor? Why are many biblical texts addressed, signed and dated? It seemed to me that those who want to take the Word of God seriously have to answer these questions. Furthermore I questioned some of their rather fantastic interpretations, for instance the statement, that the Jews are the only rightful heirs to Palestine. According to the biblical legends not only Jews but also Arabs (the descendants of Ishmael) are heirs to Palestine. The promise of the “Holy Land” was addressed to Abraham, father of Jews and Arabs. This created tensions among the believers. Sometimes I told my congregation what I had learned at the University, although I always kept a critical distance on many of the theories to which I was exposed.
However, my University professors liked my critical interventions and encouraged me to criticize their own teaching. This was totally new to me. The new converts in the Pentecostal church liked my new approach to the Bible; the older members did not. On the contrary, they prayed publicly that I should fail the examinations that were now at hand, something which the Lord prevented in his wisdom.
These painful experiences and open doors everywhere suggested to me that my spiritual home did perhaps no longer lie within the small Swiss Pentecostal Mission. This was a shock to me. As usual in such situations there were many harsh words on both sides. It was simply inconceivable for my Pentecostal friends that somebody who had tasted “the highest pinnacle of Christian life” would be prepared to drink from the “troubled fountains” of “unbelieving” and “liberal” theologians. In fact they had not read a single line of these theologians whom they condemned. Therefore, all kinds of confabulations were used in order to “explain” this anomaly.
3. Pioneer Researcher of Pentecostalism.
Pentecostals in Switzerland were at that time members of the Swiss Reformed Church as a matter of course there was no problem for me to prepare for the ministry in this Church. In 1961 I was ordained Verbi Divini Minister, minister of the divine word. At the same time I was appointed Research Assistant at the University of Zurich. My later doctoral father, Fritz Blanke, a pioneer in Anabaptist history, told me: “If you do not write for me a dissertation on Pentecostalism, I shall probably never get a doctoral researcher qualified for this work.” I answered: “This is not easy. With English, German and French we get only the opinions of the American, British, French, German and Swiss missionaries. This is not interesting. Much more interesting are the convictions of Third World, Russian or Rumanian Pentecostals themselves. Most of their documents are neither in German nor in English.” – “No problem”, said professor Blanke, “most of these other languages are taught at our university.” And so I learned each semester two languages (of course not fluently, but sufficiently in order to read Pentecostal literature) - all in all about 20 languages.
A whole new world opened up before me. What I discovered was not the Pentecostalism I knew from Switzerland, also not the Pentecostalism I was acquainted with at the British Bible School. I discovered a bewildering pluralistic worldwide ecumenical movement. On almost all points of doctrine and ethics there existed variations that differed from what I had learned.
In particular it became obvious to the serious researcher that the type of Pentecostalism that is presented to the Western public through the media domination of American Pentecostalism is - within the worldwide Pentecostal community - a very small minority, comparable to the minority of the Vatican within Roman Catholicism. And this is not the only parallel between Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism.[iv]
Unfortunately that is something that Philip Jenkins has not understood.[v] He uses the category of “conservative” (versus “liberal”) for describing this worldwide revival. But this revival cannot be described in the terms of a US election. This Third World Pentecostalism has its own dignity. Are Latin American women “conservative” because Western feminism does not make sense to them? Are they “conservative” because they want husbands who give up drinking and wasting money in the pubs, because they want husbands who do not sleep around, give up their macho-pestering and become reliable husbands and fathers? Are the Assemblies of God in Burkina Faso or the Celestial Church in Nigeria “conservative” because they baptize Muslim converts together with their four wives?[vi] Are those Pentecostals conservative who listen in their dreams to their ancestors? They tell them that many children guarantee a happy old age. Therefore they find sterile homosexuality repulsive. This has nothing to do whatsoever with a fundamentalist interpretation of the apostle Paul.
Jenkins takes David Barrett’s statistics in his World Christian Encyclopedia and fills them with a Pentecostalism à la John Ashcroft. If he had read the relevant literature (not only in English) and visited the churches in the field he would have come to another conclusion. He would have learned that the world does not tick everywhere according to American watches. Of course these Pentecostals use evangelical language. They don’t know any other. But that does not hinder some of them to be ministers in a leftwing government in Brazil (like Bendita da Silva, minister in Lula’s cabinet) or to align with certain well-taken criticisms of Western churches and missions, found in the writings of Karl Marx.[vii]
This does of course not make them Marxists. But it allowed the majority of South African Pentecostals to vote for the African National Congress in spite of the allegation of Western missionaries that the ANC was infiltrated by communists. It is anyhow questionable whether a rationalistic fundamentalism of the Western type makes sense in an illiterate or semi-literate culture. Sometimes I wonder whether it makes sense in a Western TV-society.
Third World Pentecostals trust the Bible in everything, including in financial matters, without becoming a copy of Western fundamentalism. I find it revolting that after having exploited the Third World economically we now misuse its spiritual revival in order to justify a Western theological party line.
My research was published in a ten-volume Handbuch der Pfingstbewegung.[viii] It contains all Pentecostal denominations worldwide, known to me at the time, together with their declarations of faith in the original languages and in German translation plus all the other necessary information and analysis. At this time one of the most outspoken critics of German Pentecostalism (once himself involved in the Pentecostal revival) and a staunch defender of the ill-fated “Berlin Declaration” (1909, in which Pentecostalism was essentially declared to be demon-inspired) asked me to forswear in public all Pentecostal connections. “How can I”, I asked him. “In spite of all its shortcomings, I became a Christian through Pentecostalism. One does not forswear one’s mother.”
I remained in contact with Pentecostalism all my life. In Birmingham I founded together with others an institute at the University in order to train black Pentecostal working pastors.[ix] I trained many Pentecostal educators through my doctoral programs. Occasionally I taught in their Bible schools and preached in their churches. I even received the “Life Time Achievement Award” from the Society of Pentecostal Studies in recognition of my scholarly contribution.[x]
In 1965 I was called to the WCC (1965-71). I rea1ized that mission in the mainline churches was not in the first instance evangelistic work. This fact occasioned the protest of Peter Beyerhaus (Tübingen) and Donald McGavran (Pasadena) and others. They criticized the Mission Division of the WCC because it had forgotten the urgent command of Christ - so they said - to proc1aim the Gospel to all nations and therefore were responsible for the eternal damnation of millions. I realized that most churches - including many evangelical churches - no longer believed that mission was in the first instance a soul-saving business. They still used the ideology of “saving souls” in their propaganda, but most of their activity was educational and general development work.
As a WCC executive I assisted meetings of mission societies in many US and European countries. In one of these meetings in the US the respective representatives presented themselves by saying: I represent the XY mission. We have a program of one (or ten or thirty) millions. They then described their educational and development programs. I asked them: What do you expect your program to achieve in the Third World? The answer was significant for their honesty: “We know that our institutions are ‘white elephants’. We do not expect them to alter the situation in Brazil or South Africa or India or elsewhere. But, since the people give us these important amounts, what else shall we do with them?”
4. Professor of Mission at a Secular University
When I was appointed the first and only professor of mission at a British University (1971-1989) I was even more confronted with the inherent discrepancies in Western Mission. I was often asked: “Where have you been a missionary?” The questioners expected me to speak about India or China or Africa. I answered truthfully: In the past in Switzerland, and now in Birmingham, Britain.
Indeed Europe - and perhaps also the US - is in need of a modern type of missionary. Let me report on my experiences with future missionaries from Britain. Being appointed at the Selly Oak Colleges and the University of Birmingham simultaneously one of my tasks was to lecture to future missionaries to overseas countries. Most of them were well-meaning young people with a rather weak educational background - especially in view of their language capacities - but with a very high conviction of being “called” for missionary work. Many of them wanted to teach Christian theology overseas but they did not know much about the diversity of Christian theology, not to speak of the history of Christian theology. They believed with all their heart that their conversion experience and their British understanding - or sometimes “misunderstanding” - of the New Testament was a sufficient basis for missionary work.
They ignored the varieties of Christian theologies in the New Testament, in the course of history and in the present ecumenical movement. That is why they took their own convictions for “the truth” - a catastrophic misunderstanding when confronted with the situation overseas.
Together with these future missionaries I had to teach an increasing number of doctoral students from all over the world.[xi] Practically all of these Third World students were better educated than most of the missionary candidates. The problem with these Third World students was, however, that they were always in financial difficulties. One of them told me one day: I have spent my last ten pounds. Now I must go back to South Africa. I told all the students and future missionaries and all my friends to pray for the black doctoral student. The result was rather meager. I got some money but not enough. When the time came for him to pay his university fee I went to the registrar’s office and said: “Please, do not send this black doctoral student from the university. Give us another two weeks. We are praying for him that he gets the necessary money.”
Now, Birmingham University is not a Christian Bible school. It is a secular university. Most of its staff members are agnostics. That was even true for some teachers in theology. The registrar smiled and said: Of course, we grant you the two weeks. In the meantime I phoned the Methodist Missionary office in London and told them about the plight of the black student, who was a Methodist pastor. The answer was an absolute and firm “no”. I insisted: “Wouldn’t it be more profitable to train South African blacks to the highest possible level than to send ill-prepared well-meaning British young people to South Africa?” I shouldn’t have said this. “Our Methodist pastors cannot afford to earn a doctoral degree at the university either”, I was told. I didn’t give up: “This student is of exceptional quality. He will become some time an important professor at one of the South African universities or perhaps a cabinet minister in the post-apartheid South Africa. It is in your interest to give him the best possible education.” It was in vain. Probably the Methodist Missionary Board did not believe in a post-apartheid South Africa. In any case they doubted that a Zulu could become a university professor. How wrong they were.[xii] I feared that I had to give up. But then God intervened. I got a letter from a medical doctor. He wrote that he was at the Methodist Board Meeting where my request was discussed and turned down. The medical doctor wrote: I am ashamed of my church. He joined a cheque with the amount which was needed. I went to the registrar of the university, paid in the money and said: “Mr. Bongani Mazibuko stays at the university. I just paid in the money.” Looking at the astonished faces I added: “I told you we were going to pray for Mazibuko.” Indeed, Bongani Mazibuko finished his dissertation and became dean of the Department of Missiology at the University of Durham, South Africa.
That model of mission became the leading missionary model for me. Dozens of well trained theologians teach now in their native countries. Sometimes they or their children visit me in Krattigen. I was and still am astonished that Third World Christians are willing and eager to learn something about Christianity and the bible from a white European. I asked many of them: Why do you come to me to study theology? All of them had only one answer: It is because of that man Jesus of Nazareth. This Jesus, this historical man, has a tremendous attraction for Christians and non-Christians. Not our christologies, not our theories about him but this Jesus “according to the flesh” (against the apostle Paul, 2 Cor. 5.16). All these Christians did not want to be Christians on their own. They wanted to be part of the ecumenical family, the ecumenical tradition of this Jesus. These and other experiences brought me a new understanding of mission.
5. A new understanding of mission
1. If mission is about church growth (which I believe it is) then the indigenous evangelists, pastors and theologians can do the job better and cheaper than any of us Westerners - an insight which slowly but surely is dawning on some mission societies. But if that be true, what then is the function of mission societies? If we look at the statistics of David B. Barrett and others the situation is dear. In many places of the world the departure of missionaries given the indigenous churches an important evangelistic impetus. In other parts of the world, the so-called independent churches have outnumbered or are going to outnumber the Western classical missionary churches.
2. It is said that mission is about theological education for many of these independent Third World churches are theologically rough and underdeveloped. Therefore we have to send them theological teachers. Well, how do we know that our theological scholarship is better than theirs? This is very difficult to establish since Western theology is not of one piece. Certainly Third World churches could learn something from Western theology if we send them our best theological teachers, i.e. people who have done their homework and know that Western Christianity is a perfect example of a syncretistic Christianity namely a syncretism between Christianity and capitalism, a syncretism between advertising and the Gospel.[xiii] So why should our brand of syncretism be better than the one of an Indian Guru church or of the South African Zionists? If we understand that our task is to teach and to learn, that theological education is a mutual learning process, that therefore our missionaries and our theological teachers learn as much from their students as they from them, then this would be a very promising missionary approach. I, for my part, have learned more from my students than from anybody else; especially I have learned to keep quiet on issues where I am not competent.
One important aspect of that learning process would be to integrate into our ministry a therapeutic bodily aspect. Following the New Testament it has always astonished me how important the body was for Jesus. We misuse such healing texts as sermon texts instead of taking them as examples for our liturgy. Perhaps some time we begin to take serious the research of the World Health Organization (WHO), namely its appeal not to reject Korean, African or Latin American therapeutic traditions, but combining them with our own analytical medical tradition.[xiv] Everybody knows that our Western health service is in a terrible academic and financial plight. Talking about partnership with oversees churches is not enough. Partnership means that some of the Christian and non-Christian therapists of the Third World (formerly called “witch doctors”) may help us. That is the impression I get when talking with medical Western researchers and with the administrators of the WHO, with some doctors in our hospitals and with people from the medical commission of the WCC. Mission societies and former missionaries could play an important role in the overcoming of this Western medical and pharmaceutical colonialism.
3. Mission is sometimes understood as a form of development aid. We must help the starving people in Bangladesh or Nigeria. I consider this to be a misunderstanding. The problem is not in the first instance to be tackled in India or Nigeria but at the places where decisions on life and death for the majority of human beings are taken, namely Frankfurt, Zurich, London, and New York. Aid is only the second best, although in some places it might be necessary. Africa is littered with tractors that are slowly rusting away. What is necessary, however, is the abolition of trade obstacles, in particular in the agricultural sector. We speak proudly about globalization when it is to our advantage. But when the Third World countries produce cheaper and better steel, cheaper and better food, cheaper and better cars, then we close our frontiers or subsidize our products massively. This system is evil, even if those that manage it are “good Christians”.
What shall we do? Let us return to the Bible and see what Christ did. He invited himself to Zacchaeus, the evil exploiter and capitalist. We do not know what he told him but we know the result of the encounter. The chief executive officer of the Roman administration gave away half of his fortune. Where he wronged somebody, he restituted it fourfold.
I am pleading for a Zacchaeus mission. I am looking for people who evangelize the Zacchaeuses of our time. As is well known in Missiology, the best missionaries to Bantus are the Bantus, the best missionaries to the Dalit are the Dalit etc. Therefore the best missionaries to those people who administrate our trade system are the modern Zacchaeuses. A Zacchaeus missionary is best coming from the world of the bankers, the leading managers and CEOs. If these people realize the deadly consequences of their trade and are saved by the grace of God, they are the best-placed missionaries to this mission field. It is said that the 200 richest people of the world possess as much as the two billion poorest ones. Of these 200 rich people most are Christians and many are born again committed Christians. If only 50 of these 200 rich people are saved, our trade system will be different tomorrow. Furthermore, many of these rich are afraid. They are bored and aimless. That is why they go to a Buddhist monastery in the Bernese Oberland to learn to be silent for a week. They say they need this “spiritual exercise” in order to do their deadly work afterwards with more power. What a charade! Wouldn’t a proper Zacchaeus mission be an interesting mission program for one of our mission societies?
How did I discover this Zacchaeus mission? Of course, by studying the New Testament. But this was not enough. When I was lecturing at the Fuller Theological Seminary in the late nineties of the last century, I met a man who was chief broker of the stock exchange of Toronto. Since I had started my professional career at the stock exchange, I was interested to hear from this man, why be was studying theology. He told me that he was earning a fabulous income. On Saturdays he had been playing American football with his colleagues. Afterwards they were drinking almost until they were unconscious. Sunday was used for sobering up and on Monday he went back to work. When his marriage broke up, he realized that this kind of life was aim- and worthless. He met a Christian who showed him an alternative life-style. Now, the question was: What should he do with his life? He decided to study theology and become a pastor. I thought to myself: What a waste of talents and missionary opportunities. This man knew the problems, the sufferings and the ins-and-outs of the mission field of finances. If he could win a number of financial players to become committed Christians (just as the financier Zacchaeus) he would not only make many a soul happy, he would also solve many problems of our missionary and development agencies. For this type of mission the mission fields are not the starving thousands of Bangladesh or Nigeria, but the global players of Zurich, New York, London and Paris. The mission fields are the places where alliances are forged between the worlds of finance and corrupt local elites. If only a fourth of the 200 richest people get really converted and realize that they cannot serve God and Mammon, we would experience miracles.
4. Finally, if mission has to do with our ecumenical calling, we can begin tomorrow before our doorsteps. The Lord has sent us hundreds of missionaries from the Third World. They are the direct or indirect product of our mission. Now, they come back to us in the form of immigrants and refugees. They belong to our synods, universities and mission societies. They help us in understanding our ecumenical calling. They might also vitalize our worn-out Christianity. For this to happen, however, we have to seek contact with this new brand of Christianity. This process is particularly important for Europe.[xv]
6. Back to the Roots: Evangelist Through Theological Plays
In 1989 I returned to Switzerland. I was commissioned to write the Jubilee Play for the 700th Anniversary of Switzerland. Already in Birmingham I had begun to write plays for my students because many of the black students fell asleep during my lectures.[xvi] This was understandable because they had worked the whole day, as bus-drivers or railway-men and -women. They came to the university in evening and at weekends.[xvii] I told them: “lf you sleep during my lectures you will not pass your examination.” – “Well”, they answered, “in the way you teach us we cannot understand you.” – “How must I teach you so that you can understand?” I asked. – “Only what we have sung, danced and played, we have understood”, was their answer. Together with the drama, music and dance department I began to experiment with plays, music and dance for theological education. It produced astonishing results. It was seen at the University that they wrote better examinations. The white students also wanted to become part of these innovative educational programs. I continued to explore this line. For example, I wrote a Bonhoeffer-Requiem[xviii], whose première took place in the Deutschland Halle in Berlin with 10,000 spectators - at the very place where Goebbels and Hitler had held their inflammatory meetings.
Whether my music and my plays have any artistic values is for others to decide. My ambition is to involve people who have given up the church in a process of theological and missionary thinking. Instead of inviting them to an evangelistic meeting I involve non-Christians in a theological play. Instead of inviting them to listen to an evangelist or pastor I invite them to re-live the life of Pilate or Peter or Dietrich Bonhoeffer or his fiancée Maria von Wedemeyer. Through this active evangelism the unchurched will evangelize themselves on the basis of biblical or theological texts. They will never forget having played, Pilate, Maria von Wedemeyer or even Jesus. Some of them become Christians.
During the rehearsals of the Bonhoeffer Requiem at the Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, a fascist youth group from Anaheim tried to bomb a black church. They presented their swastika on television and said unashamedly and uncensored by the moderator: “We shall drive all Negroes, Jews, Hispanics, Asians and their friends back into the sea. We warn you. You better go before we force you. We no longer accept the down-breeding and browning of America.” Consequently the soldiers who arrested the Jews and drove them into the concentration camps wore American helmets. I am convinced that at least in Europe the mission of the past, where a pastor or an evangelist told his audience that they were sinners and that they needed conversion is over. They know that they are sinners. They know this only too well. What they do not know, however, is the power of prayer, the beauty of life that is not dominated by money and prestige. A public speech by a professional speaker does not have enough conviction to show the attraction of Christian service. People must be immersed into a biblical story that lets them experience in their homes the biblical promise. It’s even better if some of the other players are committed Christians. Sa they will learn from them that it is worthwhile to give up all in order to follow the man from Galilee. A well-paid evangelist or pastor, who presents his prepared rhetoric wherever he finds an audience, has a credibility problem. That’s his job, people will say. In other words, only the life-testimony of ordinary Christians makes of our ever-proclaiming churches convincing missionary congregations.
Walter J. Hollenweger, born 1927 in Antwerp, Executive Secretary WCC (1965-1971), Professor of Mission at Birmingham University (1971-1989), free-lance writer of religious plays. In the year 2003 Walter Hollenweger offered his library on Pentecostal and Pentecostal-like churches and his research archive to the Hollenweger Center.
Notes