“The Next 20 Years” Symposium in Amsterdam
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Under a barrel ceiling dating back to before Christopher Columbus, and facing a stained-glass window depicting the Pilgrim Fathers praying as they left Holland for America via Plymouth on the Mayflower, some 200 friends and staff of YWAM gathered in one of Amsterdam’s oldest churches on Friday to ask what the next twenty years might bring.
The English Reformed Church was formerly the chapel for a sisterhood of the Beguines, a 14th-century order of deaconnesses residing in an enclosed courtyard called The Begijnhof. The courtyard is entered through an inconspicuous archway making it a restful haven in the centre of the city. After the city sided with the Reformation, the church was presented to English-speaking Protestant dissidents living in the city, among them the Pilgrim Fathers. Since then, services in English have continued to the present day.
The occasion was the transfer of the leadership of YWAM in Europe, an opportunity to reflect both on past and future. A symposium in the afternoon was followed by an evening reception, when we prayed for the team of regional leaders now carrying the European oversight together, under the chairmanship of Stephe Mayers.
Values
Dutch philosopher Evert-Jan Ouweneel began the symposium by reflecting on the nature of four values essential for Europe’s future: equality, solidarity, freedom and peace. These were the ‘Christian values’ in which Europe had to be deeply rooted, according to the father of the European Union, Robert Schuman.
Evert-Jan demonstrated how that, in each case, our autonomous human efforts to build a society on such values had failed. This presented us, he said, with the opportunity to demonstrate that true equality came from recognising we were all created in the image of God; that true solidarity sprang from the notion of brotherhood, being sisters and brothers in God’s family; that real freedom was found in the context of love and accountability, not in individualistic self-seeking license; and that true peace involved discovering God’s shalom, well-being in every aspect of human existence. For the sake of the future, he concluded, we needed to go back to our biblical roots.
Prabhu Guptara, originally from India, and heading up a UBS think tank in Zurich. asked where globalisation was leading us. Until a few months ago, he said, that was easy to answer. One view of the future was, until recently, clearly winning; the view that said that greed was good. While Reformational values had shaped so much of the west, a great change took place around the 1908’s. Ayn Rand’s philosophy, that greed was good, was endorsed by conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. The exponential growth in recent decades stemmed from this view. A new practical godlessness created the boom of recent years, claimed Prabhu, until the last few months.
While World War 2 had produced a balance of power between the USSR and the USA, communism’s collapse twenty years ago had left one superpower. But then 9/11 had introduced a multipolar world, accentuated by the latest crisis.
Feudalism?
What then lay ahead? Greater peace or increased regional conflicts? A new world war even? Competitive devaluation and increasing protectionism would lead to the second option, he believed. These were factors to watch closely.
Global society was being confronted with limited choices. A new feudalism could return, in which a few super-rich would keep the rest of population under control. Alternatively, biblical values could produce a world genuinely humane, just and environmentally responsible. We had for the first time the possibility and means of clothing and feeding everybody. Yet global society was facing a global civil war, between two sets of ideas: one stemming from the Reformation and even much earlier, going back to Israel; and the other rooted in human rationality, capacity and greed.
The future would lead to a more explicit clash between these two values, predicted Prabhu, as he stepped from the podium.
Hope for the future
Hope, Gerard Kelly told his listeners at the symposium was the answer to the question “What did it mean to be human?” How did we then, as Christians, so lose our vision of what it meant to be human, he asked, that humanist intellectuals rejected Christianity as being too stifling? We had lost our vision of what it mean to reflect God’s image on earth, he lamented, to be salt and light to the world.
The French artist Paul Gaugin had posed the basic life questions on what he had thought would be his last canvas before attempting suicide, explained Gerard. He then projected the painting with the long title, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, on the screen up front in the English Reformed Church. The answers to these questions would describe what it mean to be human, he added.
Our challenge–and opportunity–as we faced the coming twenty years, suggested Gerard, was to flesh out an answer to this question: what did it mean to be human?
God was humanic! declared the preacher-poet. That meant he was mad about humanity, and valued every human: Muslim, Christian, whatever belief. Our calling as the church was to reflect God’s heart for humanity.
Gerard began his address on ‘speaking hope into the human future’ with the statement, Hope was the bridge between the past and the future. Yet post-modernity had a problem with a history usually written by the rich and powerful: it was not reliable. So we didn’t know who we were because we didn’t really know our past, and didn’t know where we were going.
Diversity
The Christian story was all about what it meant to be human. God had chosen humanity to help shape the future with him. We needed to return to this calling to show what humans were for.
Hope was the unity that rendered our diversity beautiful. Diversity was not an option for today’s generation, said Gerard. They had grown up with it. If our faith was captive to a particular colour and culture, our children would reject it as being too narrow.
Why was the world diverse? asked Gerard. God made it that way! So why did our children’s discovery of his diversity so threaten us? The gospel was a universal story. Our faith was meta-national. How could our faith be trapped in one culture when our God was free of culture?
Could we show this universality, this diversity, in our churches? Might we actually be the one group in Europe who could demonstrate this diversity, Gerard challenged his audience.
Stefan, my son, delivered a lively and entertaining presentation on how the internet will continue to pervade our lives in the coming years. ‘Scared yet?’ he asked at one stage. Don’t be, he continued. People were once scared of travelling at above 40 kph. What we needed, he concluded, was wisdom and understanding, an intergenerational task.
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Michael Schluter, who had spent most of the day fog-bound in London, arrived just in time to share his vision of a biblical alternative to capitalism. Something was seriously wrong with our European societies, he began. We had a financial crisis, a family crisis and a culture crisis, among others. Dealing with symptoms was not enough, he warned. We needed to see the world through a relational lens. Capitalism’s moral flaws were rooted in their neglect of the Relationship factor–the heart of being human.
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All speakers at the symposium can be viewed here, with the exception of Christine Schirrmacher. For security reasons, her talk on Europe and Islam was not recorded. Dr Schirrmacher, one of Europe’s leading Islamologists, brought a much-needed balance to the debate on Islam’s role in Europe.
We Christians had missed many chances to make friends and help Muslims integrate in Europe, where many of them have been living now for 40 years. If we had more Muslim friends we would not be so vulnerable to the stereotypes depicted in panic literature. The integration debate only made sense if we could define what values Europe stood for, she said. Here was a further challenge and opportunity facing us in the coming twenty years.
