Religious stirrings

For the first years working in Agartala the steep learning curve of language studies, culture shock and getting to grips with new systems meant that not a lot of attention was devoted to other aspects of my personal life. 

But after a few years the constant religious atmosphere challenged me to think about a deeper spiritual experience, if that were possible. I tried a variety of systems to enhance my prayer life; I continued to study the Bible, as I had always done, imploring God to reveal His plan to me. I gained little by way of response or encouragement from these processes. 

What was more productive was an ongoing discussion with Brian Smith about theology, particularly as it was applied to the day-to-day work we were both doing. Brian was by this stage in charge of the theological training for the Baptist churches of Tripura. 

We eventually hit upon the idea of trying to sift through the New Testament to see if we could identify the essential teachings of Jesus; which sayings in the Gospels really came from his mouth? I cannot now recall the criteria we used, but we narrowed the key statements down to some very clear ideas about how to live, and found that they did not tally very closely with what much of the Church was saying; even the Baptist Churches of New Zealand were off the mark in some of their emphases. 

We wrote a series of articles to explain our ideas and sent them to the New Zealand Baptist magazine, but after some correspondence with the editor they were never published. 

The most pressing concern of this discussion was the discrepancy between the clear words of Jesus about solidarity with the poor and the oppressed on the one hand, and the too obvious wealth of churches and Christian communities in the modern world. 

Especially in a situation where we Europeans were living in blatant affluence in comparison with the dire poverty of our neighbours, this vast gulf could not help but worry us. We described our situation as similar to firefighters managing a nearly uncontrollable fire hose with such a force of money flowing through the pipes that the best we could do was direct it to where it would do the least damage. 

Here and there throughout the ages daring individuals had tried to wrestle with this problem: St Francis, and Gandhi are two examples. But generally the message has gone clear over the heads of the vast majority of Christians and their leaders. 

A second issue was the disconnect between the doubly underlined emphasis of Jesus, say in John 17, that his followers were to be united, and the entrenched and apparently unsurmountable walls between different so-called Christian denominations. 

We were discussing these issues in the world where the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing its greatest reformation in the wake of Vatican 2. In Tripura some of our colleagues were working in co-operation with another mission run by a French Canadian order.  In one village the local school was supported jointly by the two missions, and in some districts a Christian church member could transfer directly from a Baptist Church in one village to a Catholic Church in another, or vice versa. 

We looked in vain for such co-operation in our homeland.  Efforts to promote Church Unity had gone on for years and a little progress had been made.  Many had tried, such as Ted Roberts-Thomson on behalf of Baptists, but little had resulted, and the processes seemed to have stalled. 

These were not all the issues we were worried about, but they give a flavour of what was in our minds.