The tortoise and the eagle
  A tortoise was tired of always being on the ground, and wanted to fly in the air, so he let it be known that if any bird would take him up and show him the world from the air, he would tell him, as a reward, where many precious stones were hidden in a cave.
  The eagle, hearing of the reward, said he would take the tortoise up, and lifting him in his claws, carried him up a great height. When there, he asked the tortoise to tell him where the reward could be found, but the tortoise could not tell him.
  Angry at being deceived, the eagle dropped the tortoise onto the rocks below where he was dashed to pieces, and the eagle made a meal of him! ¹

But for Christian churches and institutions and for Christian world organizations, CS Song told the executive committee of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the lesson is anything but simple and clear.

"Especially for us as the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, moving towards the general council in Accra, Ghana, in 2004, the lesson is complex and ambiguous."

"What are the promises we have made and are going to make to our member churches and Christians?" he asked. "Once we have made promises, can we keep them?"

Song has been president of the Alliance since 1997, and by now the executive committee knows what to expect of his annual address. It will be a provocation, a challenge to the committee to do hard thinking about its own assumptions. This year was no exception.

The terms of the debate need radical change
We have argued for the necessity of asking – and addressing – a very different set of questions, rather than confining the analysis to examining answers to the old familiar questions. The central issue, we have argued, is to expand the social opportunities open to the people... While the case for economic reforms may take good note of the diagnosis that India has too much government interference in some fields, it ignores the fact that India also has insufficient and ineffective government activity in many other fields, including basic education, health care, social security, land reform, and promotion of social change. This inertia, too, contributes to the persistence of widespread deprivation, economic stagnation, and social inequality.
Policy debates in India have to be taken away from the narrow concentration on issues of liberalization. The nostalgia of the old debates, "Are you pro- or anti-market?", or "Are you in favour or against state activities?", seems to have an old "hold" on all sides, so that we concentrate only on some issues and ignore many – often more important ones... There is a strong case for reorienting public discussion and criticism from the merits and demerits of liberalization towards taking adequate note of the tremendous social and economic deprivations that blight living conditions in India and limit the actual prospects of participatory economic expansion.²

Song drew on the work of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1998, to call for a fundamental rethink. "The terms of our policy, plans and activities need change," he said.

Life is the issue

Everything the Alliance did, Song suggested, needs to be rethought in the light of the 24th general council's theme of life in fullness for all.

"If church unity is at stake, it is because life, not just the life of the Christian church, but the life created by God, is at stake. If the prevailing economic practices give rise to injustice in the world, injustice is done to life, to human life and to life as a whole. When inequality, bigotry and intolerance are justified on the ground of culture and religion, life and relationships that sustain life are seriously endangered."

Church unity

"Unity, we assert, is a gift God has given to us in Jesus, but strangely that God-given unity has proved to be most elusive to churches and Christians," Song said. "We need to continue to strive for unity, but we have to ask what kind of unity we have to seek today, not unity for yesterday, for four centuries ago, for fifteen hundred years ago."

Jesus, he argued, "reshapes and rebuilds what the religious authorities held as sacrosanct, on the basis of the reality of life with all its implications. Is it not this the change of terms that we should bear in mind as we undertake the assessment of theological dialogues, bilateral or multilateral? Should we not re-establish life as the heart of the dialogues, especially the life that two-thirds of humanity lives in deprivation today?"

Justice in a globalized and globalizing economy

The Alliance has "directed our concerns over economic injustice to international Christian organizations and other non-governmental organizations and nationally to Christian churches," Song said. But awakening member churches to economic justice, not only globally, but nationally and locally, has been "a very slow process".

Meanwhile "the globalization of world economy moves ahead faster than ever," he added. "A just world economic order, though promised, advocated and promoted with a lot of declarations and speeches, has not been actualized."

"Now individual Christians need to hear from us not generalities but concrete ways in which they can play a responsible part, even a small part, in economic justice," he suggested. "Can we come up with something unpredictable to say to our member Christians, especially to those Christians living an abundant material life? This should make us sit up and listen, and inspire us to take action, beginning with our own life, then extending to our church, and to the community in which we live."

The debate on gender

"We have been good at analysis," Song said. "We have explored the historical, social-political and cultural-religious causes that have contributed to.. . inequality, discrimination, violence and abuse." But it seems that "in many churches and societies discrimination has gone underground and continues to cause tension and conflict not only in society but within the Christian community."

"We have yet to begin the stage of reconstruction, engaging men and women in the church to begin constructing alternative male-female relationships, family bonds, church structure, and social order," he said.

The spiritual power in women "that sustains human destiny from one generation to the next" needs to be explored more, Song argued. It "has to be brought out from the deep recesses of women's struggle to benefit the human community in general and religious communities in particular."

The Alliance of Reformed churches on the move

How can the Alliance move forward?

The Alliance can be on the move again, Song concluded, if it

is willing to take risks with the theme of life and to take seriously the life people live in the real world;
helps equip its member churches and Christians in self-understanding as churches and Christians in the world today, and
pulls its resources together in leadership development.

"We have at last developed an attractive instrument to communicate with our member churches and Christians, and I hope also with the world," he said. "Just look at the new Warc Update. It arouses your interest, curiosity and expectation. What a difference from the old Update! This is a good start and I hope many more exciting things are to follow to communicate how the terms of our emphasis and direction have changed."

The executive committee is meeting in Holland, Michigan, as a guest of the Reformed Church in America, from July 26 to August 4. Pictures from the meeting are available on the RCA website.

Notes

1. A Selection of Aesop's Fables, rewritten specially for children by Barbara Sanders (London: The Murray Group, 1972), pp.34f.

2. Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, India, Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1995), pp.202-204.