Crisis is one of the most overused words in the ecumenical lexicon. But say "crisis" and think "opportunity", and the conversation changes. "Crisis as opportunity" was how WARC and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) titled a recent consultation that looked at how Lutheran and Reformed churches are changing in response to the insistent pressures of globalization.

Held in February this year in the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing, Germany, and hosted by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria, the consultation brought together theologians and church representatives from Brazil, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Korea, South Africa, Sweden, Tanzania, and the United States. For five days they discussed current structural changes in Reformation churches, in the light of the changing role played by religion in contemporary societies and of variations in church priorities related to the understanding of the gospel message in different historical, cultural and church contexts.

Sounds dead boring? Jane Stranz, who represented the Reformed Church of France in Tutzing, didn't think so.

Who would believe that church structures would be worth talking about? Yet, as Elisabeth Parmentier, president of the Leuenberg church fellowship, points out, "in the recent important steps of the ecumenical movement, obstacles have appeared in places where Protestant theologians would not have expected them, particularly in ecclesiology."

Insisting that "peaceful coexistence is not church fellowship", Parmentier pleaded for a move away from slim-line, "thin is in" ecumenical organization (Leuenberg itself is an example of what she has in mind) towards a more "full-figured model of church organization".

As contributions continued and discussion deepened, both the opportunities that churches have seized and the challenges they have failed to meet became apparent. Our Bavarian hosts reported on two recent programmes to encourage people back to church in the face of dwindling attendance: a preliminary evaluation suggested that adding further layers of structure was less effective than basing new projects at the parish level - the "actual concrete grassroots", as we say in Britain. Traditionally, in the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil, the main function of the church structure has been confessional: to ensure that the work of the church is based upon the witness of scripture. Recent pressure has been to have structures which enable projects and encourage creativity at a local level. Financial crises can sometimes help churches to focus on priorities. Often, however, they lead to cutbacks in diaconal programmes, and the poorest whom the churches help lose out. The true challenge for all is to find models of communio, ways of being church, that are welcoming and inclusive yet also allow the church to enter the religious "market" with integrity.

Differences in the experience of globalization also emerged. In the global north, the pressure of secularization tends to create churches that exist to maintain structures, rather than structures that serve the gospel. In the south, in Africa or Latin America, for example, the effects of US or European Union farm subsidies, higher interest rates, or IMF policies, as well as the impact of major health issues such as HIV/Aids, are felt more clearly in both church and society.

Russel Botman of Stellenbosch University in South Africa pointed the contrast in an imaginative paper, "anchored by a tattoo", which combined Polynesian tattoo imagery with the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr. Churches in the north may "have a crisis of structures," Botman said. "I have a crisis of meaning. But...every crisis is an opportunity for the re-emergence of the church of God and hopefully a new anchoring."

Russel Botman (right) in conversation

The contribution of the three South Africans to the consultation was particularly helpful, offering insights from a WARC church (the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa) that came into being only in the past decade and continually re-examines its new structures in the light of the apartheid experience.

"I really don't want a church with structures that resemble this culture of globalization," Botman said. "I wish for magical structures that protest: structures that are truly protestant again... I wish for church structures that can lead me down the path of human dignity, authenticity, meaning, freedom and belonging. I wish for a missional-diaconal mobile tabernacle."

Pick up your tent and walk.

Jane Stranz, Eglise réformée de France