Indaba!

Paula D. Nesbitt

Description

Indaba! depicts the adventures and challenges of participants who explored mutual listening and understanding across the worldwide Anglican Communion through the innovative Continuing Indaba project. Indaba is an African Zulu cultural process for engaging differences of view on a shared concern. Introduced to the Anglican Communion for the 2008 Lambeth Conference, it has been adapted and used as a transformative resource for church, interfaith, and civic organizations to use alongside other processes of relationship-building, conflict transformation, reconciliation, decision-making, and governance.

As a groundbreaking book, Indaba! shares findings from a cross-cultural research team who traveled with the participants, documenting their observations through interviews and survey research. The wisdom and practices of this indigenous cultural tradition offer fresh insights on how to maintain healthy and vital communities that respect differences of culture, belief, and viewpoint in moving forward together. The use of indaba in contemporary global religious and civic life offers a path forward for genuine postcolonial relationships, partnerships, and mission, grounded in deeper understanding and mutual respect.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Living
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Church Publishing Incorporated
• Date de parution: 01 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780819233189
• Langue: English

Extrait

indaba!
A Way of Listening, Engaging, and Understanding across the Anglican Communion
Paula D. Nesbitt
Copyright © 2017 by Paula D. Nesbitt
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Church Publishing
19 East 34th Street
New York, NY 10016
www.churchpublishing.org
Cover design by Jennifer Kopec, 2Pug Design
Typeset by Denise Hoff
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Nesbitt, Paula D., 1948- author.
Title: Indaba! : a way of listening, engaging, and understanding across the Anglican communion / Paula D. Nesbitt.
Description: New York : Church Publishing, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016041236 (print) | LCCN 2016049192 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780819233172 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780819233189 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Church controversies--Anglican Communion. | Reconciliation--Religious aspects--Anglican Communion. | Conflict management--Religious aspects--Anglican Communion.
Classification: LCC BX5005 .N47 2017 (print) | LCC BX5005 (ebook) | DDC 283--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041236
~ CONTENTS ~
INTRODUCTION
1 : Indaba as an Anglican Communion Adventure
2 : Preparing for the Journey: The Continuing Indaba Project
3 : Touching Ground Zero: The Search for Common Ground in New York, Derby, and Mumbai
4 : Siblings in a Global Family: Toronto, Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui, and Jamaica and the Cayman Islands
—Joanna Sadgrove
5 : Unity in Diversity: A Safari across Differences in Saldanha Bay, Ho, and Mbeere
—Mkunga H. P. Mtingele
6 : “If I Had a Cow like That ... “: A Quest for Mutual Mission in Western Tanganyika, El Camino Real, and Gloucester
7 : Reflections on the Journey: Insights, “Indaba Moments,” and Meaningful Conversation
8 : Other Indabas across the Anglican Communion
9 : Indaba and the Future
APPENDIX About the Evaluation Research: Continuing Indaba and Mutual Listening Project
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
~ INTRODUCTION ~
IMAGINE YOURSELF ON A JOURNEY. Differing viewpoints, customs, language, and culture confound your sense of order. At first you feel curious. But at some point you may note a growing resistance, craving what is familiar and comfortable. This feeling may subside over time, or it may not. At the end of the journey, home feels familiar, but somehow you are changed by the experience. You begin reflecting with fresh insight on what you might always have taken for granted. This characterizes a cross-cultural indaba experience, whether across the world or in the midst of differences not far from home.
Powerful journeys occur when you engage with people who differ from you in what you might believe or value or in how you live. Such encounters can be challenging, sometimes painful, but they also can bring moments of grace when there is a mutual feeling of being heard and accepted across the differences. In such moments, you may feel a special kinship with those you otherwise might not meet or seek out. As personal bonds form, you and the people you meet may come to understand each other in a different way—not necessarily agreeing, but realizing that differences need not destroy relationships. This type of journey is what indaba is about.
Indaba comes from Zulu culture, but the concept underlying it, as a way of communal listening and conflict transformation, is shared by cultures across the world. The cultures from which such listening processes come are different from those formed out of Western intellectual tradition and European Enlightenment ideals. In the West, individual freedom, conscience, and autonomy are prized values. At times, these compete with claims made by others in a community or in wider society. In other types of cultures, members may have an identity that is deeply intertwined with their community, and personal autonomy may be constrained by a strong responsibility and accountability to it.
This conflict in cultural values characterizes a part of what the Anglican Communion found itself entering as it began to shift from a Western colonial form of Christianity grounded in the Church of England to an expression of Christianity that breathes through many different cultures across the world. As a result, autonomy and tolerance, as well as interdependence and responsibility, have been at the heart of the varied struggles across the Communion. These came to a head at the threshold of the twenty-first century.
ANGLICAN IDENTITY AND THE COMMUNION
More than forty churches serving 165 countries and eighty-five million members make up the Anglican Communion. Each church has its own autonomous governing body. Their relationship to one another is much like close relatives in an extended family. The family may have shared customs and a tradition that provides a common identity among its members, but the relatives have their own immediate families where authority relations and customs often differ. Therefore, decisions that Anglican Communion councils or bodies make are given serious consideration by the member churches (also called provinces), but each decides whether it will support them. The archbishop of Canterbury is considered the spiritual leader of the Communion but has no direct authority over any of the member churches other than the Church of England.
Anglicans share similarities in identity and practice with both Catholics and Protestants. As a denominational tradition, Anglicanism has given rise to a number of Protestant movements and denominations, such as Puritanism, Congregationalism, and Methodism. Yet like Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism is understood by its churches around the world as sharing in a common catholic tradition with direct roots to the apostolic era. Over the centuries, Anglican churches have developed a wide range of internal religious expressions from evangelical to catholic, which has resulted in varied viewpoints on matters of faith that at times have severely strained relationships. These differing expressions have added further complexity across the range of cultures that constitute the Anglican Communion.
The Anglican Communion, in its leadership and ethos, historically has been dominated by older white male bishops from Britain, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. This began to change in the 1960s through movements for political independence across Africa, along with a fresh vision of mission relationships based on mutual responsibility and interdepen-dence. 1 These shifts brought new leaders into the Communion who were raised in the cultures they represented and who offered different visions and understandings of what faith and life together might mean. Their growing visibility and voices have added an increasingly diverse cultural vibrancy to the Communion. Female bishops from several provinces and continents, as well as female clergy and lay leaders, have become part of this growing diversity.
As a result, a common journey together no longer could mean an agreeable stroll through the English or North American countryside, so to speak. Over the last three decades, that journey has grown increasingly surprising, frequently tumultuous, profoundly educational, occasionally painful, and for many, ultimately gratifying. As the Anglican Communion’s global leadership and mission become characterized more and more by mutuality, this new type of journey will not end where it began.
The Anglican Communion and Indaba
Indaba was brought into the Anglican Communion at a time of strong tension and bitterness that had arisen from growing disagreement over how Scripture and tradition should be understood and how faith ought to be lived out. These differences were linked to the rising global multicultural diversity in Anglican leadership and a huge growth in Anglican churches over the last several decades across Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America.
Historically, as colonial Anglicanism extended its spread across continents and cultures, tensions had begun to grow over whether Anglicanism should be strictly a colonial church or be allowed to express aspects of the indigenous cultures. By the mid-1860s, a crisis had developed in Cape Town between two bishops who held very different views on this matter, 2 and the situation reflected mounting concerns elsewhere across the church. In 1867, the archbishop of Canterbury called bishops across the Anglican churches to meet at London’s Lambeth Palace to have an informal conversation about concerns involving the relationship between Anglicanism and indigenous cultures. 3 The meeting was viewed so positively afterward that Lambeth Conferences typically have been held every ten years since.
Over the years, however, Lambeth meetings became agenda-packed affairs, with parliamentary-style debate and voting on resolutions as the primary means of conversation and coming to a common decision. Even though the decisions have held moral but not legal status for the autonomous member churches, by 1998 the meeting had become so politically charged, in part through the increasing diversity of cultures and theological views, that faithful leaders were accusing one another of faithlessness and intolerance in both religious beliefs and cultural understanding. These tensions threatened to split apart the Communion.
An issue capturing widespread attention may be a symptom of a deeper concern that needs to be addressed, which was the case with the conflicts that surfaced over homosexuality in the Anglican Commu