Editorial Nigrizia

November 2007

And free us from the dumping sites.

Is a missionary style deeply rooted in the contradictions and miseries of today humanity, mission at its fullness? For Nigrizia there is no doubt: it is indeed mission. It is the testimony-appeal that Daniele Moschetti, a Comboni missionary, has sent us from Korogocho. At the heart of it there is the Dandora dumping site and the interests- even Italian ones- around it. By no chance we have put it in the church&missionsection. That is its place. Because to think of mission in Nairobi putting aside the shanty towns and the dumping sites that besiege the Kenya capital with their marginalized and impoverished humanity, it would mean to make an abstract, inconsistent and futile proclamation. Evangelization, then, as a process of liberation? Yes, why not? Without downplaying the other aspects and stiles of mission.

It has been a well kept tradition to think of mission as something that Western missionaries do in far way lands, where they used to go to save souls and implant new churches. The more critics used to add: to impose one's own custom and tradition on another people and culture. Later on focus was sharper and the missionary paradigm has been enriched by other new (or old but revised) elements: mission as church with others, as mission Dei, as mediator of salvation, as evangelization, contextualization, liberation, inculturation, common witness, ministry of the whole God?s people, inter religious dialogue, search for justice?

All of the above have to be seen in their completeness of the same missionary paradigm to be taken as it stands. Mission is not only the verbal proclamation (to announce the Gospel), though it always has a verbal dimension. However words have never to be separated from deeds, from the testimony of one's own life. It is the logic of the Word took flesh. The word took flesh is the Gospel. Works without words are mute; word without works is empty. Word does interpret the works and works do subscribe works.

The apostolic exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi by Pope Paul VI (1975) points out that :

Evangelization will always contain - as the foundation, center, and at the same time, summit of its dynamism - a clear proclamation that, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, who died and rose from the dead, salvation is offered to all men, as a gift of God's grace and mercy. And not an immanent salvation, meeting material or even spiritual needs, restricted to the framework of temporal existence and completely identified with temporal desires, hopes, affairs and struggles, but a salvation which exceeds all these limits in order to reach fulfillment in a communion with the one and only divine Absolute: a transcendent and eschatological salvation, which indeed has its beginning in this life but which is fulfilled in eternity. (n.27)

The document points out as well that: But evangelization would not be complete if it did not take account of the unceasing interplay of the Gospel and of man's concrete life, both personal and social. This is why evangelization involves an explicit message, adapted to the different situations constantly being realized, about the rights and duties of every human being, about family life without which personal growth and development is hardly possible, about life in society, about international life, peace, justice and development- a message especially energetic today about liberation? (n.29).

Evangelization and the commitment to undo the complexities of human life are both of them essential aspects of Christian obligation. They are expression of the teaching about God and humanity, of the love for the other and of obedience to God. We are learning nowadays to overcome the dichotomy between evangelization and social action. In Christ, the spiritual Gospel and the social Gospel were together. Any alternative between the Gospel's proclamation and humanization is untenable. The one giving us his testimony from Korogocho believes that there is no alternative between conversion of the hearts and betterment of life?s conditions (including, if necessary to denounce). His language may sound not as much of religious, but who would dare to call it not evangelical and not missionary??

Already in 1968, the Dutch theologian Visser t?Hooft used to write: A Christianity that has lost site of its vertical dimension has lost its own flavour and it is not only tasteless in itself, but it is useless for the world at large. However a Christianity that would make use of the vertical dimension as a tool to escape from its own responsibilities about human life is a negation of incarnation.

At the end of the day, what else is to get dirty one's own sandals in the world dumping sites- finding out injustices, building up clear relationships, suggesting changes in the light of equity and the respect for life- is not to bear witness to the Gospel?

Translated by: Enrico Gonzales