EDINBURGH, Scotland — “Good
evangelism” and “bad evangelism” came under discussion when a diverse group of
Christians met to mark the 100th anniversary of the historic 1910 Edinburgh
Missionary Conference.
Antonios Kireopoulos, the
associate general secretary for interfaith relations for the New York-based
National Council of Churches, on June 4 used his keynote address to draw a line
between “good” evangelism and bad “proselytism.”
Evangelism is most harmful,
he said, when it “strives to make Christians from among people that are already
Christians,” and suffering under political difficulties.
Kireopoulos cited the
experience in Russia and other Eastern European countries after the fall of the
Soviet Union, when missionaries, “generally, but not only from evangelical or fundamentalist
Protestant communities in the U.S., took advantage of the weak.”
The Edinburgh meeting is
commemorating the centenary of the 1910 World Missionary Conference, which
marked the beginning of the modern ecumenical movement for church unity.
The organizers of the 2010
meeting include representatives of evangelical, Orthodox, Pentecostal,
Protestant and Roman Catholic traditions, as well as of the World Council of
Churches.
In Iraq, where Christian
communities had borne much of the suffering since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion,
there had been a “particularly egregious missionary effort,” Kireopoulos said.
“How much more powerful
would the witness to Christ have been if the missionaries sent to Iraq were
there to support the local Christians, to work with the local Christian
churches to foster reconciliation in their communities torn apart by war?”