Mission as Accompaniment

Light of Truth

Accompaniment may be one of the latest models of evangelization getting rooted in the Indian Church. One of the adverse effects of urbanization and globalization is the state of alienation and frustration in which millions of individuals are condemned to live. A considerable percentage of youngsters live in indifference and some of them lack even appetite for life. To create in them an enthusiasm for life is a challenging task of mission. The world is in need of a methodology that helps the alienated to come out of their ghettos. It is in this background accompaniment makes entry as an effective method of mission. The incarnational approach of Jesus and empowering approach of Holy Spirit set before us models to instill hope in such people by making them aware of signs of courage and confidence inherent in them.

One can find the foundation for the mission of accompaniment in the NT. Gospels unveil several stories of Jesus remaining at the side of people listening to their anxieties and problems. Typology of Jesus accompanying disciples going to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-31) and the involvement of the Spirit in the case of the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:29) are some of them. TH Sundermeier has showed that the specificity of Jesus’s mission consists in conviviality. Jesus did not live for the people but with the people. This we notice when Jesus sits at table with everyone including sinners and sharing life with them. Through the communitarian festival and conviviality Jesus exalted the gift of life. When a man is heard and understood s/he acquires the capacity to listen to the other which will consequently create an atmosphere of mutual accompaniment in the society. A society comprised of individuals mutually shouldering in joys and sufferings will grow into a hopeful society.

As a paradigm, accompaniment fits well to the nature of God’s mission in the world. The Trinitarian God communicates love to humanity not in essence but in relation. At the centre of the luminous relation of the three divine persons there is the Father’s gift of the Son and its fullness in the coming of the Spirit. This gift has its content in the agape and its form is in the kenosis. Jesus came to the world so that humanity might have life and have it more abundantly. What stirs the human heart is that which we express in relation than what we communicate with concepts. It must be to emphasize this aspect of empowering the other through accompaniment that St Pope John Paul II observed in Redemptoris Hominis: ‘mission is not destruction but a taking up and building from what is in the depth of human life’ (n° 12).

Envisaging the mission prospects in this manner does not mean that it is the world that sets the agenda for the Church mission. Though the world provides the agenda for mission, the Church makes it her own according to the directives she has received from God. Moreover, Church does not renounce the mission of announcing the gospel; there is difference only in the way she executes them. If she realizes only the programme scheduled by the world, as David Bosch has rightly observed, mission will become merely an umbrella term for health and welfare services and for the projects of economic and political development. Church can be missionary only if it’s being in the world is also at the same time a being different from the world. Church has to be unique in the world without being of the world. A Church that forgets of her sending into the world as a messenger of salvation, breaks off from her vital centre and from herself. However, according to the paradigm Missio Dei, Church is not at the centre of evangelization. Being an instrument of the Trinitarian God she seeks with others the traces of the Kingdom that is hidden in the social, cultural and religious life of humanity and incorporate them in the mystical body of Christ.

kundu1962@mail.com

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