A Continuing Survey of New Groups, Movements, Events,and People Impacting Religion
01: The worship immersion tour run by the interfaith organization Faith House in New York guides visitors through the city’s religious communities during three or four day retreats.
Faith House director Samir Selmanovic, a Seventh Day Adventist pastor from Croatia, started the tours to help visitors learn about other faiths by having them enter into a liturgy or sacred space on their own terms. Faith House had initially held interfaith dialogues and encounters that brought together Jews, Christians, Muslims, and atheists in neutral places (called Living Room events) but Selmanovic found that “people respond better when something is happening in their places because they have ownership of it.”
(Source: Christian Century, June 26)
02: Jesus Youth, a Catholic charismatic movement that is growing in Britain—and the rest of the world– by way of Kerala, India, is a major example of how Indian charismatics are influencing Catholicism in the UK. Jesus Youth originated 25 years ago in the Indian state of Kerala, which is considered India’s Bible belt because of its large Christian population, but has now spread to other parts of the world through economic migration.
The strategy of the group has been to gather existing members of Jesus Youth together and then reach out to Indian Catholics, including the second generation born in England. Finally, the movement seeks to reach the indigenous population. It is this last more difficult stage that Jesus Youth has just embarked on and it seems to be having some success. The group was given a disused inner-city parish at risk of closure and started conducting 24-hour adoration of the Eucharist sessions, eventually drawing new families to the church from surrounding areas.
Jesus Youth also holds intensive prayer between Ash Wednesday and Pentecost that now encompasses 35 parishes. Another charismatic network with its roots in Kerala started “Second Saturday Conventions” that feature preaching and “signs and wonders,” now drawing crowds of up to 3,000 and including those with non-Indian backgrounds.
(Source: The Tablet, May 18)
03: Malkhaz Songulashvili, head of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia (EBCG), is becoming well-known in the ecumenical world for his method of contextualizing Protestantism in an Eastern Orthodox culture.
The Evangelical Baptist Church is the largest Protestant church in Georgia (though with only 17,000 members) and under Songulashvili has incorporated Orthodox practice and worship into its services, such as using chanting and incense. Yet the church also has a female bishop and practices liturgical dance in its services, leaving the Georgian Orthodox Church puzzled about its identity. Because the Orthodox Church withdrew from the World Council of Churches in 1997, the EBCG has become the main ecumenical representative in the country.
The EBCG has also faced alienation and criticism from fellow evangelicals in Russia and Eastern Europe (as well as from a new dissident Baptist church in Georgia), especially since Songulashvili has been friendly to the West and critical of nationalism. But the EBCG is reported to be growing and attracting a following among Georgian young people.
(Source: Christianity Today, June.)