Mission non-colonial: Swiss theologian and playwright Walter Hollenweger calls on Christians to adopt a humbler approach to evangelism.

For many centuries European Christian evangelism was, with few exceptions, `colonial'. This is most clearly seen in the invasion of Latin America and the enslavement of the native people by the Catholic Church. One missionary said that if the natives were unwilling to be converted they must be killed, because they made human sacrifices to their gods.

Another example: Matteo Ricci was a Jesuit missionary in China. In dialogue with the Emperor he developed a new expression of Christianity, and he translated the name of God into Chinese. Of course this name had connotations in Chinese culture, especially with their ancestor veneration. The Pope said that the translation was unacceptable. The Emperor wrote to the Pope asking him what he knew about Chinese language and philosophy--and, of course, the Pope knew nothing. But he still stopped Ricci's work. As a result, the door was closed to Christianity in China for centuries.

Our European Christian terminology is heavily influenced by our Germanic and Celtic past. Christmas is not in the New Testament. 24 December is borrowed from our Germanic past. Sunday was dedicated to the sun god.

Why do we Swiss celebrate 1 August as our national day? We say that it was on that day in 1291 that the original Helvetic treaty was signed. But, in fact, it was signed on 1 August because that was a holy day--the day of the Celtic god of war and trade.

On 1 August, the original Celtic and Germanic Swiss sacrificed someone and drank his or her blood. When the first missionaries, Columbanus and Ganus, came, they said, `You do not have to kill one of your people. There is one who has died for you.' They replaced the old rite with the Lord's supper. In Western Europe our understanding of the death of Christ goes back not just to the Bible but to the very bones of our pagan past.

The pagan philosopher Aristotle said that logical consistency was a mark of truth. That is not in the Old or New Testaments, nor is it part of Christian tradition. But Thomas Aquinas made that pagan philosophy a medium of theology. I have nothing against that, but we should understand that we are standing on the rock of pagan philosophy and religion. So we should not stop the Chinese if they want to build on their own non-Christian tradition.

The Protestants have been no better than the Catholics. David Livingstone, considered the greatest missionary to Africa, destroyed the Africans' social fabric through commerce. He did not do that because he was greedy for money but for theological reasons. He felt that the Africans' social system prevented them from accepting Christianity.

Most missionaries of Livingstone's day believed that their form of Christianity was the best if not the only one. They forgot that some of our great theologians have been Africans--for instance, Augustine Tepurian. They also forgot that the oral, biblical religion is much nearer to African values than to our modern Western society and church.

This is not a polemic against Western Christianity but against taking for granted that our form of Christianity is the best and that, therefore, Christians the world over should follow our example. When Africans, Latin Americans and Asians, or for that matter women and young people in the West, invent their own forms of Christianity, this is denounced as heresy. When a Korean woman introduced some pre-Christian Korean insight to the World Council of Churches meeting in Canberra, the theological establishment said she was heretical. How do we know this so emphatically? If we were united on all theological and ecclesiastical issues, perhaps we would have a point. But we are not united and cannot know exactly what is heresy and what orthodoxy.

The undoubted success of the missionary movement is no proof of our theological rectitude. It is, rather, a proof of God's grace.

The fact is that colonial evangelism is foreign to the New Testament. Even the conservative evangelicals recognized that at their Congress on Evangelism in Lausanne in December 1974. Christians in New Testament times did not psychologically massage their audience until they submitted to their proclamation and call it `power evangelism'. They exposed the truth and allowed their audience to discover for themselves what the implications were. Biblical evangelism was throughly dialogic and situational.

Take the example of the pagan woman who came to Jesus and said, `My daughter is ill, please heal her.' Jesus said he could not: `One does not take the bread from the children's table and throw it to the dogs.' Here, in the New Testament, Jesus appears to be a racist who says that the Gospel is only for Jews. But the woman said, `Yes, but the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from the master's table.' That touched Jesus. Jesus, the Son of God, learned something about the Gospel from a pagan woman. So, who are we if we don't want to learn something from non-Christians?

The apostle Peter met the gentile Roman centurion Cornelius after he had had an encounter with God. Cornelius did not go to the temple, celebrate the Sabbath or observe circumcision or the food taboos which were a matter of course for Peter. They compared their insights and experiences. Cornelius learned from Peter but did not become a copy of him. And Peter learned from Cornelius that you did not have to follow all those rules in order to be a Christian.

If Christians can learn from non-Christians, is this true for those of other faiths? That is clearly for people of those faiths to answer. But I have met Jews who go a long way in that direction. For instance, a Rabbi told my students, `In Heaven there will certainly be more non-Jews than Jews.' Among Buddhists and Hindus I have met some intransigence but also great openness. What has always astonished me was their non-logical and non-Aristotelian approach. What seems to Europeans a clear `either or' was transformed by them into an `as well as'.

While I was working at the University of Birmingham in England, I met some extraordinarily tolerant people. Birmingham has 60 mosques and about 20 Hindu and Buddhist temples, and many other religions. I always invited people of other faiths to talk to my students about their convictions, especially in relation to Christianity. One of my Muslim colleagues started his lecture by saying that for both Islam and Christianity Jesus of Nazareth was absolutely vital. I went home and began to reread the Qur'an. I discovered that Jesus, or Isah, was seen differently there but given great importance.

What does this mean for me in practice? I have not given up evangelizing. But I don't do it in the colonial way. The people of a town by the Lake of Zurich wanted to perform a Passion play of mine in the local church. Many of them were non-churchgoers although they would not regard themselves as non-Christians. The general manager of the local bank, one of the non-churchgoers, played Pontius Pilate--the procurator of the Roman judiciary who thought that Jesus was probably innocent but decided it would be too difficult to help him. Half-way through his performance he began to stammer. He realized that he was not playing Pontius Pilate, he was Pontius Pilate. And everybody else realized that he realized it--there was a strange feeling in that church.

Similarly, I wrote a play about the parable of the Prodigal Son for a group of wealthy, bored women. I changed the father into a mother who was torn between her two sons. A thousand people came to the church to see the performance. It was moving. When the elder son went out of the church and said, `I don't want to come to the feast which you are giving this worthless brother of mine, who wasted all your money,' she ran after him. But he slammed the door and she began to weep and said, `Please, please come back again.' All of a sudden the biblical story became the story of that community.

I have produced my plays with Protestants, Catholics, Jews and people of no religious background. The irreligious people have been the best actors--they can be astonished, gripped by a biblical text because it has never previously been explained to them. What they take from my texts is up to them. That is a dialogic approach. So mission and dialogue are not opposites. Dialogue is the biblically informed way of carrying out mission and evangelism.