What Should be the Voice of the Church?
Dr Asangba Tzüdir
We live in interesting times made more pronounced by the various paradoxes. When we are supposed to ‘live’ as humans, we seem to have lost our sense and sights of the predicament that makes each of us a human and rather ‘exist’ without meaning and purpose. Rather than Christian ethics and moral ideals, our value system is comfortably nestled in materialism. We pursue higher incomes through the depreciation of our morals. There seems to be sweetness in embracing the culture of undeserved eating rather than the livelihood earned through honest sweat.
Technology has enabled us to connect with people around the world but it has created a huge distance and relationship gap with people that are actually close and dear to us. There is virtual enlightenment rather than spiritual enlightenment and harmony. The creation of unions has only brought disunity among the people on various sinister lines. Our corrupt minds can still talk against corruption, as such beautiful and meaningful concepts that generate value systems are sacrificed at the altar of lip service or like a hay wash. These are some of the many paradoxes confronting us today threatening our life and living.
Is there a possible way out of these paradoxes? These paradoxes cannot be solved through the thoughts that created the paradoxical problems. There is need for alternative perspectives that can help enable us in decoding the meaning and purpose of our existence. For a people governed by religiosity, the Church has a big role to play here. It is time for the Church to proclaim its true voice to the people, and thereby reclaim its status and function as a physically redemptive Church so also spiritual redemption in providing alternative perspectives that can create a change in our mindsets. There is need for newer mindsets that would help erase the socially encoded and religiously ‘dogmatic beliefs’, which closes our hearts and minds from exploring various possible alternatives.
To an opinion poll question conducted by this paper on whether theologians and Church leaders should get involved in politics in Nagaland, and it was not surprising that those favoring NO edged the YES by a mere 4% which only proved the inconclusive nature of such a question, more so, compounded by the amorphous understanding of politics in relation to the Church. The question of whether the Church should involve in politics has been a topic of debate and discussion over the years and at the same time making it a religiously moral dilemma. To say the least, our life itself is politics; it is a life engaged in political activity. When Aristotle spoke about man as a political animal, he was characterizing man as a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; and Foucault took it further when he talks about the modern man as an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question. We just need to know what politics is all about and for that matter the Church seriously needs to know its political role especially in relation to the state.
The biggest political responsibility of the Church today is to inculcate Christian values and moral ideals and newer perspectives in the political functioning of the state that is so enmeshed in the paradoxes of life. This should begin by first founding the Church within a ‘religio-political’ envisioning beyond the grasp of what we call ‘dirty church politics.’ In hindsight, one pressing area is the ‘clean election campaign’ where the Churches need to actively engage in producing a transformative effect in the political affairs of the state. Such engagement can reawaken the political consciousness of our state. But, at the end it all narrows down to the mindsets, perspectives and approach beyond what is written in black and white.
(Dr. Asangba Tzüdir is an Editor with Heritage Publishing House. He contributes a weekly guest editorial to the Morung Express. Comments can be mailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
