Concluding Remarks

The colonial Church in the Third world (the image and likeness of the metropolitan Church) has built a solid material basis for itself by having landed property and buildings and other sources of regular income. The price to pay for this is dependence on the dominant classes, whose help is indispensable for the maintenance of and augmentation of the Church's patrimony. Of course the poor were never neglected: they had the sacraments, processions and alms. These were meant to console and confirm them in their natural fatalism. Compared with this situation, the BCCs foster critical relationships and do not allow themselves to be used for maintaining the stability and progress of some classes and of the government that ensures this. It is up to the official Church to support the poor prophetically, abandoning its strong position and temporal power.

It is in the history of Hong Kong that one will have to seek the elements for a creative response in view of its future. The social, political, economic and ecclesiastical structures that have taken root in Hong Kong will need to be carefully evaluated for their constructive or deviating contribution to the majority of the people of Hong Kong. It will be necessary to assess deviation in terms of values that are not in keeping with the "Kingdom of God" and are becoming a block to responding prophetically to the call of the God of history. It may be necessary to do much genuine soul-searching to see how much of the concern for "democracy" is truly a concern for justice for the marginalized or only a concern for safeguarding the benefits reaped by the institutional Church and the well-to-do Christians of Hong Kong. It may also be necessary to distinguish "Church and State" from "religion and politics". When Church and State cannot count on each other for mutual support, when ideologies and public legitimations change, then it is only a new understanding of the tasks of religious faith, with new structures of participation and community building in the Church, that will enable the Christians of Hong Kong to outlive any particular historical conjunction and provide a new creative basis for expressing religious commitment in daily life.

Unwillingness to undertake a serious response to the above points could vitiate any plans to embark on adapting traditional Church structures, turning them into a mere political strategy of the middle class (presuming that the upper class has plans for, and access to, better pastures elsewhere). Any ideas of strategy could end up with frustration faced with intra-Church confusion and political anxieties that may become the lot of Hong Kong Christians in the wake of its integration into the People's Republic of China. The one and only predominant desire ought to be to see in the new developments an historic opportunity to carry the faith and its liberating message into the Mainland in the midst of any trials that may be awaiting.