The Approach

Much has been written in recent years on the issue of the local Church (with variations in terminology) and the most that I could claim to do in this paper is to focus on some points that perhaps have not been sufficiently stressed and which could help us understand the problems of localizing the church, which is essential for its true catholicity. Without a good grasp of such issues, serious experiment with "small faith communities" could prove frustrating. As may be expected, our approach will be predominantly historical, but with an awareness of, and sensitivity to, the theological implications for churches in the Third World. The church of Hong Kong is likely to enter into this category.

It is not possible in the space available to enter into factual details of the origin and evolution of the individual local churches in Asia. However, the colonial atmosphere in which they grew has shaped their growth and evolution. The Portuguese and Spanish expansion determined to a large extent the pattern of evolution of the local churches all over Asia, including regions that came under control of other European powers in the course of later centuries. The recipient cultures need also to be taken seriously into consideration to understand the nature of the local churches in Asia. My concluding section will pay special attention to this.

The Church in History : Witnessing to the Gospel?

In the guidelines issued for drawing up the FABC / TAC document on THE LOCAL CHURCH, it was stated that the "being of the Church" is not separable from its "mission". This would imply that the nature of the Church can be best understood only against the background of its past and its doings in the past, without of course negating potentialities for the filture. The scriptural "mission" to all nations and till the end of time does not by itself and without reference to the historical growth of the Church help us to understand how that "mission" was actuated. Furthermore, new challenges to "mission" cannot be understood except in the historical conjuncture that has evolved from both the distant and the more recent past.

The beginning of the Church is traced back scripturally to Pentecost Day, when the outpouring of the Spirit found people from all over the world speaking their own tongues and all understanding each other－a reversal of the Biblical Babel. Although this phenomenon may help to explain some constitutive elements of the Church, particularly the central role of the Holy Spirit, it does not help to understand the actual process by which Christianity expanded into new regions with different cultures. Rather, the Pentecost narrative idealizes the issue. Practically at no stage of the history of the expanding Church have its individuality and universality been so easily manifested as in the Pentecost narrative! There is little likelihood that people today will accept a theology of "mission" that would overstress the idealism of the scriptures without explaining why that idealism has taken less ideal forms in the course of the past twenty centuries.

The gradual self-understanding of the Church is itself a part of its historical nature, as when Jesus said: "when the Spirit comes ... he will lead you into all the truth" (Jn 16:12-12). In time, and assisted by the Holy Spirit, the Church has realized that she has too often been a victim of her own self-justifying rhetoric. In seeking unity, the Church sometimes fell into a cult of uniformity, of a monolithic Church, which aspired to a single universal language (Latin), a single theological system (Neo-Scholasticism), a single system of worship (the Roman Rite), and a single system of government (the Code of Canon Law). The Church also sought catholicity in universal expansion and in an irrational quest for bigness. The notion of mission was corrupted by the imperialistic effort to bring as many as possible into the fold, and by the adoption of the maxim "Outside the Church no salvation". The "barbarians" of the empires were substituted by "pagans". This trend is turning with the more recent self-understanding, but it does not seem to lead as yet to the understanding of the unity of mutual charity leading to a universality of communion of friends. (3)

3.Avery Dulles, Models of the Church (Hong Kong, 1985).