talking to, and interfering with, the world

"...the church today has to become determined to learn a new way of talking to the world and not less of interfering with the world. A new way of talking, because the secularized world in which we live has developed so many new, human possibilities that she can only be legitimately talked to if she is also listened to, and the talking has a chance of becoming real mutual communication. A new way of interfering, because in the first place it is appalling to notice the smallness of the church's significance in the welter of the dominant powers and tendencies which govern human lives and thinking...

The modern world, by its victorious secularism, has domesticated the church into a "reservation" for people with "religious" needs, and the church has largely accepted this domestication."

thots from Dutch missionary-theologian Hendrik Kraemer in 1958! I like what Ryan Bolger had to say a while back about missionaries understanding what needs to go on in our own communities in North America. I am reading Kraemer's book A Theology of the Laity in preparation for a course I am teaching at Tyndale Seminary in the fall, "Faith in the Marketplace."

here's another great little quote from Kraemer:

The only true church is not the hotel Church, where guests rather avoid than meet each other, but the family church, life under one roof in communion, a church that can stand tensions and quarrels.