Archbishop Jukka
Paarma
Address given at the "Faith and Mission - Shared Commitment" Consultation
in Paltamo, Finland, on June
11, 2001
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is the
fruit of missions work.
In one sense it can be said of our church, as of the
church of Rome, that it gave birth to itself, as merchants and travelers took
this new faith with them and spread it as they went. Here too we can follow the
progress of Christianity, for example, according to the way in which old
cremation rituals gave way to Christian burial, in line with the doctrine of
the bodily resurrection. There are other signs of the earliest arrival of Christianity
in Finland as well. In the Turku region old crosses have been found from the
time before the division of Christianity into eastern and western churches.
Here in the north Christianity first had an influence through its own power and the foothold it gained was reinforced through deliberate missions work. The frescoes in our national sanctuary, the Turku Cathedral, also tell of this. As you walk down the main aisle of the cathedral towards the main chancel, you pass through a wide archway. Two large pictures are painted on the walls of this archway. One of these represents the ninth century north-German missionary bishop Ansgarius. This bishop of Hamburg and Bremen is not known to have ever visited Finland, but his work in spreading the Christian faith to Scandinavia made him the Apostle of the Nordic region, thus well deserving of his place in our national sanctuary.
As you go into the main chancel itself, there too is a
large painting related to our missionary history. The picture depicts Saint Henry
around the year 1150 baptizing Finns as Christians in Turku near Kupittaa.
Henry, our patron saint, was English by birth, having left is homeland and come
by way of Upsala to Finland to organize the church which had already begun
here, and to establish here a separate Finnish diocese in Turku.
Accompanying these medieval missionary bishops in the Turku Cathedral are,
across from Ansgarius, Martin Luther, the reformer of the sixteenth century,
our church’s teacher and guide; and across from Henry, Finland’s own reformer,
Michael Agricola, who was taught in Wittenberg by Luther and Melanchton, and
who, in the fresco, is depicted presenting the first copy of his Finnish
translation of the New Testament to king Gustaf Vasa.
As I proceed to outline our church’s stand on ecumenism and missions in the
beginning of this new millennium, my starting point is our church’s
self-understanding as an Evangelical Lutheran church. The pictures which we
have just seen tell of our missionary history, and of how we understand the
place of our own church with Christendom.
*
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is Christ’s
church in Finland. Our church does not claim to be the only true church in
Finland, but our church understands itself to be part of this one true and
salvation bringing church. According to Luther, the church is the community of
the Holy Spirit, “a peculiar congregation in the world, which is the mother
that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God” (Large
Catechism, explanation of the third article of faith). The church has been
entrusted with a precious heritage of faith, which it has been passing on from
generation to generation.
Our church has an important historical continuity. We are also heirs to the
apostles and the early church. I myself am the fifty-third bishop to sit in
Saint Henry’s seat in Turku. The history of our church does not begin in the
sixteenth century, but rather we are part of the same church as the generations
before us. The hosts of heaven and all of the saints are also present in our
worship services. Today’s Lutheran church in Finland continues the work of
Saint Henry and the medieval Catholic church in proclaiming the word of God,
baptizing and teaching, believing and serving.
This church, situated up here in the North, away from the world’s
thoroughfares, lived for centuries concentrating on its own mission and service
in terms of baptizing and raising up new members. We are accustomed to speaking
of our church as a folk church, in the sense that its message is intended for
the nation as a whole; its mission and service tasks are intended to encompass
the entire population of the country. The church then understood its calling in
mission and service to be for the benefit of our own nation, not as yet for the
benefit of the nations.
Our church’s foreign missions began, as with those of many other churches, only
in the late nineteenth century. It was then that individual believers and
priests as well began to awaken to the missionary calling in the current sense
of the word. The Finnish Missionary Society – now The Finnish Evangelical
Lutheran Mission - was established in 1859. (The original Finnish name does not contain the words “Evangelical”
or “Lutheran”, for given historical
reasons.) The founders were church orientated Lutherans, but due to the
governmental situation at the time – Finland, with its vast Lutheran majority,
being then a grand duchy of Orthodox Russia – the mission was set up as a free
association mission society. The Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission began its
work in Ovamboland in the year 1870.
In Finland catching fire for missionary work has been strongly connected with
the spiritual awakenings with which God has blessed his church. Thus revival
movements have from their very inception been strongly committed to foreign
missions and the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission as well in its time chose
to adopt the revivalist association format as the basis for its foreign
missions work. In a church which has had many revivals then, we have many
missionary organizations as well, seven of which have officially empowered by
our church to carry out this work.
From the start missionary societies have been understood as means of fulfilling
the great commission given by Christ to the church. At times though there has
been the idea within mission societies that missionary work is their task, not that of their church or
congregations. This is not surprising, given that not all of those within
ecclesiastical circles at that time understood missions to be the church’s
central task.
Over the past century thinking in our church has progressed in this area.
Missions are now seen specifically as the basic task of the church, not just as
the activity of missions activists and believers who have taken on missions as
a specialized hobby. The way in which the church now sees missionary work as
one of its most basic tasks can be seen in many important documents. For
example in one of the most important ecumenical documents in recent years, the
Porvoo Common Statement agreed upon between Anglican and Lutheran churches, it
is stated with strong emphasis that the church is apostolic and thus a
missionary church. Apostolicity is here defined as including two factors:
faithfulness to the apostolic tradition and faithfulness to the call to
missions. The English language version of the Porvoo document has even been
given the name ‘Together in Mission and Ministry’.
The Porvoo Common Statement reads as follows:
36. ‘In the Creed, the Church confesses itself to be apostolic. The Church
lives in continuity with the apostles and their proclamation. The same Lord who
sent the apostles continues to be present in the Church. The Spirit keeps the
Church in the apostolic tradition until the fulfillment of history in the
Kingdom of God. Apostolic tradition in the Church means continuity in the
permanent characteristics of the Church of the apostles: witness to the
apostolic faith, proclamation and fresh interpretation of the Gospel,
celebration of baptism and the Eucharist, the transmission of ministerial
responsibilities, communion in prayer, love, joy and suffering, service to the
sick and needy, unity among the local churches and sharing the gifts which the
Lord has given to each.’
37. ‘The Church today is charged, as were the apostles, to proclaim the gospel
to all nations, because the good news about Jesus Christ is the disclosure of
God's eternal plan for the reconciliation of all things in his Son. The Church
is called to faithfulness to the normative apostolic witness to the life,
death, resurrection and exaltation of its Lord. The Church receives its mission
and the power to fulfill this mission as a gift of the risen Christ. The Church
is thus apostolic as a whole.’ (The Porvoo Common Statement 36, 37b)
This clear policy is also seen in our new Church Act,
which came into effect in 1994. There it is stated, right after the paragraph
regarding the confession of the church, that in accordance with its confession
the task of the church is, “to proclaim the word of God and distribute the
sacraments, and to otherwise act in such a way as to spread the message of
Christ and bring brotherly love to fruition” (Church Act, chapter 1, § 2).
In addition to distributing the word and sacraments there are two basic tasks
mentioned here: spreading the message of Christ and putting brotherly love into
effect – missions and diaconia. Beyond this the Church Act defines the mission
work of the parish as follows: “The parish and its members are to promote
missions work, the purpose of which is to spread the gospel among those who are
not Christians.”
*
What is the of overall picture of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church of Finland as a missionary church like then? In answering this
question I will be referring to the four year report for 1996-1999 which has
just been discussed in our General Synod. In terms of that report we can say
that the missions work of our church has intensified, but that new problems
have arisen.
In the years 1996-1999 the amounts which parishes
budgeted for missions work rose significantly, as did volunteer contributions.
The parish budget portion of these funds has been approximately 40 %. A
considerable portion of the remaining support comes from the close to 20
different national church collections for missions and international diaconia
organized by our church’s central administrative offices. During the period
covered in the report support for mission work rose by 18 %. In 1995 mission
support amounted to FIM 159 million [one-hundred-fifty-nine million Finnish
marks]. In 1999 this had risen to FIM 188 million, and for the jubilee year of
2000 missions support passed the 200 million mark.
During these years parishes also
diversified their interaction with associated churches. For example the
dioceses of Helsinki and Tampere began sister-diocese projects with dioceses of
the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia, and the diocese of Lapua
established a friendship with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan.
But while parish support for missions rose by 18 %, the number of missionaries
working in the church’s missionary organizations still declined by 14 %. The
decline in the number of those going to the mission field comes in part from
changes in the nature of the cooperation between our churches, but it is also
due to the fact that those interested in missions have had difficulty in
obtaining sufficiently long leaves of absence from their work here in Finland.
Of the church’s seven missionary organizations, that with the most missionaries
in the field in 1999 was the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Mission, with 274.
Next came ‘The People’s Mission’ [Kansanlähetys] with 98 (differing from the
rest by showing a 10 % growth in this area); followed by the ‘Lutheran
Evangelical Association in Finland’ [Suomen Luterilainen Evankeliumiyhdistys]
(60), ‘The Sower’ [Kylväjä] (51), ‘The Messengers’ [Sanansaattajat](10) and the
‘Swedish Lutheran Evangelical Association in Finland’ [Svenska Lutherska
Evangeliföreningen i Finland] (9). The Finnish Bible Society, specialized in
Bible translation and distribution work, does not have any missionaries in the
field at this point.
In the attached illustration you can see those areas of activity, on five
different continents, in which there are Finnish missionaries or other forms of
cooperation. The continents with the largest numbers of missionaries from our
church in 1999 were Africa (201) and Asia (193). In other countries of Europe
there were 77; in Latin America, 18; and in Oceania, 13. The individual
countries with the greatest numbers of our missionaries were Ethiopia (48),
Russia (45), Japan (41) and Tanzania (32). Finnish Lutheran missionaries are
active altogether in 34 different countries.
*
The strength of our church’s missionary work has been in
our revival movements and the economic and personal support channeled through
their missionary organizations. But this phenomenon has its down side as well.
In many parishes an overlap has been noticed between the work and organization
of these missionary organizations and that of our central organ for
international diaconia, Finn Church Aid. The Church Council has thus
established a committee for the development of missions work, to make proposals
for the development of our church’s missionary organization model, and to
investigate the ways in which the connections, cooperation and division of
labor between missions and international diaconia should be developed. Thus
began a position paper, ‘The Mission of the Whole Church,’ the further
development of which is currently underway in our church.
In the ‘Mission of the Whole Church’ process increased
attention has been paid to the responsibility of the universal church. Making
the missionary work of the church into still more of a cooperative venture
between churches draws the church into a discussion of the future of missions
work and the distribution of resources between churches. At the same time the
spread of Islam and new religious movements require position statements and
explanations from the church.
The current system, where the actual foreign mission operators are the church’s
official missionary organizations, and where the church’s Office for Global
Mission is part of a common plan for increasing cooperation between
organizations and training, has functioned relatively well. Leaving all
functional responsibility to these organizations in the future, however, will
no longer be sufficient. The ‘Mission of the Whole Church’ memorandum takes the
view that joint planning, decision making and cooperation would be noticeable
strengthening factors, for the following reasons among others:
1. Cooperation and contact between churches
Cooperation between churches and ecumenical
discussions increasingly bring out questions relating to missionary work,
regarding which our church must take a position and then take responsibility
for it. Young churches of Asia, Africa and Latin America have for some time
already hoped for direct contacts with our church. More than they have been,
representatives of Finnish missionary organizations working with associated
churches should be seen as workers of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of
Finland.
The new situation is illustrated by the fact that also
in our own dioceses and parishes a clear need has arisen for direct contacts
with associated missionary churches. The previously mentioned partnership
relationships with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Namibia, and the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan are clear examples of this. In a natural
way space must be made for initiatives arising from parishes, and the bilateral
aspect of missions should be given concrete form.
Missions always involve, in one way or another, striving for the unity of the
church. For this reason the type of image our church presents in terms of internal
unity in the organization of its missions work and a desire to also strive for
real unity between churches is important.
2. Connections between missions and international diaconia
The central relationship between missions and
international diaconia has always been one of the central questions concerning
missionary work. This question has often arisen here on the home front as a
theoretical consideration of principle. In the practice of missionary work the
interrelatedness of these two is self-evident. “To labor of heart, mouth and hand, already we spring to action,”
(Finnish Hymnal 343, verse 3) is something we have both sung and thought. We
testify of the Lord often in ways other than by preaching, especially through
love and service; though preaching per se
– or should I say, telling of Christ – is an indispensable part of the work as
a whole.
Developing the connection between missions and international diaconia is a
particularly timely issue for us domestically at the moment. This means on the one
hand developing the contact between our missionary organizations and Finn
Church Aid; and on the other, coordinating resources and clarifying the common
vision of missions and diaconia at the domestic local congregation level. The
old saying that one’s homework must be done first and well is applicable here
too.
3. The question of the position of the church’s
missionary organizations
Our church’s model for organizing missionary work
has given some the impression that these organizations would be the only ones
actually carrying out missions work, and parishes’ primary function would be to
finance this work. That is not at all how things work these days, but in order
to keep this caricature from being realized we must find some sort of
operational structure in which missionary organizations, which have operated
independently for a rather long time, might commit themselves to more far
reaching joint planning and decision making. For the administration of the
whole church we will need the sort of operational unit for missions work and
international service which could take responsibility for those church fields
and also meet the expectations of our associated churches. Parishes as well
must be better able to participate in the planning of missions work and international
diaconia.
This is the kind of homework that we are working on here in the Evangelical
Lutheran Church of Finland, and I see this consultation called by the Finnish
Evangelical Lutheran Mission with representatives of its associated churches as
part of the process of doing that homework. It is as though the Finnish
Evangelical Lutheran Mission has invited you to their home to help work on an
assignment that has been given to the whole class: to commit ourselves in unity
to the Triune God and the mission of his church.
*
When we speak in our church of the great commission
given to the church and of world missions, it is no longer just a question of
operations taking place somewhere else – in other lands and with other churches
– but more and more often global mission presents a question of how our church
carries out its basic task right at its own doorstep.
Although 85 % of the population of Finland still belong to the Lutheran church,
with close to 90 % belonging to some form of Christian church, in many ways we
live domestically on a mission field. The church membership percentage in some
parishes in the capital district is already down to around 70 %. Part of the
question is that people are resigning from the church and no longer bringing in
their children for baptism. Another reason for the increase in non-church
members, however, is the increasing number of immigrants in Finland. Because of
these things, those within our church’s parishes must be prepared to face an
increased plurality of values in society and be open to contacts between
religions and to providing unrequested service and a clear Christian
witness.
In attending to our task of witnessing, we in the Evangelical Lutheran Church
of Finland increasingly need your support. We want to learn of how you in your
own mission fields confront people belonging to other religions, and those
which do not confess any religious faith at all. We need your experiences, but
more and more I have begun to feel that we need genuine two-way interaction. In
the same way that workers from our church serve in your churches, we need fresh
vision from your workers, who could come to work for some time here in our
churches.
The pictures which I showed to you at the beginning
are still relevant today. Christianity in Finland, going back to the times of
Saint Henry, Saint Ansgarius and the Lutheran Reformation, has always needed
those who spiritually feed the flock of the living God, care for the
up-bringing of new generations of believers and equip us to testify for Christ.