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The world-wide Church already has the majority of its members living in the Southern Hemisphere. Therefore the Church of the new century will be a Third World Church, which means a Church of the poor and non-powerful, non-clericalist, de-centralised, expressing itself in less legislation and organisation.
This will dictate a new pattern for the Church as we know it in the West. Our European Church will become more of a witness to Gospel values by downshifting in five particular areas.
- Our large anonymous urban parishes will become the nodes of a network of neighbourhood communities. For the most part the life of Christians will be nourished by their participation in small local communities of about ten-families size.
- Within the Catholic Church there will be a shift of jurisdiction away from Papal/Vatican authority to local dioceses through which the Gospel and Church life will be inculturated in each country. The supreme authority of the Church will reside in collegiality not monarchy.
- The present structures displaying ecclesial power (in the Catholic Church, the Vatican State and its Diplomatic Corps of Nuncios, etc,) will give way to structures which promote growth of and suited to Christians at the grass/cassava roots.
- Today's pyramidical structure will downshift to a way of functioning in a networking, communitarian form.
- There will be a downshift of the importance given to what Church members believe, in favour of how they live: from orthodoxy to orthopraxis. What will matter as each of us passes through death will not be how much we know or believe but how much we love. The former are only means to that end. A traditional Creed can be an instrument of exclusion - if you do not sign up to it you don't belong with us - rather than spiritual nourishment. Creeds will be composed in the idiom of each community's culture.
Adrian B Smith
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