Overall, Brother Bøytler’s article is very informative and challenging. I hope our church will accept the challenge to discuss the difficult issues he raises and to move forward in seeking the unity necessary to keep us connected around the world. v
Rev. Wilson A. Nkumba Rev. Wilson A. Nkumba is a pastor and teacher in the Moravian Church in Western Tanzania. He was a participant in the 2014 Bethlehem Conference on Moravian Music and History and is a consultant for the Common Moravian Curriculum Project of the Unitas Fratrum. First of all, I would like to congratulate Rev. Dr. Jørgen Bøytler for a very impressive and instructive presentation which brings about the generally unknown current situation of the Unity into known statistical reality. After reading the whole of Brother Bøytler’s paper, I came to realize that the Moravian Unity is confronted with the danger of being wiped away from the world map. This danger reveals itself in three ways. The first is division between northern and southern parts of the world due to tremendous increases in differences between them and specifically between regions as time goes. The second is loosing of the classic features of Moravian identity of the global South; although there is growth in numbers, the church is immersing itself into other denominations’ cultures and absorbing those cultures. Gradually the church will die for loss of all distinctive Moravian features, and will instead be something else. The last revelation is the stagnation of the Church in the US and Europe, which is caused by believers’ behavior of being so faithful to Zinzendorf ’s theology of ecclesiology as well as secularization of the northern societies. Out of awareness of these challenges, during the whole period of reading, meditating upon and writing my response to his presentation, my mind was absorbed in Brother Bøytler’s first question: “can unity prevail in the diversity of the Globalized Moravian Church?” I think this is very important question which we need to focus on. To be honest, it is a very tough job for all of us to predict the future of the Unity, since it is true that the future of the Unity will not rely on what we verbalize concerning our well wishes about the future of the Globalized Moravian Church. Various complicated reasons make up the nature of this hardship to predict the future of the Unity. For instance, Brother Bøytler told us that one of the reasons for the growth of the Church in the global South, and the decline of it in North, depends on how much the region in which the Church exists tends to abide in or leave Zinzendorf ’s theology of ecclesiology. For example, those who
THE
HINGE
27