Dialogue as gradual evangelization

Towards the end of last week’s Shalom I wrote these words: “It is my hope that this year of Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue will see a more frequent faith sharing among Christian Churches and faith traditions. This might happen when dialogue is rightly understood as gradual personal sharing of one’s faith in the process of deepening human friendship which is the bottom line of dialogue.”

These two sentences need more clarifying lest someone is confused.

There can be confusion when one asks, is gradual evangelization making others Christian? Or making Protestants Catholic? Or making Muslim and Indigenous believers Christians and Catholic?

No, definitely not. Evangelizing is not proselytizing or slowly converting them to our religion. Evangelizing is sharing our faith in Jesus Christ without coercion. But why gradual?

“Gradual” in our experience refers to an opportunity, a possibility when our dialogue partner asks why do we believe in or support a value, a teaching. In other words, in the course of our friendly relations brought about by socio-economic-political collaborations, we wait for the question to surface. We do not, even indirectly, force our partner to listen out sharing of our personal relationship with God in Jesus Christ. As previously mentioned above, “…in the process of deepening human friendship…”, the quality and depth of such friendship will determine when the intimate, delicate, personal questions would be verbalized and articulated in freedom.

In the early years of the 24-year life of the Bishops-Ulama Conference (BUC), the Muslim Ulama and the Protestant Bishops and Pastors would repeatedly insist that the Conference would now discuss the Prophethood of Mohammad and the Divinity of Jesus Christ. For five years I refused to allow it because we were not yet good friends. We would only quarrel. I used to reply by saying “let us wait for the time when we can listen well and disagree without being disagreeable”. That time came eight years later!