The Internet in Mission and Ecumenism ... - Reformiert online

2. Introduction to the Consultation and Objectives
by Rev. Susanne Labsch
Rev. Susanne Labsch, Head of the Department for Mission and Ecumenism of the
Protestant Church of Baden
Dear participants, dear sisters and brothers,
“We are born for the dialogue” – this sentence is nearly 500 years old.
“We are born for the dialogue “ – was said by the Reformer Phillip Melanchthon.
We are gathered here to have an intense dialogue, a consultation on “Mission and
Ecumenism in the Internet – Internet in Mission and Ecumenism”. We want to analyse
and develop the communication via Internet within the EMS fellowship and we want to
develop a communication system where all partners can participate actively and on equal
terms.
The EMS is a mission society in which six Churches in Germany and 17 Churches
mainly from Asia and Africa are bound together. We try to develop from a mission society
to an ecumenical international fellowship of 23 churches spread over three continents.
The International Mission Council of the EMS who gathered in july of this year took
important decisions in this direction:
The first is a new Theological Framework on our common mission and vision
(see also the Mission Statement in the Annex).
The second decision was to adopt a new “Policy framework” with three common tasks:
1. We want to share life concerns between our 23 churches. Therefore we need quick
and reliable information. It must be possible for partner churches for example in
Indonesia to give direct information to the other members of the fellowship without having
to wait for the activity of a liason desk in Germany, at Stuttgart. In order to achieve this,
we have to study how to get and to share reliable information among us.
2. We want to focus our activities on a bi-annual program developed and sustained by all
the churches within the fellowship. For the year 2003 and 2004 this program has the title
and aim: peace-building. As a common project, the EMS fellow churches will sustain
together the Medical Service of the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. This bi-annual program
planned and developed with different churches on different continents needs a good
communication tool via internet.
3. “Sharing through cross-cultural witness and service” is the third core task.
This means the continuous exchange of ideas and persons like ecumenical learning as
ecumenical volunteer or coworker, theological exchange, study possibilities and others.
We are for example managing an Ecumenical Volonteer Program where young persons
can come and go for some time to one of the churches in Germany, Ghana or India.
These young people are still using the Internet as their instrument of cross-cultural
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