Time flies! Another year is over at the blink of an eye. My heart is filled with praise and gratitude when I reviewed the achievements of the Hong Kong Christian Institute (HKCI) in the past year. I am amazed by the tremendous work carried out by such a small-scale organisation. I am grateful to have a group of dedicated staff and management committee members who have committed themselves to the work of the organisation in spite of their busy schedules. I am very proud to be one of the team members involved in HKCI. I will neither go into details of HKCI’s achievements nor analyse the importance of her ministry to the Church and society of Hong Kong. Members will grasp a clear picture and have their own judgment when they read the annual report and browse the web site of the organisation. I would rather take this opportunity to reflect on the mission and roles of HKCI.

First of all, I would like to discuss the enactment of anti-discrimination legislation. As is widely known, the position of HKCI supports the extension of the legislation to include discrimination based on sexual orientation in order to assure that homosexuals equally enjoy their basic human rights. With such a stand, HKCI faces a counterforce within the local Christian community against the enactment of the anti-discrimination law to protect the equal rights of homosexuals. Last year a number of churches, Christian organisations and individual Christians were mobilised to assert their views by different means, such as public declarations, talks, advertisements in newspapers and a fierce debate in the literature. A campaign was launched on this issue in which enormous debates were aroused in society at that time. Recently, commentators from the Christian Times have pointed out that the highly organised campaign last year was irrational because the ministers and individual Christians who were mobilised to fight against the enactment of the anti-discrimination legislation on sexual orientation did not fully understand the rationale but were just followers of the campaign leaders. Worse still, according to the commentators, rational debates were directed to a strategic literature war for the sake of winning the battle but not seeking the truth. If the analysis of the commentators is correct, we have to ask why such an irrational campaign occurred in Hong Kong’s Christian community. What will be the future of the churches in Hong Kong if they are led by such campaigns? In the midst of such heated debate and contradictions, HKCI has insisted on maintaining her principles and position. We do our best to continue the dialogue with churches and Christians with confidence but humility. Regarding this issue, I have witnessed that HKCI has performed her prophetic mission and role by providing alternatives for the Church.

Globalisation is another area that I would like to highlight, particularly its impact and the role of the Church toward this international issue. In the past year, HKCI has initiated cooperation with Christian organisations by co-organising a series of conferences about globalisation. Both the conferences and the subsequent publications are thought-provoking. They provide a macro-perspective for the Church and Christians to better understand the changes that affect both local and global communities. I have observed though that the turnout at various programmes related to globalisation has not been high. We thus have to identify the reasons for the Church and Christians’ lack of interest in this issue and related activities. The commonly expressed explanation with which I am familiar is that “ministers and believers are very busy” or “the ministers cannot keep pace with their church members if they go too far in front and work beyond the members’ concerns and articulation.” Perhaps both explanations are correct.

Here, however, I would like to share my view: the Church and individual believers are located in a state of “involution.” This means that the church management and its operations are at a high level of efficiency. Church workers are sophisticated to organise different types of programmes. Very often though they do not risk to preach any message that is beyond the believers’ capacity to bear. Under such circumstances, believers will stay in a closed system of fixed beliefs. Not only do they lose interest in messages that are strange to them, but they also oppose those messages that are contradictory to their fixed beliefs. In the long term, the whole Christian community will become stagnant, making progress difficult, if not impossible. Consequently, I find HKCI’s persistence to support Hong Kong’s Christians to reflect critically and live out their faith, as well as to reform and improve our church/belief system, to be highly valuable.

Thus, we should affirm HKCI’s mission and role with great joy for what we have achieved in the past year!

Chan Shun-hing