Aims

Preaching the Gospel is essential to the very existence of the Church. In a world with shrinking borders, the forms this preaching assumes pose new problems. Theological reflection on evangelisation should take as much into account the historical nature of the Church as the evolution of the contemporary world.
Evangelisation involves nations and forms of life too.

Main themes

The contemporary church in the western countries meets new challenges today and seeks to answer it with some options which the course will analyse carefully: the absolutely priority pastoral option of the "evangelisation"; the missionary activity like passage of pastoral of maintenance to pastoral of evangelisation; the dialogue and the inculturation to fill the ditch between faith and culture; the personalization of the faith like response to a sociological and conventional Christianity.

Content and teaching methods

The course deals with contemporary questions arising in evangelisation: its presence to diverse human cultures and modernity; human dignity and liberation; religious and convictional pluralism. It attempts to decipher the various paradigms of evangelisation. It tries to distinguish the logics confronting one another in the evangeliser/evangelised relationship and to distinguish what is theological and what is not.

Method: the method is interactive and based as much as possible on the experience, contributions and needs of course members.

Bibliography:
D. J. BOSCH, Dynamique de la mission chrétienne. Histoire et avenir des modèles missionnaires, Paris, Karthala, 1995.
Repères pour la mission chrétienne, textes réunis et introduits par Klauspeter BLASER, Paris, Cerf, 2000.

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