Antonio Lambino SJ

Who in Asia today are most responsible for the advance of inculturation? It is the poor grassroots of communities of faith, the Basic Christian Communities (BCCs) who are the principal agents of inculturation in many parts of Asia today. As the BCCs struggle to discern and to put up into practice what the Spirit indicates as the authentic Christian way in social situations marked injustice and oppression, the Asian face of Christianity emerges little by little.

The BCCs show that it is a participative Church, which is most capable of inculturation. Inculturation requires a process of courageous transformation, an ongoing conversation, since every historical realization of Christianity is afflicted, as we have tried to explain, with the condition of brokenness. Any change in basic attitude and values, especially one involving the reversal structure of inequality does not come easy. Certainly, such a change cannot and should not be imposed from the top. It must be patiently and laboriously work out from the bottom. The BCCs are not a call for others to change while one ever remain the same. The BCCs represent a major change within the Church itself in terms of participative discernment, involvement and co - responsibility. For this reason, inculturation that is achieve through their agency promises to be more effective and more enduring.

Membership in basic ecclesial communities empowers the poor to be the subject of their own destiny in human society. This “freedom to be” does not favor the objectives and strategies of either the Right or the Left. No wonder the BCCs often attract  the unhealthy interest of the dictators and revolutionaries. Authoritarian regimes see them as subversive, a dangerous group that needs to be controlled or suppressed. Rebels, for their part, look upon them as potential allies and try to instrumentalize them for their revolutionary objectives.