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Most of the 4,500 participants in the Mennonite World Conference Assembly in Calcutta had never been in that city before, and Calcutta is overwhelming. Even people from other regions of India speak about Calcutta with horrified awe. When I lived in Calcutta 25 years ago and travelled to other parts of India, I often met people who were astonished that my wife and I had chosen Calcutta, "of all places", as our home. During this trip to the Mennonite World Conference, I talked to people in Delhi and Bombay, in Bangladesh and in Malaysia who asked why Mennonites would have a conference in Calcutta, of all places.
I'm sure that many Assembly delegates asked themselves that question in stunned silence as they bumped and lurched in buses and taxis from the airport or railway station through crowded, dirty, noisy, streets. But within a few days, delegates were out exploring on their own, taking tours, volunteering in one of Mother Teresa's homes and telling friends about a new discovery they had made down some crooked lane in a local bazaar.
The resilience and goodwill of the participants in the Assembly was a delight. We exchanged greetings and friendly smiles with hundreds of people whom we had never met before. We were tolerant and sympathetic to those near us who coughed and coughed and coughed again. The thick polluted air was our common and constant burden to bear. After a while, we stopped talking about it, although we didn't stop coughing.
It wasn't only Calcutta that became ordinary. There were two or three delegates from Russia, but their presence was hardly noticed. Russian delegates at Mennonite conferences used to be treated like celebrities. Every time a person got a visa to leave the Soviet Union, it was regarded as a major victory for freedom. Now that visas are easier to get, there were actually fewer delegates from Russia than at earlier conferences. It's more dramatic to be denied freedom to travel than to have freedom and not use it.
Our worship services and songbooks were bilingual and sometimes multilingual. The people beside us were often from another continent. After a day or two, that seemed normal, even though our home churches are not like that at all.
We humans really are quite adaptable. So often we talk about how difficult it is to change; and it is, if we stay in the same place doing the same things with the same people. But move to a new home, visit a new country, travel with new friends, and change becomes natural, less daunting; even ordinary.
We did bring along one habit that seems hard to change. There were 4,500 of us in Calcutta, and we never publicly centred our prayers and attention on that city. Each day, the church in one region of the world was the focus--Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, Latin America. Those regions were the colours for a painting that took form throughout the week. Calcutta was like the canvas upon which we painted; it served its purpose well, but it was a functional prop.
We often "do church" that way. Our communities, cities and nations frequently are absent from our speeches and prayers in church. We care and pray for each other, but rarely for those we have just read about in the local paper or heard about on the evening news. Sometimes worship leaders even encourage us to leave the everyday world outside when we gather to worship God.
There are churches in which the congregation is encouraged to pray and care for the girl with leukemia whose story was in the Saturday paper, for the politicians who are debating legislation about lotteries, for the old men who just got evicted from their run-down residential hotel because it didn't meet fire regulations, for the family whose son died in a hit and run accident, and for the retiring school teacher who was featured on the evening news because she had been voted "teacher of the century" by her former students. The churches that bring the world into the church and place it on the altar before God, are churches in which the people of the world hear a language, passion and love that they recognize.
I wish we would have placed Calcutta on the altar when we were together in corporate worship. I wish we would have prayed for its wounds and lifted up its hopes. It was not simply a canvas upon which we could paint a portrait of our worldwide church.
Nor are our communities merely the incidental settings in which we happen to build our churches. They should not become so familiar, so ordinary that we overlook them in our worship. Even if we are "pilgrims and strangers", even if our "Kingdom is not of this world", we should heed the words of God through the prophet Jeremiah: "Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it" (Jeremiah 29:7).
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