Church urged to check poverty

What is the biggest challenge facing the church in India? Director of the Institute of Social Sciences Delhi, George Mathew says, poverty the first.

Mathew was delivering the Juhanon Mar Thoma Memorial Lecture on Saturday, when he identified the three chief challenges facing the church.

The first was poverty: by World Bank estimates based on 2005 data, 256 million people in the country were below the poverty line. The second challenge was religious fundamentalism, fed by the "domination syndrome" afflicting sections of all major religions. The third challenge concerned terrorism and extremism.

"Churches all over the world have to grapple with these three challenges and their manifestations in various forms in different contexts. Are they doing anything about these," he asked.

He said the Church today was working hard to "heighten the religiosity of the people and deprive spirituality."

"An important challenge before present-day organised Churches is that they must become people's churches… They have become hierarchical and, in the modern world, a corporate body… Sometimes one feels that, for the Churches, people are not subjects but objects," The Hindu newspaper cited him saying.

Recalling the late Metropolitan of the Mar Thoma Church in Kerala, Juhanon Mar Thoma, who always gave concern to the pleas of the people, Mathew said, such a person was hard to find among religious leaders now.