A new missionary impetus would seem to be emerging in the Netherlands: this is what emerges from a study recently published by the Central Religious Missionary Office (CMBR), with the title “Religious and the missionary movement towards the future”. Dutch religious show themselves to be realistic. In the Western world there is little future – says the report for “the classic religious life”, which had enjoyed a period of revival at the end of the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century in Holland, when the community of believers had been one of the major “suppliers” of missionary forces that went to spread the Gospel in the southern hemisphere, constructing churches, schools and hospitals wherever they went. Since then, however, the number of missionaries has been drastically reduced. Nonetheless, at the CMBR the temptation to succumb to pessimism is resisted, because now a change can be perceived in the attitude of religious in whom there is “a growing consciousness that Christianity is greater than Holland or Europe”. “The churches of the southern hemisphere demonstrate a vitality and a dynamism that have a reflex effect on the other half of the world. In many of these places there is a revival of religious and missionary life: the future is there”. A series of recommendations are then made on the conducting of the missionary movement, which over the years has developed and become a great and varied network of projects; the “mission” therefore continues, but the fragmentary character of the “missionary network” poses questions about stability, continuity and identity. Care must be taken to ensure that the network draws “sufficient nutriment from within the religious tradition” and that the bonds between Dutch missionary workers and the ecclesiastical institutions from which they come be not broken. A last recommendation concerns missionary formation in community groups and the programme of formation for the young, which must says the study – remain the prerogative of the agenda of the religious institutions, since this is a source of enrichment both for religious and for non-religious.
