Is Religion a Western idea?

Event Details

What the Webinar will be about

In September of 2023, the Pew Research Center released a report entitled 'Buddhism, Islam and Religious Pluralism in South and Southeast Asia' which shows that people in Buddhist Southeast Asia have a distinctly different perspective of religion than people in Singapore which is the most Westernised country in the region. In this forum, Claire Chong presents, from her fieldwork research, some emerging ideas on the Cambodian notion of 'religion.' It is hoped that with a better understanding of what religion is in other societies, Christians may engage with people of other faiths in more meaningful ways.

Speaker Bio

Claire Chong and her husband Dr Kevin Lowe lived in Cambodia and Myanmar for 15 years and established self-sustaining churches and businesses. She is presently a Research and Training Associate with the Singapore Centre for Global Missions, an affiliate faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary, a member in the Executive Team of the International Society of Frontier Missiology, and serves in the leadership team of WEA Mission Commission. Claire is also a PhD candidate with the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, UK, researching on the use of a Buddhist epistemological approach in studying Cambodian ritual and religion.

The Organisers

For this webinar, the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM) partners with the Rethinking Forum (RF).

The Alliance for Vulnerable Mission encourages cross-cultural workers to make themselves vulnerable to the people they serve - mainly by using local languages and local resources in ministry. This webinar is a platform to listen, ask questions and engage in conversations focused on this theme.

Prioritising cultural and missiological humility, the Rethinking Forum seeks to strengthen the witness of Christ to the Theravada Buddhist world. We want to address barriers and overcome hinderances to the Gospel, taking a critical look at what lessons can be learned from the past, deconstructing unhelpful approaches (such as neocolonialism and western worldview). Likewise, we seek to learn from and engage with new movements to Christ taking place on the ground and culturally appropriate foundations and expressions of faith. Engaging on a missiological (theoretical) and practical level, we seek to incorporate the two. We aim to become vulnerable towards those we are there to reach, seeking to discover what God is doing beyond our limited frameworks.