30. The powers of worldly formation often impinge upon the church before the church has much chance to impinge upon them. This happens not least through knowledge of morally significant events in the public world, including the religious and cultural symbols connected with them, transmitted through the media. The church's relation to such public information can be positive, especially when pastors are well-informed and alert to make appropriate connections. We said at Tantur, indeed, that the world has at times taught us how to be the church. We may learn from movements in the world what it is that the Christian tradition truly stands for. Some of our most significant acts of witness have "been drawn out by moral struggles in society in which the church has had to learn at least as much as it has taught. In this way the efforts of moral formation in society have carried their own ecclesial significance...." And, further, "there is something crucial here: moral struggle, discernment and formation are not simply to be ‘annexed' to our understandings and ways of being church and used to draw out the genuine treasures of our traditions. They also challenge those deeply and teach us to learn from the world (which is, after all, God's) how better to recognize and ‘be' church as a faithful way of life."6

31. There are, of course, consequences of this sort of learning. Societies, nominally "Christian" and otherwise, have indeed sometimes enacted what the churches--beforehand, at the time, or later--saw to be part of the genius of their own message. The outlawing of slavery and child labor, or the establishment of universal public education, are examples. But the secular success of church-instigated or church-backed policies has often set social processes in motion which in time leave the churches marginalized. Schools, hospitals, human rights laws and the like have often gained independent momentum on their own and have abandoned their original ecclesial and moral roots.

32. Finding themselves shunted aside by such secularizing processes, churches have sought other ways to remain socially involved. Sometimes they have begun to reflect in their own lives the institutionally secularized forms of their original theological insights. They have relearned their own messages from the world: but in thinned-out and distorted forms. Victims of their own success, they have become captives to current cultural interpretations of faith rather than places of genuine contemporary formation in the faith. They have taken over distorted ways of "reading" reality, and then, as a second step, tried to elaborate such distortions theologically. The result is not formation in the faith but "malformation". In a generation or less the distinctive outlines of the faith have begun to disappear.7

33. This is especially true in situations, such as North America, where a vaguely christianized "civil religion", as well as vaguely christianized forms of popular religion, are transmitted and in a certain way authenticated in peoples' minds by the media. Media presentations of Christian faith indeed may be virtually "irreformable" in that protests and corrections are of no avail against deeply ingrained images and assumptions. Films and "soap" operas - now also distributed across the globe - are often more powerful sources of information, and misinformation, about the faith than our own educational efforts among the people of God.

34. Here, as in so many other cases, ecumenical ties are all-important for maintaining identity in the faith. Our awareness of the challenge we face in forming congregations faithfully inevitably leads us towards a deeper understanding of what ecumenism can mean in action. We need the kind of formation which will help local communities to remain ecumenically aware under the pressure of events which contain both threat and promise. We need to learn from success, and also from failure. Can a distinctive, shared ecumenical formation come to exist under specific local circumstances? Can it come to exist globally?

35. The church bears moral witness simply by being what it is in its human environment. By being what it is, it bears witness to some message. It may stand for justice, peace and the care of our planet, or it may stand for something else. We need to make this inevitable moral witnessing self-conscious, and bring it under the control of the story of faith. We need, in short, to make our formational activity an intentional mutual upbuilding, an oikodomé, of the household of God.

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