Churches clash ahead of WCC meeting

By Kim Tong-hyung

Churches being partisan may be no longer news but their division coming to open hostility should be taken as a different matter.

One case in point is with the churches’ failure to make a joint statement because they disagreed on the inclusion of religious diversity for the World Council of Churches (WCC) meeting scheduled for Busan in October.

This disagreement, pitting conservatives against progressives, runs deeper than it appears.

They are already poles apart on whether churches should pay income taxes.

While the conservative Christian Council of Korea (CCK), the country’s biggest church lobby, has been combating calls against taxation, reform-minded churches find this stance embarrassing.

The conflict took a turn for the worse earlier this month when Kim Yeong-ju, a representative of the more progressive National Council of Churches in Korea (NCCK), stepped down as the head of the WCC organizing committee and expressed frustration over all the infighting.

The draft of the joint declaration included a rejection of the idea of supporting religious diversity and battle cries against Communism, religious humanism, homosexuality and any other ideas that ``run against the Gospel.’’ It also expressed opposition to the calls that churches pull back their zealousness in converting people of other faiths.

This drew an angry reaction from theologians at Sungkonghoe University, a member of the Anglican church of Korea, which announced a statement criticizing the church groups for rejecting a multi-faith society and disregarding minorities.

The CCK isn’t all smiles either, with the more fundamentalist leaders in the group raising concerns that WCC internationally has been warming up to the idea of supporting religious diversity. WCC is commonly referred to as the ``United Nations of Christianity,’’ with around 350 church groups from 110 countries listed as members. The Busan event is expected to draw more than 5,000 visitors.

``I have to admit that the desire to get a joint declaration between the groups got the best of us and the statement was written in haste without a proper level of communication and consent,’’ Kim said.

The bigger fight between the church groups is over the issue of taxes. The member churches of the NCCK state that churches should pay income taxes, something the CCK found offensive.

President Lee Myung-bak, a devout Christian who owed his election to fervent church help, had carefully suggested that religious groups should pay taxes, only to retreat in a microsecond after the CCK cried foul.

Critics, however, claim that the case for religious organizations couldn’t be any more clear-cut. Korea is obviously a secular state and there is no reason pastors, priests, monks and any other person generating income from religious offerings should be above paying taxes, a duty that, at least in theory, is to be shared by every law-abiding citizen.

And exempting incomes taxes on the clergy has never been supported by law, but continued for decades anyway using culture and convention as excuses.

Protestants and Buddhist leaders in the past have vocally rejected the idea of paying income tax, saying they deserve their tax-free status since their lives are dedicated to the ``selfless serving of others.’’

But there’s an irony in that people who are supposedly committed to making society better have so much trouble accepting the basic individual burden essential for supporting it. Besides, it’s awkward for Protestants and Buddhists to play the selfless card when the Catholic Church has been voluntarily paying income tax since 1994.

``Paying taxes is the most basic duty a citizen has to his or her society. We are committed to advancing discourse on this issue between the churches as quickly as possible,’’ said NCCK’s Kim.