Acehnese women wash utensils near the ruins of their house in Indonesia's tsunami-stricken provincial capital of Banda Aceh. Rescue teams have nearly finished their work in Indonesia's tsunami-hit areas, a Red Cross official said on Tuesday as the count of dead and buried passed 123,000. The Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on December 26 killed at least 123,071 people in Aceh province on Sumatra island. REUTERS/Supri

New York—The US National Council of Churches has issued a warning about the dangers of Christian evangelisation in predominately non-Christian regions affected by the devastating tsunami of late 2004.

“The work of those who don’t know the difference between aid and evangelism has caused serious problems,” said the Rev. Shanta Premawardhana, the council’s associate general secretary for interfaith relations.

He warned in a statement issued this week that local Christian communities could face threats if “evangelistic mission agencies ... engage in aggressive and inappropriate evangelism.”

The context of the statement, which included guidelines for church involvement in tsunami-affected regions in Asia, stems from relief efforts by several US-based groups. In one incident, the Virginia-based agency World Help sought to have US Christian families adopt 300 orphaned Muslim children in Indonesia, a plan the agency eventually abandoned under public pressure.

Christian leaders in the tsunami-affected regions feared violence “aimed at churches” by Buddhist and Muslim militants who did not “discriminate between established churches and the new evangelistic groups”, Premawardhana said in the statement prepared in consultation with churches in Sri Lanka and Indonesia.

The church leaders, he said, believed some of the evangelistic practices and the theologies on which they are based smacked of “colonialism” and they feel outsiders need to be sensitive to Asian cultural and religious realities.

“While evangelism is important and necessary, it is best left to local Christians,” said Premawardhana. He noted the US church council wished to engage in a dialogue about mission and humanitarian assistance with evangelical Christian groups and mission agencies.

Asian church leaders, he said, believed such communication is needed because their churches continue to struggle because of “theologies and practices of mission and evangelism that belong to the colonial era”.