“Whispering the Gospel”: Bishop Kleden on Asia’s quiet witness

By Fr. Kasmir Nema, SVD

Reflecting on the recently concluded Twelfth Plenary Assembly of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) in Jakarta, Archbishop Kleden, Archbishop of Ende and Vice President of the Indonesian Bishops’ Conference (KWI), said the gathering helped participants see that God is already at work in the many different realities of the Church across Asia. “The assembly once more made it clear that every genuine encounter is an opportunity to experience greater things,” he said in the interview.

Listening to participants from different Asian countries, he said, “enlarged the heart and widened the horizon” and helped delegates recognize God’s presence in local Churches where Catholics are often a tiny minority. “Being a minority is not a reason to lose hope and to give up,” he said. Rather, it is “an opportunity to give witness, to be creative in finding humble and small ways to live out the Gospel’s values.” 

For Archbishop Kleden, this points to something distinctive about the Church’s mission in Asia. “In Asia we talk about whispering the Gospel,” he said. “To realize anew that the way of the Gospel is the way of humility” was, for him, one of the “greater things” experienced at the Assembly. He sees this quiet witness not as a strategy born of weakness, but as a contribution that the Churches of Asia can offer to the universal Church.

Four conversions for synodal leadership

The Assembly’s Final Message emphasized that synodality transforms hearts before transforming structures. For Archbishop Kleden, this requires concrete conversion, beginning with the way Church leaders listen.

“First of all, the conversion to be a listening leader,” he said. Such listening, he explained, cannot be limited to Catholics. It must include people of other religions, the natural world, and those who have too often been overlooked—”the women, children, the youth, and the poor.” Listening, he stressed, does not diminish episcopal authority. “It strengthens it,” he said, because it enables leaders to understand authority not as “power to dominate” but as a call to serve, to become “bridge and bridge builders.”

The second conversion is to interculturality. In a continent marked by extraordinary cultural and religious diversity, Church leaders need to become more aware of the prejudices that shape their way of seeing others, Archbishop Kleden said. “Oftentimes, because of cultural prejudices we are not able to see greater things the Lord is performing in and through others,” he explained.

The third is a conversion to Eucharistic spirituality. Referring to Pope Leo XIV’s message to the Assembly, which called for “a spirituality of ecclesial unity grounded in the charity that flows from the gift of our Lord in the Eucharist,” Archbishop Kleden said the Eucharist reminds Church leaders that their vocation does not belong to themselves. “The Church does not depend first of all on us, and the Church is not ours. It belongs to the Lord,” he said. Leadership, therefore, must be understood as participation in Christ’s self-giving love and service to the Church.

The fourth conversion is perhaps the simplest: gratitude. Archbishop Kleden called on the Church to be grateful for the flock entrusted to her, even when that flock is small. The fact that Christians and Catholics are a minority in much of Asia, he said, should not lead the Church to lose hope. Faith rests instead on confidence in God, who has his own ways of drawing close to people.

Building bridges in a changing Asia

The image of the Church as a bridge-builder emerged repeatedly during the FABC Assembly. For Archbishop Kleden, however, bridge-building must extend well beyond interreligious dialogue.

Within the Church, he identified the need to build bridges with young people, particularly in a continent with a large youth population. He also highlighted migrants—those who arrive in a new country in search of a better life and those who leave their own countries for the same reason. The Church must also build bridges among the different cultural groups within its own communities. Beyond the Church, he pointed to the need for bridges with people of good will, civil society, governments, and creation itself. 

Among the many challenges facing Asian societies, Archbishop Kleden singled out one as particularly urgent: the ecological crisis. “All these challenges are real and urgent challenges to the local churches in Asia,” he said. “But if we should mention the most urgent one, I would say, the ecological issue is the most urgent matter for Asia.” Many Asian countries are pursuing economic development, he noted, but natural resources are often exploited at a high environmental cost. He pointed specifically to deforestation, land grabbing, and extractive mining carried out “without much concern for the consequences for nature.”

Mission belongs first to God

Underlying Archbishop Kleden’s vision of the Church in Asia is the missionary spirituality of Missio Dei—the conviction that mission is, first and foremost, God’s mission. “God has his own way to the hearts of people, to shape cultures and to inspire religions,” he said. God is already at work building bridges with humanity, he added, and calls Christians to participate in that work as “bridges and bridge builders.”

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For Archbishop Kleden, this conviction is also the foundation of hope. “Only because it is Missio Dei, God’s mission, the Church in Asia has a future.” This perspective also shapes his understanding of leadership as he takes on his responsibilities within the Indonesian Church and the wider FABC family. 

For him, the answer is synodal leadership: leadership that listens, welcomes diverse voices, and is not afraid of sharing responsibility. “We shall not fear of losing power, but inviting and encouraging more people to participate in the leadership,” he said. “The name of the future of the Church is walking together, sharing responsibility.”

“Be bridges and bridge-builders”

As the FABC Assembly concluded, Archbishop Kleden was asked what single message he hoped Catholics across Asia would carry home. His answer was brief—and perhaps captures the heart of his reflection on the Church’s mission in Asia: “Take courage to be bridges and bridge-builders, as Jesus has done for us.”

In a continent where Catholics often live as a minority, the future of evangelization may not depend on speaking louder, but on learning how to listen more deeply, walk more humbly and build more patiently. For Archbishop Kleden, the quiet witness of the Church in Asia—”whispering the Gospel”—is precisely where its missionary strength may be found.