Welcome to our third EMCAPP-Newsletter 2026 with information, ideas, challenges, ...
Blessings, Werner May, https://www.emcapp.eu/
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Issue 25 of the eJournal was the last one!
Yes, that’s right. I am discontinuing the free e-journal!
25 issues – so may authors from around the world and so many topics!
But now I`m retiring as a publisher.
And here you can read all former issues: https://emcapp.ignis.de/
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The next EMCAPP-meeting 2027
We are planning a next major EMCAPP meeting for late October 2027 in Poland, integrated into a conference of the Polish Association of Christian Psychologists www.spch.pl. More details will follow in the next EMCAPP newsletters.
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A Healing No
I’m delighted: you can now finally read about this topic that is so important to me — "Saying No and Building Trust" — in an eBook „A Healing No“!
Search on Amazon: Werner May, A Healing No
There you can also read a book excerpt “Leseprobe”.
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And finally: A challenge?
All speak about spirituality - The interreligious dialog
It is interesting to consider which of the three approaches—which I have come to recognize as fundamental attitudes in interfaith dialogue—we adopt when encountering others:
- Everyone is right: All people, including us Christians, possess limited understanding. Thus, no one possesses the whole truth.
- The exclusivist attitude: Individual non-Christian worldviews are all flawed because they are rooted in rebellion against God, rely on righteousness through works, or are based on personal existential experiences from which people construct their own worldview.
- The inclusivist position: We find traces of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in all personal worldviews, owing to God’s general blessing and His prevenient grace.
The choice of one of these three positions will also shape our everyday relationships with non-Christians.
Personally, the third position seems to me to come closest to the truth. Why? Because God’s goodness leads us to repentance, and I can therefore assume that this goodness has left traces in his creation that every person can experience, regardless of whether or not they grew up in a Christian culture. Long before I became a Christian, I prayed in times of distress. Even as a non-Christian, for instance, I cared for people with disabilities. I experienced God’s intervention without recognizing it as such. I was also convinced that my life had meaning.
More than we realize, every person has already had some experience with God. We can detect traces of God in every human being.
And at the same time, we can perceive three things in every person:
- every person is longing for God,
- the damage sin has wrought in and through their life, and
- the infinite grace available to everyone in Jesus Christ — grace that is already leaving its mark.
A Provocative Example
A few years ago, a friend of mine married a Taiwanese woman — he is a Christian, she a Buddhist. We visited them in their home country for the wedding celebration, got to know and appreciate her family, and experienced the following:
A few years earlier, the bride and her family had undergone a profound life transformation through a serious and deepened commitment to their Buddhist faith. Her parents testified that this had saved their marriage. They had learned to part with their possessions and dedicated their time to better understanding their faith.
The unity I observed among them — and with their friends from the same Buddhist community — strongly reminded me of the unity found in our own congregations: they were delighted to see one another, embraced warmly, and were full of joy. And when some of them unpacked their instruments and sang, the joy and enthusiasm in their songs mirrored that of our own worship teams. Had I met them on the street, I might well have greeted them as fellow believers, given that I did not understand the lyrics.
In essence, they experienced and shared the same kind of story I told when I first came to faith —only, in their case, the conversion was to Buddhism. On closer inspection, however, they spoke of doing many things to earn better karma, whereas I would have spoken of grace for Jesus’ sake. Good works are not performed so that I might be saved, but because I am already saved. That is a profound difference. Yet, fundamentally, they were speaking of a conversion — and the effects were clearly visible in their lives.
Was this the work of the Holy Spirit outside the Church? Perhaps in line with the inclusive perspective found in interfaith dialogue? Or is there another explanation? I believe the explanation is linked to our understanding of the human person; in this context — and from a biblical perspective — the following point is important to me:
The Fall did not destroy everything; it left within humanity a longing for God — a deep memory of what human beings once were as the image of God. This includes the human capacity to turn away, through insight, from a lifestyle estranged from love and to perceive that shift as life-changing. The experience of personal conversion and its life-affirming impact is not reserved solely for Christians; others have this experience, too.
Thus, our task is to look for and discover (or help to discover) traces of God in every person’s life and to encourage a deeper conversion. The process must not be reduced merely to the goal of conversion itself. We seek to build relationships based on mutual interest and respect.