My religious upbringing was shaped by the common reading of the Bible  for many years with my parish’s youth group. It was also shaped by annual trips with this group to different regions of France, where we encountered Cistercian mysticism. Taizé was a stimulating environment for a form of spirituality capable of attracting young people through a renewed language and approach. Gregorian chant, the reduction to the essentials sought by monastic discipline, and the incredible richness of European Christian art opened up spaces for reflection and left a lasting impression on me. Particular mention should be made of Romanesque art, cosmology and anthropology, which I have since regarded as a kind of ideal balance between humanity, nature and God.

My stay in Berlin and the discoveries I made in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) confirmed and reinforced this practice of collective Bible reading, but also the realisation that the Church is not primarily a local entity, but a global phenomenon and reality, whose plurality of manifestations is a source of inspiration rather than a barrier or a deviation. This global reality of Christianity, as well as the confrontation with modern criticism (Freudian, Marxist, Nietzschean) of the faith and the Church’s actions throughout history that I encountered in Germany, have coalesced in my convictions: the Church, taken as a whole, is faithful to its vocation above all when it acts for the good of others.

Two key phrases that have shaped my outlook demonstrate this, each in their own way. The first is from Father Amédée, prior of the Cistercian Abbey of Bricquebec in Normandy. He was the first monk I ever met. I was fascinated by this man’s fresh, radiant and perpetually smiling face, the polar opposite of what I associated with the word ‘monk’. We had met him on our first group trip, a few weeks after I turned sixteen: “God loves you personally, passionately, divinely.” He repeated this phrase to us every day during our stay, and I still remember it. This summary of the Christian faith had deeply moved me, just as I had been moved by the opening words of a sermon by Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife in Brazil and a leading figure in the struggle against social injustice in the 1970s, which I heard shortly before Christmas at a conference in the Jura: “The Church, bearer of Christ’s presence on earth, has existed on this earth for almost 2,000 years. What have we made of this world?”

My training, which began with Bonhoeffer’s theology—open to and engaged with the world—alongside Roman mysticism and cosmology, continued in an urban parish in Lausanne, through the search for a language about God that was accessible to teenagers and adults seeking answers. But it is most often the experience of a different way of living as a Christian that has shaped my journey, for example by accompanying and supporting the Reformed Churches of Central and Eastern Europe after 1989 as they repositioned themselves within their nations. Gaining a gradual overview of the churches in Europe, their more or less rapid social marginalisation, and the need for closer collaboration between them prepared me to try to bring these insights to bear on Swiss Protestantism, and then to highlight the Swiss Reformed contribution to the global concert of churches within the framework of ecumenical organisations.

I have always preferred learning to teaching. Listening to how Christians elsewhere expressed their faith in contexts more challenging than my own allowed me to maintain a sense of perspective regarding our situation in Switzerland and motivated me to share it. Ecumenism, in the sense of seeking unity, is meaningless if it is not nourished by international experiences and exchanges with other faith cultures. I was quickly disappointed by approaches—which are endemic to my own tradition—that sought to demand that other Churches or denominations become more like my own. I soon came to prefer the option of finding, within other expressions of faith, the reasons for their development and what might be lacking in my own, so as to enrich it and make it deeper and ‘globally relevant’