Collectivist Culture and Building a Synodal Church in Vietnam: Opportunities and Challenges

Collectivist Culture and Building a Synodal Church in Vietnam: Opportunities and Challenges

Religion and Social Communication Vol. 24, No. 1 (2026)
ISSN 3057-0883 (Online)

Author

Nguyen Cong Nhat
Graduate School Department, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines
Email: nhatnguyencv@gmail.com

Abstract

The article aims to argue that the Church life in Vietnam is under the influence of the culture of collectivism, which creates an imbalance between collective faith and personal faith of Vietnamese Catholics. This collectivist culture is shaped through the intertwining of traditional values and religious values throughout the nation’s history. On the one hand, the culture of collectivism brings benefits of unity, love, and support in social life and religious life. On the other hand, it tends towards uniformity, group-competence, and inequality, leading to a lack of personal faith. These are manifested in the recent discussions toward synodality in the Church in Vietnam. Influenced by Confucian hierarchical patterns, the collectivist cultural model poses challenges to achieving genuine communion, participation, and mission in ecclesial life. Therefore, the Church in Vietnam is called to intentionally strengthen the dimension of personal faith as a prophetic step toward a more dynamic and synodal Church, both ad intra and ad extra. To this end, the article proposes an inculturated application of the Johannine model of discipleship as an ecclesiological framework capable of fostering mature personal faith within the Vietnamese context. The study employs textual analysis and draws upon interdisciplinary scholarship in social research, religious studies, and contextual ecclesiology.

Keywords

culture, collectivism, personal faith and collective faith, Catholic Church in Vietnam, communication of faith, inculturation

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Pages: 141–163

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62461/NCN111626

Submitted, Accepted & Published Dates

Submitted: September 10, 2024
Accepted: November 16, 2025
Published: January 1, 2026

Cite this article

Nguyen, Cong Nhat. “Collectivist Culture and Building a Synodal Church in Vietnam: Opportunities and Challenges.” Religion and Social Communication 24, no. 1 (2026): 141–163. https://doi.org/10.62461/NCN111626.

Copyright & License

© 2026 The authors. This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).