by Matthew Davies
The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) held a forum on Global Reconciliation on Thursday 31 July at St Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis as part of the 74th General Convention of ECUSA. The turnout was staggering with nearly 1,000 people in attendance.
The speakers at the forum were: the Most Revd Njongonkulu Ndungane, the Archbishop of Cape Town; Professor Jeffrey D Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and a Professor at Columbia University; Abagail Nelson, Director of Latin American Programs at Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD); Ranjit Mathews, an Intern at the Office of the Anglican Observer at the United Nations; and the Revd Dr Sabina Alkire, a priest in the Church of England and Former Researcher for the Commission on Human Security at the United Nations.
Bishop Griswold, speaking about God's Mission in a Global perspective, explained how the House of Bishops in ECUSA were scheduled to come together a week after the events of September 11 to discuss global citizenship and what it meant to be a part of the worldwide Anglican Communion. "9/11 occurred and the first thought was should the meeting be cancelled," he said. "My feeling, however, was that [the meeting] was all the more important because at this point, fear, anxiety and anger were disconnecting us...and any further point of this would be cutting us off from the sense of being a global community." He added that there was a strong desire to encourage a strengthening across the cultural lines.
"As one of 38 primates, I have not only had the privilege of visiting many of the provinces, but also to visit fellow Anglican Christians and realise our incredible resources and the limited vision of people in this country as being a global community," he said. "We need to take much more seriously our international role. Reconciliation has to do with the world and so our speakers this evening will broaden our horizon and give us a perspective of Christ's reconciling love in a way that is articulate and real."
Bishop Griswold introduced the first speaker at the forum, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, as one of the major forces in the 1998 Lambeth Conference on global debt and HIV/AIDS.
Archbishop Ndungane opened his speech by explaining that the people of South Africa are accustomed to the theme of reconciliation between black and white people but must also deal with the wider issue between the poor and rich. "This is continuing to widen," he said. "There are 4.5 million people who are unemployed. Sixty per cent live a life of poverty. The gap between the rich and poor has risen substantially between 1995 and 2001." The Archbishop of Cape Town also informed the audience about the staggering number of people who die from HIV/AIDS each year in Southern Africa; and the decline in public health, public transport and education.
"People lose the sense of value and community," he said. "If children are not lovingly cared for, and men and women are deprived of the opportunity to work, they will fall prey to drugs, to crime and other means to ease the pain." He added, "They lose the vision that God has set before us. We need to affirm the deep and urgent longing that people feel for the poor to hear the good news at last."
At the end of his speech, the Archbishop called upon everyone to account to each other for the way that we use our stewardship. "Nothing is more important than human life," he said. "And the poor have the same dignity as the rich and the same means for survival."
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who has spent over twenty years at Harvard University and most recently as Director for the Center for International Development, delivered a very dynamic and moving speech entitled "We Can Make a Difference".
"What can we say about the day that's just passed in Africa ," he said. "We know that 7,000 African children died today of malaria, we also know that 7,000 died of AIDS. When we talk about the wealth we have in this country, and the poverty that there is in the world, and the 15,000 people that died today meaninglessly we talk about the coexistence of wealth that is unimaginable and kills many people each year."
Professor Sachs, who is also a special advisor to United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, revealed that there are one billion people throughout the world whose daily struggle means that their expectancy of life may be 40 years, and the shocking reality of how 200 out of every 1000 children will not see their fifth birthday. "A million children each year die of measles in these poor countries because they don't have the nutrition to give them the strength of the immune system that they need," he said.
The largest pandemic in modern society is AIDS, with 13 million Africans currently dying from the disease, and yet the vast majority don't have access to the drugs that they need. "These people are trapped because the world has looked the other way," said Professor Sachs. "There are very practical solutions. If they can be empowered with first the relief and then the base of development then their struggle would become less painful."
The third speaker, Abagail Nelson, has for the past four years helped the Episcopal Church to design and implement programs that respond to natural and manmade disasters, and reduce communities' exposure to future risk. "In globalisation and reconciliation none of us exists alone," she said. "No part of this body can say of any other part, 'I have no need of you.'"
She explained how her belief is that God calls each of us to stretch ourselves to really identify other people's reality. "Walk in someone else's shoes sometimes and see what it feels like to live in their perspective," she said. "It's about investing our own gifts and talents so that there are no more victims. It's about building the kingdom of heaven."
The next person to address the audience was Ranjit Mathews, a second generation Indian-American who has served as an assistant to the HIV/AIDS Office of the Church of the Province of Southern Africa. "When I went to South Africa as a missionary I felt I was the one being evangelised," he said. "The Church must be a witness and raise its prophetic mantel. Once we are fed spiritually then we are better prepared to service the needs of others.... Life must be an instrument of love wherever we go."
The final speaker of the evening, the Revd Sabina Alkire, has worked around the world helping to alleviate global suffering. One of her concerns was that out of the twenty poorest countries in the world, sixteen are in conflict or war. "If four days of military expenditure every year was dedicated to education we would be able to meet our millennium goal by 2015," she said. "And if Christians lived out their faith fully there would not be so much poverty today."
All of the evening's speeches were extremely moving and revealing, and Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold's hope and prayer for the forum was that "we will go forth from this gathering, and from this General Convention, filled with the Holy Spirit and a deepened commitment to engaging in God's project of restoring all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.
"Let this be the beginning of a new and united effort of our church to serve and advance God's mission of reconciliation globally."