Last year I was privileged to participate in two separate events of the global Anglican Communion. Although they were quite different, both events gave me insight into what is distinctive about how Anglicans understand “mission” and how the much-championed Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) fit into that understanding. The first conference was in March 2007, in South Africa: “Towards Effective Anglican Mission (TEAM): an International Conference on Prophetic Witness, Social Development, and HIV and AIDS.” In September 2007 I attended a meeting of the Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN) in the Great Lakes region of Africa, on the theme of post-conflict resolution and reconciliation.
Photo: Miguel Vidal / Reuters
At the beginning of the TEAM conference, our host, the Most Rev. Njongonkulu Ndugane, Archbishop of Cape Town, invited the 400 participants to unite against global poverty, thereby “blowing fresh winds of change into the lungs of the Anglican Communion.” Rather than focus inwardly on differences and divisions, our attention was directed outward to the world around us, using the lens of the MDGs.
In 2000, world leaders made a commitment to achieve these eight goals by 2015. The goals aim to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, eliminate gender inequalities, prevent environmental degradation, halt HIV and AIDS, and provide adequate education, health care, and clean water.
I recognize that the MDGs have much to commend them. They represent a significant shared responsibility within the community of nations. They are considered doable. It is widely acknowledged that the financial and human resources needed to accomplish them already exist and there are mechanisms in place to monitor our progress.
Not since the Jubilee 2000 movement, which called for debt cancellation in the world’s most impoverished countries, has there been such concentrated attention by people of faith on global well-being and economic justice. Many church members will remember the petitions, public action, liturgies, and demonstrations that accompanied the Jubilee campaign.
Yet I have been a slow convert to the MDGs. They are neither so clearly rooted in our scriptural tradition, nor do they have the same emphasis on God’s economy of abundance and sufficiency. They have been criticized for reflecting the approach of people who think they already know the answers, who regard poverty as an engineering problem that needs only a technical solution, who impose their own response to the “problem” of poor countries.
It certainly struck me at the TEAM conference that the more privileged provinces of our Communion tended to be the more vocal proponents of the goals. Those provinces in parts of the world where the goals are specifically directed were not on board to the same degree.
Upon reflection, this isn’t a big surprise. It’s the difference between viewing a dance floor from the balcony and being directly engaged in the dance! People in Bangladesh or Chad are in the thick of things, striving day by day to get by and make things better. People from the UK or North America tend to see global events and development relationships at a greater distance, from above.
When a panel of presenters from different provinces of the Anglican Communion spoke about their local mission context, this difference between seeing things closely, on the dance floor, and seeing them from the balcony, became quite evident.
Bishop Munawar Rumalshah of Pakistan told a story of when an area near the Afghan border was bombed in retaliation for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He and his colleagues were then confronted by a group of angry protesters demonstrating against the church as a symbol of the West. But just before violence broke out, the protesters began to question their own actions: “Why are we bothering these people?” they asked. “They have been cleaning our wounds for over a hundred years.”
This was one of many stirring anecdotes of local situations. I was similarly moved when Maori Anglican theologian Dr. Jenny Te Paa identified the challenge of theological education among women and Indigenous Peoples as a local mission priority of Aotearoa/New Zealand.
We also heard from the Western church. When Abagail Nelson of Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD) took the podium, she spoke about their program of distributing mosquito nets in malaria-ridden parts of Africa, an initiative that is clearly saving lives.
It was inspiring, yet what was missing for me was hearing from the American church about its own mission context. What about the US invasion of Iraq and the billions being spent on armaments? What about the unique spiritual challenges of being a wealthy church?
When challenged on this, the reply was that the Episcopal church had decided to focus its prophetic mission solely on the MDGs, in order not to muddy the waters and confuse its priorities. While this made some sense strategically, it seemed to me that countries of the global North tend to see things from the balcony. We need to be reminded of the Anglican understanding that responsibility for mission in any place always belongs primarily to the church in that place.
It’s a principle that should apply equally, whether one is in a wealthy or impoverished part of the world.
Hellen Wangusa, the Uganda-born Anglican Observer at the United Nations, articulated these and other challenges in her address to TEAM delegates. She reminded us that the Anglican Communion’s commitment goes far beyond 2015, and that its mandate is not only to tend to the needs of the poor, but also to address the responsibility of the rich. In her wisdom, she understood that the power of the MDGs lies in the fact that they name distant and abstract realities, making them specific and direct.
The TEAM conference report acknowledged that the MDGs are “merely the starting point for the Communion’s interventions,” and that there are many issues that the church must pursue that go well beyond the MDGs. Most notable was the issue of conflict, which plagues so many parts of the world and often prevents movement toward the goals.
Which brings me to the second Communion event, the Anglican Peace and Justice Network meeting where I represented the Anglican Church of Canada along with Ms. Cynthia Patterson of the Diocese of Quebec. This time, about 26 network participants from Sudan, Japan, Scotland, and beyond came together for 10 days in Rwanda and Burundi, guests of Archbishop Kolini of Rwanda and Bishop Pie Ntukamazina of Bujumbura, Burundi.
Not only did we engage intensely with local sites and stories, but we also heard many moving accounts of struggle or conflict from participants, and their efforts as Christians, and specifically as Anglicans, to respond in faith. These weren’t accounts from the balcony, but from people on the dance floor, directly engaged in mission within the vibrant, complicated context of their own countries.
I cannot begin to describe the effects of the sights we saw and the stories we heard. Archbishop Kolini spoke candidly of the failure of the church in Rwanda-a country that is over 98% Christian-during the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 people were massacred as the world looked on. When we toured the genocide museum in Kigali, I was horrified and perplexed by the stark evidence of broken humanity, of cruelty, deceit, and viciousness among human beings. Yet Rwanda was moving on, seeking healing, justice, and a new future.
In Burundi, a country racked by years of civil strife and conflict, we visited a memorial in the remote mountain village of Buta dedicated to 40 Roman Catholic seminarians and workers who had been slaughtered by rebels in 1997. The rebels demanded that the students divide into two groups along ethnic lines, so that one would be killed and the other spared. The young men refused to comply, and chose instead to die together in a courageous witness to their shared humanity and common baptism.
We heard similar accounts of courage, witness, and reconciliation from Uganda, Kenya, the Philippines, and Korea, where local churches had defined their own priorities of healing, restorative justice, interfaith cooperation, and economic justice.
In every case, I was deeply impressed by the role of the Anglican church-a role of social analysis, prophetic witness, of healing, and compassion.
The factors that define God’s mission are not the same in every place. They do not have a deadline and cannot be quantified or monitored. Hellen Wangusa expressed this recently at an American conference called “Everyone, everywhere.” She said that to her, MDGs have always stood for the “Mission Driven Goals” of the Anglican church in her part of Africa.
These MDGs were the kind that shaped Sunday school and catechism classes, ensuring that “everyone, everywhere” learned to read and write. These MDGs shaped communities that gave rise to the likes of Archbishop Janani Luwum, Stephen Biko, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, helping to form them and give them the courage to speak truth to power, and inspire those around them.
In the end, what I would like to see as the outcome of the MDG campaign is this: that the Anglican church worldwide will become a mission-driven church-learning dif-ferent dance steps in different places, and together seeking the power of God’s transformation, who alone has a full balcony view of the human condition.
