Being connected to the battle against poverty involves touching, smelling, being closer. Photo: Reuters/Kamal Kishore

“Never tire of doing what is right,” urges Paul in 2 Thessalonians, but how can we not tire of battling the enormous, amorphous, problem of global poverty?

I know I was most energized to battle poverty when I saw, touched, and smelled it in Dinajpur, Bangladesh. I was sent alone on this trip-one flight and a good day’s drive from my office in the capital-to visit a community suffering from seasonal food shortages. I stepped out of my air-conditioned van and immediately, a crowd of about 40 men and women surrounded me. You could count the children’s ribs. The men were dark and bent from years in the fields. The women’s saris were torn and dirty. “Can you give us food?” they asked. “What will you do to help us?”

Two years have passed since that raw encounter, and whenever I hear about “global poverty” I crane my mind to see this moment again, on the muggy afternoon of May 8, 2006, when I felt connected to the men and women of that village. I glimpsed the depths of their suffering and wanted to help. This sense of connectedness was foreign, horrible, powerful.

We are over halfway to the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and we continue to struggle not only toward the eight specific targets, but against the deadening abstraction of “global poverty” that’s slowing down the rich from helping the poor. It’s built-up blasé from child sponsorship commercials, disaster relief drives, and a thousand distractions in our own backyards. Even those of us with motivating memories-of AIDS victims, street children, prisoners-find this fuel used up too soon.

Of course there are many practical ways to keep energized when doing good work: pick a cause (or MDG) to focus on, keep informed, and stay spiritually and physically healthy. But it’s impossible to go very far without needing some connected community to sustain you.

Many MDG campaigns have worked to create this kind of community, through strategies like “Make Poverty History” wristbands and rock concerts like Live 8. In the heat of these cultural moments, we feel connected with a worldwide family.

Anglicans have a unique resource for a motivating connectedness, and it’s our currently broken and bruised Anglican Communion. On its best days, this family ties us in solidarity to the joys and sorrows of people far away. It’s our own globalized web, one not dictated by corporations’ interests or aid obligations, but hopefully, in this postcolonial era, one sustained by our shared faith and tradition.

If we look up just slightly from the busyness of our local ministries, we see the richness of these global Anglican connections: companion diocese programs, theological student interns, study grants, longstanding development partnerships, international commis-sions and conferences.

At one of these recent conferences, Towards Effective Anglican Mission in South Africa, Professor Steve de Gruchy noted that our connection through globalization and the global church are irrefutable facts. Christians, however, should be working to transform both connections into something more life-giving.

There are a million ways that global Anglican ties are and can be life-giving. For one, they help us move past deadening abstraction. Uganda isn’t just another part of an AIDS-ravaged continent. Our churches pray for each other through the Anglican Cycle of Prayer, and a Canadian Anglican volunteer, Dr. Carolyn Langford, is teaching animal health in Kabwohe. And Taiwan isn’t just a name on a shirt label, but a diocese in a lively partnership with the Diocese of New Westminster.

How else can we use this gift of community to “do what is right” in the world? Can our connectedness in the Anglican Communion motivate us to achieve the MDGs out of solidarity? Can it give us a broader perspective, one that presents the MDGs as one step in our larger, more holistic mission to share the liberating gospel? And what can we do through the partnerships already in place?

I hope this relaunched MinistryMatters inspires you along these lines. Many of the articles speak to the richness of our global connectedness: Keith Knight writes about the longstanding work of The Primate’s Relief and Development Fund; Maylanne Maybee reflects on the theme of “mission” in two Communion conferences; and Archbishop Fred Hiltz, the Primate, shares his thoughts on recent MDGs marches, in Canada and England.

Any professional Western resource about the MDGs can often seem inadequate, since it’s removed from that powerful face-to-face contact with poverty. But we send this publication out knowing that after our words go so far, it is God who breathes life into dry bones, gives fuel to the burnt out, and ties us closer into life-giving, connected community.

Archbishop Fred Hiltz — marching on behalf of those for whom the MDGs represent the difference between death and life. Photo: Art Babych

I am delighted that this edition of MinistryMatters is devoted to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and I want to thank all who have contributed articles. I trust they will provoke thought and action, locally and globally.

These goals were born at the Millennium Summit in New York in September 2000, at which all 189 UN member states adopted the Millennium Declaration.  The goals are:

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Achieve universal primary education
• Promote gender equality and empower women
• Reduce child mortality
• Improve maternal health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
• Ensure environmental sustainability
• Develop a global partnership for development.

In a paper delivered at the spring 2007 meeting of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops, the Rev. Dr. Ian Douglas said: “These goals are not some kind of unified, supernational, global, integrated United Nations program to cure the ills of the world…. They are not about a single quick fix. They are about building a movement for the repair of the world. They represent a vision of what can be; a vision of a restored, reconciled world, a union of shalom…. They serve as an invitation to get on with what God wants us to be about in the world.”

During the Lambeth Conference this summer, over 1,500 bishops, spouses, and ecumenical guests accepted an invitation from the Archbishop of Canterbury to participate in a walk through London in support of these goals. We walked from Whitehall past the Houses of Parliament and across the River Thames to Lambeth Palace. There, we were greeted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who described the march as “one of the greatest public demonstrations of faith this great city has ever seen.” He went on to say, “You have sent a simple and very clear message, with ringing force, that poverty can be eradicated, that poverty must be eradicated and if we all work together for change, poverty will be eradicated.”

Commending people of faith for their actions in the name of justice and peace for all, the prime minister then challenged us, saying, “We need a march not just to Lambeth, but to New York on September 25, when the United Nations will meet in an emergency session to address poverty.”

He challenged us to ask our governments “to make good the promises that have been made, to redeem the pledges made, to make good the Millennium Development Goals that are not being met.”

In response to that challenge, Bishop Susan Johnson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and I travelled to Ottawa on September 25.  Along with other church leaders, we participated in a liturgy of the word in Christ Church Cathedral. We then walked and stopped for prayer at locations pertinent to each of the goals.

When we arrived at the United Nations Association office, Bishop Johnson and I presented a joint statement, calling on our prime minister and other world leaders to establish a timeline for achieving the MDGs.

These goals, modern as they are, have an ancient ring about them, for they are in the spirit of the prophets who, in the name of God, called people to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly, one with another before God (Micah 6:8). They are in the spirit of the gospel of God in Christ. Jesus began his public ministry by reading from the scroll of Isaiah (chapter 61) in the synagogue in Nazareth. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Time and again in the gospels Jesus demonstrates his care and concern for the poor, the oppressed, and those pushed to the edges of society. He calls his followers to show similar compassion. So important is this vocation that the extent to which we respond is the very basis on which judgement will be passed on the last day (Matthew 25).

This vocation finds expression in the way we pray and act as a church. In contemporary language we pray “for the whole human family, that we may live together in justice and peace” (Litany 6, Book of Alternative Services). We pray that we may “discover new and just ways of sharing the goods of the earth, struggling against exploitation, greed, or lack of concern: [that we may] all live by the abundance of [God's] mercies” (Litany 4, Book of Alternative Services). The church of this generation is acutely aware of the need for actions of repentance and renewal.

Nowhere is this expression of repentance clearer than in the Ash Wednesday Litany of Penitence: “Accept our repentance, Lord, for the wrongs we have done, for our blindness to human need and suffering, and our indifference to injustice and cruelty.” And nowhere is our commitment to renewal more clearly stated than in our baptismal vows, which include the commitment to “strive for justice and peace among all people,” a commitment grounded in “respect [for] the dignity of every human being.”

Marching in support of the MDGs, speaking on behalf of the millions for whom these goals represent the difference between death and life, calling on the leaders of nations to press on with achievable timelines for the full realization of the goals is a solemn obligation. To honour it is to stand up for the peace, for justice and joy, for the liberation and life that God wills for his children of every language, race, and nation. It is, as the hymn writer puts it, the call to “to use the faith you’ve found to reshape the world around.”

I encourage you to read and reflect upon these goals in the spirit of a prayer once found in the Quebec Diocesan Gazette.

Give us, O God, a vision for our world as your love would make it-where the weak are protected and none goes hungry or poor; where the goods of this life are shared and everyone can enjoy them; where different nations, races, and cultures live with tolerance and mutual respect; where peace is built with justice and justice is guided by love; and give us the courage and inspiration to build it.

In this prayer and the work to which it calls us, I am sincerely in Christ,

+Fred

People join hands outside the UN building in Bangkok, Thailand, on October 17, 2007, to commemorate the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The event was part of a global “Stand Up and Speak Out” campaign against poverty, one part of the Millennium Development Goals campaign. Photo: Reuters/Sukree Sukplang

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, all 189 member states committed themselves to improving the lives of the world’s most impoverished people before 2015. It was a compact between rich and poor countries: wealthy countries, including Canada, promised to deliver more, and more effective, aid, faster and deeper debt relief, and fairer trade rules. Less wealthy countries would work to reform policies, improve governance, and to channel resources to social development. Eight specific goals emerged:

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Achieve universal primary education
• Promote gender equality and empower women
• Reduce child mortality
• Improve maternal health
• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
• Ensure environmental sustainability
• Develop a global partnership for development.

These goals are broken down into 18 specific targets, and 48 indicators. The United Nations monitors action toward these goals, and their MDG Monitor website is a quick way to check up on the world’s progress.

Where we are now

We are now more than halfway to the 2015 target, and while some progress has been made in all developing countries (especially in growing countries such as China), overall movement toward the MDGs has been too slow (particularly in sub-Saharan Africa).

Developed countries, including those in the European Union and the G8, have made a commitment to bring their Official Development Assistance (ODA) closer to 0.7% of their Gross National Income (GNI), a target that has long been held up as viable and effective. So far, only a few countries have reached this target, and Canada’s ODA contribution remains at around 0.3% of GNI.

Many meetings have been held to strengthen the push toward these goals. The most recent was on September 25, 2008, when the UN hosted a high-level meeting in New York City to identify gaps and accelerate progress toward the MDGs.

Where do we fit in as a church?

The ongoing work of Partnerships and The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) contributes in various ways toward the MDGs. In addition to this work, General Synod has taken specific action.

June 2005: The Ecojustice Committee of the General Synod sends a letter to the Canadian prime minister, urging that the ODA be increased.

March 2007: A seven-person delegation from the Anglican Church of Canada, including  PWRDF, attends the Towards Effective Anglican Mission (TEAM) conference in Boksburg, South Africa, which challenged Anglican provinces to review and renew their responses to the MDGs.

June 2007: General Synod passes resolution A213, asking for various actions around the MDGs, including lobbying the prime minister, identifying theological themes within the MDGs, and renewing in-house and joint program work around the MDGs.

July 24, 2008: During the Lambeth Conference in London, Eng., Canadian bishops march alongside other Anglican bishops, interfaith leaders, and others to draw attention to the MDGs. Over 1,500 people attend. Some Canadians participate in an “online march” by sending letters to their Members of Parliament.

September 25, 2008: Archbishop Fred Hiltz, National Bishop Susan Johnson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, other bishops, and ecumenical friends march in Ottawa to urge the Canadian government to honour its commitment to the MDGs.

Where do i fit in?

There are many ways that Canadian Anglicans are working toward the Millennium Development Goals. Many support Christian MDG campaigns, including Make Poverty History and the Micah Challenge, while some are taking up the challenge on their own-for instance, the Rev. Jesse Dymond, Diocese of Huron, who spoke with local MPs about issues of global poverty. Some are working collectively, like the Diocese of Ontario, which encourages parishes to pray specifically for the MDGs and has held related vigils.

The momentum toward 2015 continues to grow, and General Synod is working to develop new resources. Stay tuned!

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.

Gopal Chitrakar / Reuters

The Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF) has been engaged in community development work for most of its 50-year history. It has, therefore, lived and breathed the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) long before the United Nations created them in 2000.

PWRDF provides a holistic approach to development, and all eight MDGs are interconnected in its work. The goals are: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV and AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and establish a global partnership for development. PWRDF staff say it is impossible to isolate and focus on any one of these goals. Instead, the goals must be seen as part of a larger project of holistic development.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

To move toward holistic development, PWRDF works through partner organizations around the world and within Canada. Those partners are either church-based or secular organizations and community groups, and many of them have been in a close relationship with PWRDF for up to 20 years. Most of those partner organizations have a strong focus on community development that includes health education, food production, and human rights.

PWRDF does not provide a ministry to partner organizations; it is in partnership with them. That means being in dialogue and working with partner organizations on an equal level. It is therefore no coincidence that the PWRDF Board of Directors has representatives from four partner organizations who sit around the table as full members. Their perspectives are invaluable and cherished.

While the MDGs have a strong focus on the eradication of poverty-and the goals frame poverty in economic terms-PWRDF focuses on strengthening the community. A strong community incorporates human rights, health education and practice, a solid education for women and children, and sustainable agricultural practices. A strong community leads to the eradication of poverty within that community.

The distinction is important. The United Nations and its MDGs approach the issue from an economic and human rights perspective. PWRDF, too, applies a human rights lens to its community development work, but it approaches community development from a biblical perspective, holding up the dignity of the individual and strength of the community. PWRDF works with and through its partners to strengthen individuals and communities across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin and South America, and the Caribbean, and within Indigenous communities in Canada.

Because the holistic approach to community development is foundational for PWRDF, the eight MDGs could not be considered in isolation from each other in its work.

What is interconnected development?

Here are some examples of how elements of PWRDF’s work-sustainable development, food security, microfinance, health care, and education-are interconnected.

PWRDF helps enable the MDGs by supporting sustainable development (afforestation, reducing/eliminating dependence on chemical fertilizers, etc.) and improving access to safe water and basic sanitation. The benefits of this work are far-reaching: soil will yield sufficient crops and people will be well-fed so that they can perform their daily work; people will not spend scant resources on chemical fertilizers that harm the environment; the environment will support a community learning to treat males and females equally; children, mothers, and the entire community will reap the benefits of health care and health education in a world that is healthy; women will not have to walk so far to get water, and the water they gather will be wholesome.

Bobby Yip / Reuters

The work PWRDF supports in food security and microfinance would not be possible (or would be severely limited) if people did not receive proper health care and health education; if people did not learn that women and men function best when regarded and treated equally; if women were spending many hours each day walking to water sources and carrying heavy containers of water many kilometers; if people did not learn that the created order needs to be cared for and rebuilt through afforestation, reducing use of chemical fertilizers, being careful with the placement of latrines, etc.

PWRDF staff regularly consult with partner organizations to see what the local needs are and how they can best be addressed. The end result is a menu of partner organizations spread across a region, each with specific strengths and a focus to provide a very specific local need

Glen Spurrell, PWRDF’s Africa program officer, says that all eight MDGs can be found in the work being carried out across Africa. And while PWRDF is not involved in providing universal primary education because it is the local government’s responsibility, a number of its educational and health-related programs enable healthy children to attend school. Its programs to promote gender equality, for example, raise the level of awareness and understanding within a community that enables girls to access an education rather than simply remain in a home, doing household chores.

Stories of interconnectedness

Does PWRDF make a difference? Glen Spurrell says that, through health education programs provided by partner organizations, birth weight is increasing. “There is a half-kilogram gain in birth weight. That is significant.” The agricultural and water programs provided by PWRDF partners have also led to a significant difference in the lives of women across Africa.

Since water is the lifeblood of most communities-for crops, drinking, and cooking-many have water stories to tell, including this one from Asia. Englanded is a community of Indigenous farmers who grow vegetables on mountain slopes in the Philippines. Each household owns an average of 1.3 hectares of agricultural land, consisting of small, terraced plots. In 2007 the village farmers approached the diocesan office of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines (ECP) to find out if they could help them provide easier access to a water supply. In their dreams, the farmers imagined having running water to each home in their community. In reality, entire families would spend hours walking down the mountain slope to fetch water in plastic containers, then walk back up the mountain to empty their jugs into pails or tanks to be used for household chores and also to water their crops. This was a difficult and painstaking process.

Their request for help turned into the creation of the Englanded community organization. With technical and financial assistance from the ECP, the community dug a well and used an electric pump and a network of pipes to supply water door to door for their homes and their gardens.

The community organization, seeing the benefit of working together and working with other organizations, is looking beyond their water needs. They have begun to grow their vegetables in greenhouses to develop a market economy, and they are tackling health and education issues. PWRDF provides financial support to the ECP, and PWRDF staff were able to see firsthand just how they are making a difference in communities such as Englanded.

PWRDF’s work within Latin America covers most of the MDGs. There is a strong focus on food production, gender equality, and human rights, particularly because of the difficult plight of women in many Latin American countries.

A PWRDF delegation visited the Centre for Women’s Human Rights in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 2007 and heard firsthand from the women and families who had been supported by the centre. Throughout Mexico, the centre provides legal support for cases involving the disappearance and assassination of women, and works with the Mexican government to raise awareness about and reduce violation of women’s rights.

PWRDF has a long history of working with minority groups, refugees, and migrants. There are about 175 million people, or 2.9 per cent of the world’s population, currently living temporarily or permanently outside their country of origin. PWRDF has built a strong connection with dioceses across Canada that have developed their own refugee sponsorship programs. Likewise, it works with partner organizations around the world that have a similar passion for work among minority groups. One example of this is PWRDF’s work with the St. John’s Cathedral HIV Education Centre in Hong Kong, the first faith-based organization to undertake an AIDS ministry.  Established in 1995, its main focus is to provide a reproductive health program for the 226,000 Asian migrant workers in that city, most of them Filipinos and Indonesians. Building upon those connections with the migrant workers, there is a related ministry dealing with human rights issues around employment and education.

PWRDF has a long history with the fight against HIV and AIDS, the sixth MDG. The Partnership for Life campaign was a resounding success in raising awareness of HIV and AIDS across the Anglican Church of Canada. And the financial response from Anglicans was overwhelming. The partnerships with organizations in the Global South continue to be strong, and those education and awareness programs will continue to be supported until HIV and AIDS is no longer an overwhelming threat to the lives of so many.

Even though the focus of the UN’s MDGs is the Global South-Africa, Asia, Latin and South America, and the Pacific-PWRDF also focuses on those issues within the Canadian context. It works with and through Indigenous partnerships across Canada, striving to help bring dignity to native communities as they work hard to preserve their cultures and languages. Poverty exists within Canada’s Aboriginal communities, and child poverty is rampant in places as dissimilar as the native reserve and the heart of Toronto. Women are murdered in Vancouver’s East Side, on the streets of Winnipeg and Edmonton, and in homes across the country. Issues of human rights exist in our own backyards.

The UN’s MDGs are to be achieved by 2015, but whether the world will eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by then remains to be seen. In 2008, PWRDF is celebrating 50 years of international development and relief work and, as long as poverty and injustice continue in our world, PWRDF will continue to work through partner organizations on local, specifically designed community development programs. PWRDF and those partner organizations will be there beyond 2015, engaged in the same kind of work that they have been doing for the past 50 years. It will do so on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada, and it will carry on that work as long as Anglicans continue to support it through their financial contributions.

“We used to be able to say: ‘if only we had the technology, if only we had the medicines, if only we had the science, if only we had the engineering skills then we could meet the millennium goals.’ But we know that with the technology we have, the medicine we have, the science we have, it is the will to act that now must be found.”

—British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, speaking at the Lambeth march for the MDGs in London, July 24, 2008.

Many books will help you find this will to act with practical suggestions, stories of hope, and data analysis. But we need spiritual resources, too. As congregational sales representative for Anglican Book Centre and Augsburg Fortress, I offer you a few of the latter.

1. What Can One Person Do? by Sabina Alkire and Edmund Newell (Church Publishing, 2005)

This is the best Anglican primer on the MDGs by far. In 2006 the Episcopal Church committed to making the MDGs a mission priority, and this book helps the church walk the talk. The authors recommend seven actions: prayer, study, give (0.7%), connect, raise awareness, take action, and advocate.

2. Amos and Hosea: Boundaries, Tough Love and Amazing Grace (The Kerygma Program, 2005)

This is a thorough Bible study on two essential texts that shaped Jesus’s behaviour and the church’s tradition. The leader’s guide is written by Victoria Smit, with an accompanying resource book by George W. Ramsay.

3. Hungry for Justice: A Six-Week Guide for Praying Daily, Building Community, and Changing the World by the editors of Sojourners magazine (Sojourners, 2008)

Ideal for Lent, this book synthesizes many themes and disciplines required to take on the MDGs.  There is a daily excerpt from Jim Wallis’s 1981 book The Call to Conversion, a scripture on the same theme, a provocative question, and a prayer.

4. Walter Wink from the United Methodist tradition has valuable spiritual advice: “History belongs to the intercessors who believe the future into being.” Wink’s prize-winning books on “the powers” also remind us that spiritual conversion is necessary to find the will to act. Naming the Powers (1984), Unmasking the Powers (1986), Engaging the Powers (1992), and When the Powers Fall (1998) provide a deep exploration of the spirituality of justice-seeking. All are published by Fortress Press.

5. Prayers for a Privileged People by Walter Brueggemann (Abingdon Press, 1994)

After a lifetime of reflection on scripture, especially the Old Testament, this great scholar shares his prayers on behalf of the “haves,” who face the seduction of denial on one hand and the temptation of despair on the other. “Save us from our power … our violence … our fear and hatred,” he prays, “because we are your people … and this is your world.”

6. Praying with Vincent de Paul by Thomas McKenna (Word Among Us Press, 1994)

This book is from the excellent Companions on the Journey series by this Roman Catholic publisher. From St. Benedict to Dorothy Day, the church has struggled to live out the call to find Jesus among the poor. Vincent de Paul is a good companion for anyone who seeks balance between intelligent activity and trusting surrender.

7. 52 Simple Ways to Make a Difference by the late Paul Simon, former US senator (Augsburg Fortress, 2004)

This book is a practical, colloquial, and inspiring book for general readers. It reminds us that it’s the little things we do count, and offers concrete suggestions for what these little things can be. Pick one per week, and see what changes!

8. Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing by Dennis A. Jacobsen (Augsburg Fortress, 2001)

If you want to hear a voice enflamed with indignation at the church’s complicity with capitalist North American values, take a deep breath and read Doing Justice. Rooted in inner-city parish life, Jacobsen is world-weary yet faith-filled. His reflections on eschatological scriptures underline South African theologian Allan Boesak’s dictum: “You cannot understand ‘revelation’ unless you are being oppressed.”

9. Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God by Cynthia Moe-Lobeda (Augsburg Fortress, 2002)

This book is written “for all people whose hearts know even the faintest glimmer of a holy hunger to live toward the well-being of vulnerable neighbours.” Globalization, Moe-Lobeda says, challenges us spiritually, but at the same time has weakened our will to act. Passionate and academic, she argues that the Christian contemplative tradition can ignite creative resistance to the seemingly inevitable march of globalization.

10. Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises and a Revolution of Hope, by emergent church leader Brian McLaren (Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2007)

This is written with a regular, nervous inquirer in mind. It has more humour than anger, and warns without being terrifying. McLaren helps us believe that the changes we seek are not beyond reach, and will bring joy to the seekers.

If I can help you in locating these or other resources, do not hesitate to contact me at revalan.cook@augsburgfortress.com

Happy reading!

If Charles sold some listed securities, 50 per cent of the gain would be taxable. However, as he has learned, when you contribute qualifying securities to the Anglican Church of Canada or to any charity other than a private foundation, none of the gain is taxable. For example, if you donate securities that originally cost you $2,000 and are now worth $10,000, you recognize $8,000 of capital gain but pay no tax on the gain.

Your donation receipt will be issued for the full fair market value of the securities on the date they are transferred to the church. In computing the amount of your charitable tax credit, you receive the benefit of all the appreciation that can now be applied to reduce taxes payable on other income.

Planning opportunities with listed securities

1. When it’s time to sell

You may own securities you don’t think will perform in the future as well as they have in the past, or maybe you expect a correction in the entire market. Nevertheless, you hesitate to sell because you don’t want to pay tax on the gain. If you have been planning to make a charitable gift, these securities could be the ideal asset to use for that gift. The net cost of the gift could be relatively low.

Consider this example: Charles thinks it is time to sell some stock now valued at $10,000, for which he originally paid $2,000. He has decided to make a $10,000 gift to the Council of the North Trust administered by the Anglican Foundation. His combined federal and provincial tax rate and charitable tax credit are both 45%.

If Charles sold the stock, he would have to pay $1,800 for the tax on his capital gain (50% x $8,000 = $4,000; the tax on this capital gain works out to $1,800: 45% x $4,000).

But Charles knows better. He will give his securities to the Anglican Foundation.

As he does so, he receives a tax credit of $4,500 (45% x $10,000). There is no tax on his capital gain of $8,000.

2. When you want to hold

Unlike Charles in the previous example, you may have a stock you think has a great future. While you like the idea of exempting part of the gain from taxation, you don’t want to lose out on likely future appreciation. Thus, you are more inclined to hold the stock and make this year’s charitable gift with cash.

If you hold such stock, you might consider giving it and using the cash, which you otherwise would have given, to repurchase the stock on the market. Thereby, you would have established a higher value (cost base) for the stock, and when you sell it in the future you will be taxed only on the gain accruing after the repurchase.

3. Bequest of securities

The full exemption from taxable gain applies to charitable bequests and to lifetime gifts. If you intend to make bequests to the church as well as to family members, it could be advantageous to fund your charitable bequest with appreciated, listed securities and your family bequests with other assets. You can do this by making a specific bequest of certain securities, or by empowering your executor to select the assets for the charitable bequest.

Suppose, for example, that your estate consists of your principal residence, plus cash, plus $100,000 of listed stock with an adjusted cost base (original cost) of $40,000, and that you want to leave $100,000 to the Anglican Foundation and the balance to your children. If the stock goes to the children, $30,000 of the gain (50% x $60,000) will be taxed, but if it goes to the Anglican Foundation, the full $60,000 gain will be exempt from taxation. Better, then, to give the church your stock and your children your cash and principal residence, neither of which is taxable.

It’s amazing what one can do when one is feeling generous, visionary, and thoughtful.

For more information about gift planning, please contact Archdeacon John M. Robertson at 1.888.439.GIFT or jrobertson@national.anglican.ca

That day, on August 6, 1993, the Primate spoke on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada: “I am sorry, more than I can say, that we were part of a system that took you and your children from home and family,” he said. “I am sorry, more than I can say, that we tried to remake you in our image, by taking from you your language and your signs of identity.”

Archbishop Peers spoke these words during a tumultuous time for the Anglican Church of Canada. Survivors’ stories were coming out, churches’ financial futures were uncertain, and many former residential schools staff felt that their stories were not being listened to. Many Anglicans remember these times as dark days.

Fifteen years later seems like a good time to consider where we’ve been. Have we weathered the storm? The Anglican Church of Canada has certainly been blessed to have survived financially. Many parishes have taken steps toward healing and reconciliation. Some parishes and dioceses have done antiracism training, and produced resources to help improve relations between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals. In some areas, priests have represented the Anglican Church of Canada at legal hearings of residential school survivors.

Yet the lives of many Canadians continue to be strained by the legacy of residential schools, so the apology needs to live.

What is a living apology? It is not a constant prostration in search of forgiveness from a maligned group. Our Aboriginal leaders have lifted the church from bended knee and extended an invitation to walk together. This is the kind of forgiveness only Christ can enable. Now we must actually do the walking, step by step, in conversations and relationships and programs, trying to build right relations between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals. This is how the apology lives.

It lives in surprising and vibrant ways. There’s a new National Indigenous Anglican Bishop, Mark MacDonald, who has been criss-crossing Canada visiting Aboriginal Anglicans and encouraging their faith and ministries. He and others in Indigenous Ministries are exploring ways for Aboriginal Anglicans to govern themselves.

And the Anglican Church of Canada is trying to put its money where its mouth is. The Anglican Healing Fund has distributed over $3 million for projects that promote healing. These include training survivors in prayer ministry, training community counsellors, and supporting spiritual canoe journeys for youth. This funding is ongoing.

There’s a new spot on the national website where you can learn more about how the apology lives: www.anglican.ca/rs. Here you can read about self-determination, justice, and healing—lofty words for a church that has made many mistakes. Emboldened by Christ’s help, we are striving to live this out.

We have deacons, priests, and bishops in order to sustain human participation in the mission of God. Photo: Michael Hudson

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge & shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

From “God’s Grandeur”
-Gerard Manley Hopkins

In his Hobart Lecture of December 2000, Archbishop Michael Peers spoke of the ordained ministries of the church as “refracting” the ministry of the baptized. Ordained ministries focus and illuminate characteristic elements of baptismal ministry-diaconal, priestly, episcopal. He acknowledged the corrosive effect of clericalism, in which diaconal, priestly and episcopal ministry were understood as the property, or even as the entitlement, of those ordained to the office of deacon, priest, or bishop. And he challenged his hearers to understand the complex and vital relationships among ordained ministries, the ministry of the baptized, and the mission of God-the missio dei.

The relationship between the mission of God and the ministry of the church ought to be a close one. It does not seem to have been Jesus’s intention to establish a new set of religious propositions and ritual practices. Instead, one can easily read the gospels as an account of God working in Jesus to renew the relationship between (on one hand) religious belief and ritual practice and (on the other) God’s active and purposeful presence in the world. In contemporary Judaism, that purposeful presence is often expressed as tikkun olam, “repairing the world.”  At a recent bar mitzvah celebration, the young bar mitzvah elaborated at length on why a loaf of bread is more miraculous than manna. “Manna,” he said, “is God’s work alone. A loaf of bread requires human participation, and the sharing of a loaf of bread requires human consent to partnership in God’s work of tikkun olam.”

Human consent to partnership in God’s work of repairing the earth is a way we might talk about the ministry conferred in baptism, and about the ordained ministries that illuminate, refract, and serve that ministry. We have deacons, priests, and bishops not simply to sustain a set of ritual practices, not just to affirm a set of religious beliefs, and certainly not merely for the purposes of institutional survival and order, but to foster ritual practices, to affirm religious beliefs, and to sustain a common life that supports human participation in the mission of God, the repairing of the world.

Of deacons, priests, and bishops, the most familiar to ordinary Anglicans are priests. In most congregations on most Sundays, it is a priest who presides at worship, and a priest who preaches. In fact, the priest who serves as rector of a parish is often simply “our minister” to the people of that parish. Up until recently, a deacon has been simply someone waiting a while to be a priest, so renewal of the diaconate is a welcome and helpful initiative taking root across our church. And a bishop is, for most Anglicans, a distant administrator and, on occasion, a visiting celebrity with exotic accessories. It is those ordained to the order of priests who are visible day by day and week by week in the lives of Anglicans, and an exploration of how their ministry contributes to God’s mission can yield insight that will strengthen the whole people of God as we serve that mission.

In 1918, Gerard Manley Hopkins published perhaps his greatest poem-“God’s Grandeur.”  It sets out with a high and hopeful tone: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” then pauses to acknowledge the hard reality of a trodden, trade-seared, toil-smeared bare-soiled wreck of a world. And yet…

…for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

The priestly ministry of the church is a witness to the holy in the life of the world, for the sake of the world, and the local ministry of those ordained priests is to foster the participation of all the baptized in that witness. This holy to which we are called to bear witness is not a sequestered node of ethereal perfection, held safely apart from the smudge and smear of the world. It is instead, a promise that smudge and smear are not all that the world can be, that bare soil is not the last soil, and that business as usual, with its claim to inevitability, is not the only business afoot.

The priestly ministry of the church is a witness to what Jesus called the kingdom of God, a kingdom founded not in stuff, status, and power, but in those other qualities, the ones we name, often unreflectively, at the beginning of our weekly celebration-“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.”  These words mean more than we mostly take them to mean, I think. Most of the time, we recognize them as a signal that worship is about to begin, registering them as religious words without recognizing that they are laying a claim on this time, this place, and we who gather in them. This isn’t just 160 William Street in Oakville anymore. Now this is a holy place, governed by the ethic of the kingdom of God, an ethic of grace over entitlement, of love over hostility and indifference, and of fellowship over the lonely pursuit of personal aggrandizement. From the first words uttered by the presider, we are told to expect a transforming encounter with God, and with the kind of holiness that holds out an alternative to the accelerating devolution of the life of the world into violence, fear, indifference, greed, and want.

At a recent ordination the preacher, the Rev. Canon Dr. David Neelands, distinguished priestly ministry from clerical ministry. We can no longer, he asserted, ordain clergy-persons charged with managing the institutional life of a local congregation. He challenged the ordinands to resist the strong enticements to function as clergy. Much of the reward system of our church continues to favour clergy managers over priestly refractions of baptismal ministry. And for sure, functioning as priests who refract the priesthood of the whole people is harder work than counting the liturgical, pastoral, and financial beans of a diocesan franchise.

The truth is, though, that the world doesn’t need well-run Anglican franchises. Most of a generation raised in the ethic of such franchises have taken leave of them, and their aging parents are puzzled, and often deeply troubled, by that exodus. The world needs hope, needs desperately to hear that there is still a Holy Ghost brooding over the bent world “with warm breast and ah! bright wings.”  That is not to say that we do not need to make careful use of resources, to be thoughtful in our planning and our practices. It is simply to say that careful use of resources and thoughtful planning are useless without reference to God’s presence and purpose in the life of the world.

There is something loose in the life of the world, something that intends the mending of what has been torn, the redemption of what has been wasted, the healing of what is broken, the reconciliation of what is estranged, the gathering of what has been scattered, the finding of what has been lost. This holy something is the business of priesthood, not just for those ordained to that order, but for all who are baptized into the working, serving, witnessing Body of Christ, called to ministry in God’s mission in and for the sake of the world.

But it is not just the prospect of travel that has placed pilgrimage on my mind. On July 3, 2008, the Canadian violinist Oliver Schroer succumbed to leukemia. Schroer was in his early 50s, and had enjoyed a successful career as a solo artist, crossing folk and roots with various other musical influences, and gaining a loyal following in Canada and well beyond. His battle with leukemia was fairly short; it was less than 18 months from diagnosis to death, but even during that time he continued to record (Hymns and Hers, a project he described as “an album of hymns and introspective ensemble pieces”) and to play concerts. The final concert of his life took place on June 5, 2008, less than a month before his death.

It is not Hymns and Hers that is relevant here, but rather the 2006 Camino album, a beautifully packaged audio journal of the 1000-kilometre pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago that the musician made in 2004. Accompanied by his wife and two friends, Schroer packed along his violin and portable recording equipment, and created atmospheric and evocative improvised pieces in churches and on roadsides along the walk. One of the friends on the pilgrimage was the photographer Peter Coffman, and his work is presented in the 28-page CD booklet, offering visual illumination to the recordings.

Pilgrimage seems to be somewhat in fashion in our day, and a quick online search will turn up dozens of books written about the Camino experience. Among them are books by New Age hero Shirley MacLaine (The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit), as well as a brand-new one by Mennonite theologian Arthur Paul Boers entitled The Way is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago. I have read two Camino books:  Joyce Rupp’s Walk in a Relaxed Manner: Life Lessons from the Camino, which is a mature and solidly liberal catholic reflection on the experience, and Fumbling: A Journey of Love, Adventure, and Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, a much less seasoned work by the young writer  Kerry Egan, in which she explores issues ranging from her father’s death to her romance with her travelling companion to her struggles to believe in God. Between these two works, I came to think that I had at least some appreciation of the diversity and complexity of the pilgrim quest, yet it was not until I heard Schroer’s work that I came to understand the deep appeal of such a journey.

I actually wonder if the title of Boers’s book, The Way is Made by Walking, wouldn’t have been a better title for the Camino album. That title is so similar to the sentiments of St. Augustine when he said, “it is solved by walking,” catches wonderfully the heart of Schroer’s project, and in a very real sense anticipates how he faced his own death.

In an interview with Toronto Star reporter Diane Flacks, Schroer spoke of death as being the “waterfall we’re all facing.”  “We’re all dying, you know,” he remarked, and then in response to a question about what he expected of death, he said this:

“At the moment we pass through that portal, things rearrange themselves so thoroughly [that] it cannot make any sense to us now. I have the feeling that, at the moment that I slip across, it will make ultimate sense. And I’m not going to look back.”

This strikes me as being less the stuff of the soft New Age mysticism that would characterize someone like Shirley MacLaine, and more akin to what the medievals would have called “a good death.” With time to prepare to die-with time to put one’s life in perspective and one’s soul in order-death can be faced with calm confidence.

I can only speculate here-and I suppose such speculation might be either naive or irresponsible-but if one has listened carefully to Camino, it is not hard to imagine that the long walk had something to do with Schroer being able to die well. And actually, you have to more than just listen to this album: you must hear it, savour it, pour over the photographs, and dwell on the gently poetic liner notes. It is not an album for background listening, nor is it particularly one that can be listened to in any way other than something like prayerful solitude. I have sat out on my screened porch on a summer night and heard it. I have walked through the woods while it played on my little MP3 player. I have prayed with it while sitting in the garden at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. Each time, I find myself walking with that little company along a dusty pilgrim’s road, and each time I’m a little richer for it.

To return briefly to my travel plans, I suspect that part of what might happen in this trip is that I’ll find my appetite whetted for a return visit, and one that will be built around walking St. Cuthbert’s Way or spending time exploring life in a place like Taizé, or maybe even out on the long road that is the Camino. Maybe I’ll be made a little more deeply aware of how it is that “the way is made by walking,” or at least be recalled to the truth that our lives should not be seen not as static or settled things but rather as a way. If I can trust that insight-if I can trust the promise of the One who named himself as the Way (and the Truth and the Life), then like the Canadian violinist whose theological work was executed in the doing of his music more than by anything he actually said or wrote, an enacted theology and a good death lie on my horizon as well.