wfn.org | WCC's U.S. Conference Gears up for Anti-Violence Decade

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

15-December-1999 
99424 
 
    WCC's U.S. Conference Gears up for Anti-Violence Decade 
 
    Tutu electrifies delegates in homily 
    at historic Ebenezer Baptist Church 
 
    by Jerry L. Van Marter 
 
ATLANTA-With the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC) preparing to 
launch its "Decade to Overcome Violence" in 2001, the council's U.S. 
Conference focused on the theme of reconciliation as it gathered here Dec. 
9-11 for its annual meeting. 
 
    Speaking at the pulpit from which Martin Luther King Jr. led the U.S. 
civil-rights movement until his assassination in 1968, South African 
anti-apartheid leader and Anglican bishop Desmond Tutu told a congregation 
of about 150 worshipers at Ebenezer Baptist Church that Jesus' message "was 
even more radical than that of equality." To preach equality in the context 
of Roman occupation "would be revolutionary," the diminutive Tutu said. 
"Christ was even more incredible. He said we are more than equals - we're 
family." 
 
    For Christians, therefore, reconciliation is more akin to adoption than 
to secular concepts such as coexistence or acceptance," Tutu concluded. 
"You don't choose your family. They are God's gifts to you." 
 
    This kind of unconditional acceptance is "the most fundamental 
obligation of Christians to the  other," said Yale Divinity School 
theologian Miroslav Volf, who characterized it as "the will to embrace." 
 
    Speaking just before Tutu on Dec. 10, Volf said God incarnate in Jesus 
is the model for such obligation. "The will to embrace," he said, "is prior 
to any judgement, precedes any truth about others and transcends the moral 
mapping of the social world into good and evil." 
 
    In this sense, Volf continued, reconciliation involves far more than 
justice on the one hand and forgiveness on the other - it involves the 
restoration of right relationships between individuals and communities and 
between the sometimes-competing demands of justice and forgiveness. 
 
    Making either justice or forgiveness a precondition for reconciliation 
won't work, Volf said. "To give up on justice plays into the hands of the 
oppressor, as the situation in South Africa so demonstrated for many 
years," he said. "Peace without justice is betrayal. You cannot take the 
demand for justice out of Christianity." 
 
    But to suggest that reconciliation can happen only after justice is 
achieved is "equally false," Volf insisted. Because people have different 
ideas about what constitutes truth and justice, he said, "one person's 
justice is another person's injustice, as we have seen in the Balkans." 
 
    Justice, he said, "can atone for past wrongs but cannot create 
reconciliation between the two parties all by itself." And for Christians, 
he added, true reconciliation means "embracing the truth that the God of 
the cross died for the godly and the ungodly, that God's grace offered to 
even the vilest of evildoers." 
 
    Volf, a Croation who has experienced seemingly intractable conflict 
first-hand, said: "The hope for the world lies with those who, despite the 
outrage, will invite the perpetrator for a cup of coffee, to try and find 
out why they do such horrible things. Our only hope is that the tears will 
catch up with the bullets - without such actions that seek to create 
communion without dismissing evil, there is little hope." 
 
    WCC general secretary Konrad Raiser said the plan of the world's 
largest ecumenical organization to create a 10-year-long emphasis on 
overcoming violence has generated "a positive response of churches to couch 
their ministry in the concept of reconciliation." 
 
    Raiser said the churches "are afraid, because it so complex and they 
feel not so competent to mediate conflict. Others have shown more courage 
than the churches in many situations." 
 
    The key to reconciliation, Raiser said, is the reclaiming of the 
biblical message that reconciliation is "first of all a gift from God - a 
gift which we can only receive and respond to, but which never becomes a 
quality or character that we can control and decide to use or not to use." 
 
    The church's role is a difficult one, Raiser said, because "the proper 
role of the church is to stand between perpetrators and victims, both of 
which can be traumatized by the injustice and separation between them." 
 
    Reconciliation, he said, "requires of both an act of self-denial - of 
repentance from the victimizer, and on the part of the victim the readiness 
to forgive and not to ask for revenge." True reconciliation, he said, 
"engages the partners in a conflict in actively reshaping their common 
future." 
 
    The WCC's Decade to Overcome Violence is not a program of the 
ecumenical organization itself, but a cooperative effort of the WCC's 
member churches to share models and resources that are working in local 
situations. It runs from 2001 through 2010. 
 
    The U.S. Conference elected its officers for the next four years. They 
are: moderator, the Rev. Kathryn Bannister of the United Methodist Church, 
who is also one of the eight presidents of the WCC; and vice-moderators, 
the Rev. McKinley Young of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Ann 
Glynn Mackoul of the Antiochian Orthodox Church. 
 
    Ashley Seaman, a student at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, 
Ga., was elected as the PC(USA)'s representative on the conference's Board 
of Directors.   

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