Episcopal News Service March 14, 2007
TEAM: Conference participants head home with new friends, tools to meet MDGs' challenges
By Mary Frances Schjonberg
[ENS] As the more than 400 participants in the Towards Effective Anglican Mission (TEAM) conference prepared to leave Boksburg, South Africa, they knew they were taking with them new ideas for mission and new partners in their work.
Participants spent each day from March 7-14 in Bible study, worship, workshops, plenary sessions, networking and strategizing, all focused on the church's commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_77743_ENG_HTM.htm) -- an eight-prong declaration that has at its core the eradication of extreme poverty by 2015. On Sunday, March 11, conference participants went to worship in 13 Anglican parishes in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria.
Near the end of the eight-day meeting at the Birchwood Conference Centre, near the Johannesburg airport, a number of conference participants reflected on their experience.
The Rev. Joanna Udal of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan said that the conference was a chance to "bring together the best experience and wisdom with the Communion on the really pressing issues facing the world."
She said that the fact that Sudan's concerns got heard "by people from more affluent parts of the world" was a good example of how the conference was all about getting the developing and developed world "engaging together."
The Rev. Amy Denney Zuniga, ordained from the Diocese of Northern California and now serving in the Iglesia Anglicana en la Region Central de America, said the conference represented "a collection of the gathered wisdom" of the Anglican Communion.
She will remember "the incredible experience of being gathered with the whole Church and the whole world," including people from "countries I didn't even know existed."
Before Denney Zuniga went to the conference, she thought the MDGs represented a huge amount of work that would be hard to achieve. Now, she said she sees that the MDGs can be achieved -- and have been achieved in some places -- but she has learned that the MDGs represent a minimal set of accomplishments.
"They're really a starting point for all of us," she said. "Now I really see much more work there is to do, but that's something that's not really discouraging because we have the tools and it's what we are called to do."
Full story: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_83529_ENG_HTM.htm
More information about TEAM is available at the conference website (http://www.team2007.org). Continuing ENS coverage is available at http://www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_23466_ENG_HTM.htm.
-- The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is national correspondent for the Episcopal News Service.
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