WCC NEWS: Forging justice in the marketplace

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World Council of Churches - News

FORGING JUSTICE IN THE MARKETPLACE: THERE IS NOTHING FAIR OR EASY

For immediate release: 21 May 2011

When Archbishop Valentine Mokiwa visited a gold mining operation in
Tanzania, he came across something he never expected to see: a world-class
runway and sprawling houses with private swimming pools.

Then, Mokiwa, president of the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC),
stepped just outside the mining compound to find a completely different
reality.

“There is abject poverty,” he said. “People struggle to make ends
meet. You visit healthcare clinics and there's no medication. People are
dying.”

Understanding the root causes of global economic-related violence was on
the agenda for the fourth day of the International Ecumenical Peace
Convocation (IEPC) being held in Kingston, Jamaica, 17-25 May.

In a series of presentations including a youth skit and television style
interview show on stage, the stark realities of modern global economics
and the role of the church were examined.

Tanzania, not considered a wealthy country by global standards, attracts
mining companies from all over the world. In the last five years, Tanzania
has sent gold worth 2.5 billion US dollars to the United States. Tanzania
received 2.7 million dollars in return. “There's nothing fair here,”
reflected Mokiwa.

Ideally, the collective church should play a role to protect people from
economic exploitation. But the church may well play into the massive
socioeconomic inequalities that plague Tanzania and many other countries,
it was said.

“Within the church, all hands are not clean,” pointed out the Rev. Dr
Roderick Hewitt, a minister of the United Church in Jamaica and the Cayman
Islands and moderator of the Council for World Mission. Hewitt and Mokiwa
were two of the four panellists in the television style interview
presentation.

The other two panellists were Omega Bula, executive minister for the global
justice and ecumenical relations unit of the United Church of Canada and
Rev. Prof. Dr Emmanuel Clapsis, an Orthodox theologian from the US.

“Soul-searching is required,” Hewitt said. “In our critique of the
market, we are doing it in the context of contradiction.” Churches
cannot begin to forge justice in an inhumane marketplace until they opt
out of that marketplace themselves, a marketplace in which structural
violence is embedded.

“We cannot deal with the issue of the marketplace when we in the church
are complicit,” said Hewitt. “One of the first things we need when
discussing the needs of the global marketplace is to get down on our knees
and ask for confession.”

Another challenge is that the voices asking for structural change in an
oppressive world marketplace are not voices of power. If those voices
could be heard, they would call into question our core assumptions about
wealth and poverty.

“The market is based on domination and exploitation,” said Bula.
“Such a market should end. In many places, these victims are women,
children and people of colour. We need to be moving away from markets
described as 'empire.'”

If there is no change, protests against marketplace oppression will
crescendo, cautioned Clapsis. “I'm afraid that, in the future, social
unrest will be about jobs, about security. What is the role of the church?
We are searching for a new economic system that distributes our resources
in a more equitable manner. Otherwise, there will be more misery for the
majority.”

The questions are monumental and there are no easy answers, concluded the
Rev. Garnett Roper, theologian and president of the Jamaica Theological
Seminary after the presentations. If churches can't or won't act on
oppression in the marketplace, how can they expect to use that marketplace
to aid non-violence?

He gave voice to a concluding question that troubled IEPC participants as
they discussed the conditions of the marketplace in hundreds of
communities worldwide. “Is the church being naïve when it talks about
peace in the marketplace?”

IEPC website (Link: 
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=9ab5d754981dea36c66d )

WCC project on the impacts of economic globalization (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=b09a3ef9dcb630b7d7ef )

IEPC photo galleries (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=f72ba83ee052aa522800 )

IEPC videos (Link: http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=12a0bd9d5781ad4a12d9
)

High resolution photos of the event may be requested free of charge via
photos.oikoumene.org


The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness 
and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of 
churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 349 Protestant, 
Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 560 million 
Christians in over 110 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman 
Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, 
from the [Lutheran] Church of Norway. Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland.



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