wfn.org | Anglican Communion's secretary gene

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June 6, 1997
Episcopal News Service
Jim Solheim, Director
212-922-5385
ens@ecunet.org

97-1787
Anglican Communion's secretary general maintains focus on Middle East

by Marcia McRae
   (ENS) As secretary general of the worldwide Anglican Communion,
based in London, the Rev. Canon John L. Peterson, the former dean of
St. George's College in Jerusalem, has in one sense never left the Middle
East behind.
   The struggles for peace in that troubled region of the world continue
to occupy the attention of Peterson and the international church body he
oversees, he said during a recent visit to the Diocese of Georgia.
   "The moral voice of this church is raised to address Palestine and to
stress justice and peace issues," Peterson said. 
   In particular, he noted, the Episcopal Church in the United States
"has taken a strong stand for justice and peace in the Holy Land and is
very supportive of the struggle to bring about justice and peace for Jews
and Palestinians." The wider church has "extremely good leadership from
Presiding Bishop (Edmond) Browning and Patti Browning," who have
spoken with "a strong prophetic voice," he said.
   Despite the seemingly intractable differences in the region, Peterson
made an optimistic assessment. "I do not think the Palestinian dream and
the Israeli dream are opposites," he said. "If people are of good will,
those issues can be resolved."
   While politicians seek to present the interests of Jews and
Palestinians as diametrically opposed, those dreams--for security and a
homeland--are really quite parallel, he suggested.
   During his years at St. George's, Peterson witnessed the
mistreatment of Palestinians, including members of the college's staff.
The Palestinians, he said, are "our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ in
the Holy Land," who have "been faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ
since the day of Pentecost."
   The people "who were oppressed, in Europe in particular, have now
become the oppressors in the Middle East, in Palestine, to the indigenous
population of the country," he said.

The Communion's international concerns
   The Communion's concerns are by no means limited to the Middle
East, Peterson noted. Asked whether the wider world situation has
improved, he said a matter of perspective, like describing a glass as half
empty or half full.
   After relating a litany of trouble spots from Rwanda to Northern
Ireland, Peterson said that one could be discouraged about the current
state of humanity. Yet, he added, "another way to look at it is people
say, `No longer will we be occupied. No longer will we be oppressed by
another person another ethnic power.' When you think of that, it is a
very positive very liberating statement that Jesus speaks about so
frequently about in the Gospel, the wholeness of who we are."
   Within the Communion, he said, he often serves to encourage
communication between different factions or parts of the church. "One of
my jobs is to help people understand a particular position taken by a
particular church," he said. Concerns about positions on sexuality taken
by the church in the United States, for example, are at times based on
perceptions that are "more rumor than reality," he said.
   The U.S. church is "one of the major players in the Communion,
financially, but even more, spiritually and morally," he said. "I think that
there is a real sense in this church of justice and a call to justice, and this
church responds to the injustice to expose it."

Tying a Communion together
   He stressed the importance of the links that he observes between
different regions of the Communion. "The Diocese of Georgia is part of
a greater whole than itself," he said. "The strengths of this diocese are
needed in the totality of the Anglican Communion. We are all
interdependent on each other."
   A parish, he said, "needs the diocese, the diocese needs the national
church, the national church needs the Communion so we can be whole in
our being and not live in isolation."
   Always drawn to the Middle East and interested in viewing peoples
from the perspective of culture and geography, Peterson, a Minnesota
native who attended Concordia College, spent his junior year at the Near
East School of Theology in Beirut, Lebanon. He grew up a
Congregationalist and was ordained in that denomination after completing
Harvard Divinity School. He taught at Seabury Western Seminary in
Chicago after receiving his doctorate, and was ordained in the Episcopal
Church. He served as dean of St. George's from 1982 until 1994 when
he was selected to serve as the Communion's secretary general.

--Marcia McRae is editor of the Church in Georgia, newspaper of the
Diocese of Georgia.