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[PCUSA NEWS <PCUSA.NEWS@ECUNET.ORG>]

Note #8782 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

05334
June 23, 2005

A world of woes

But church and community have solutions, Ufford-Chase tells peacemakers 

by John Sniffen 

ABIQUIU, NM -- The church should take a more active role in addressing the
needs of the world, General Assembly Moderator Rick Ufford-Chase told 400
participants in a Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference at Ghost Ranch this
week. 

	He suggested a policy of "civil initiative," a term coined by the
late Jim Corbett, co-founder of the Sanctuary movement that sheltered Central
American refugees in the 1980s.
 
	"Jim's conviction was that the church must be church," Ufford-Chase
said. "It will never be enough for us as faithful people to try to convince
the government to do the right thing. The church, in the face of overwhelming
crisis, must step into the breech and be church." 

	Ufford-Chase said civil initiative "maintains and extends the rule of
law ... unlike civil disobedience, which breaks it, and civil obedience,
which lets the government break it. The heart of a societal order guided by
the rule of law is the principle that non-violent protection of basic rights
is never illegal.
 
	"If you were passing a pond with a 'No trespassing' sign, and saw a
person in it yelling for help, you would not hesitate to jump in and try to
save that person's life," Ufford-Chase said. "And no one in the community
would accuse you of breaking the law. Even though you had violated a rule or
statute, the rule of law had been furthered in the process. 

	"When we confront great need ... the trick is to name the fundamental
principles that hold us together as a people and figure out how we are going
to live into those principles," he added.
 
	As examples of such non-violent activism, he cited Christian
Peacemaker Teams that provide "a non-violent presence in the midst of
overwhelming violence." One has been in Baghdad since before the 2003 U.S.
invasion. Others are in Colombia and along the U.S.-Mexico border.

	Ufford-Chase, speaking to an audience gathered in a large white tent
with a panoramic view of the Rio Chama valley in northern New Mexico,
presented a list of challenges he said the church and world face.
 
	"You have the challenge of a world that has lied to us, a country
that would like us to believe -- our leaders that would like for us to
believe -- that it is possible for us as people of privilege and comfort and
wealth to receive all the benefits of the global economy while taking no
responsibility for the global community," he said. "Eighty percent of the
world's population will work their fingers literally to the bone with no real
expectation that their lives will get better, while 20 percent, including all
of us seated here in this beautiful place, will receive the benefits of their
labor."
 
	He said our society has a spiritual problem, a "gratitude problem,"
an inadequate understanding of community, an addiction to violence, and a
fixation on fear.

	The spiritual problem, he said -- quoting Mary Jo Leddy, author of
Radical Gratitude -- is a "captivity of craving."

	"It works as long as people want more," he said. "The problem is not
the shopping -- the problem arises when we think that we are buying identity,
meaning and purpose in the process."

	Ufford-Chase said the world has a huge distribution-of-resources
problem that is also "a deeply spiritual problem for you and for me."

	On the environment, he quoted Vandana Shiva, director of the Research
Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, India, a speaker
in last month's Presbyterians for Restoring Creation conference in Silver
Bay, NY: "As a people, we have felt so small that we feel afraid. That's why
we must connect with one another as we expand ourselves into new communities
and new understandings, even as we create an ever-diminishing footprint.
 
	"We are living in a world in which increasingly everything, including
those elements of God's creation which sustain us, is for sale. ... If you
don't have money, you don't have access to water or clean air or the land."
 
	Shiva said during the earlier conference that it faith communities'
job to create grassroots, local-community-based expressions of democracy to
demand justice in the use of resources.

	"Christian communities today face challenge of living ... the ideal
of the first community of common possession, where no one claimed private
ownership of what they had, where each made resources available to the
others, and each one received according to his or her needs," the moderator
said. "The consequence of this would be the absence of needy persons in the
community."
 
	Quoting Latin American theologian Franklyn Pimentel Torres, he said
"many will consider us to be deluded," but we should not stop working toward
the Christian ideal of a just society in which people are more important than
money and market.
 
	"We must keep on (pointing out) that it is just and human for all to
have enough to meet basic needs, whether material or spiritual," he said. "We
must stand against everything we are told about the way the world will work,
and name the real values of community as God calls it. We have a challenge to
a new kind of community."
 
	Regarding what he called our "addiction to violence," he said the
ultimate religious question of today is: "How can we find God in our enemies?
What guilt was for Luther, the enemy has become for us -- the goad that can
drive us to God."
 
	Ufford-Chase said he was once asked by a Guatemalan pastor: "How can
most powerful nation on earth be so afraid? You have all of the world's
resources available. You have a system of government that we would give
anything to have - but you act like you have no say at all in what is done in
your name."
 
	"Fear is the fundamental driving problem we are going to have to deal
with for some time," the moderator said, because "the fundamental, underlying
principle behind both our politics and our theology as a nation" is that of
exclusion -- to define a circle and keep others out."

	He proposed a different model: "A circle that is ever being pushed
out, so that we can draw more people in. . . . Biblical tradition is that we
are defined by the people to whom we extend ourselves to."
 
	He warned, however, that "if we are truly on the edge of the circle,
extending our hands out ... we will always be told by the dominant theology
and politics that what we are doing is a subversive act."
 
John Sniffen is associate editor of Presbyterians Today magazine.

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