04499
November 10, 2004

Unity and healing are challenges to the church in divided times, NCC head says

by Jerry L. Van Marter

ST. LOUIS — A deeply divided nation — and world — must rally around “the message of unity and reconciliation based on justice and peace,” National Council of Churches General Secretary Bob Edgar told the opening session of the ecumenical organization’s annual General Assembly Tuesday.

      Alluding to the Assembly’s theme — “Weave Anew: Unity, Peace and Justice, Hope” — Edgar said, “In weaving you have warp (vertical) and weft (horizontal) threads. The warp is Jesus’ plea for Christian unity. The weft is the quest to make our unity more visible.”

      The challenge, Edgar continued, “is to tap resources for healing and lift up issues for uniting.”

      Justice, poverty, peace and environmental degradation are issues that should be held by all as “deeply moral issues,” he said, and ticked off five illustrative NCC programs:

• The “Let Justice Roll” anti-poverty campaign that registered more than 100,00 new voters and “voiced the scandal of poverty” in the U.S.;
• The “Benefit Bank” that assists low-income Americans in accessing some $35 billion in unclaimed government benefits by providing counseling and a new web-based software program that identifies available benefits. The bank is “up and running” in Philadelphia, Edgar said, and will soon be operational in Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Kansas and Mississippi;
• A Network of Seminarians for Social Justice that addresses such issues as hunger and public education;
• Peacemaking activities such as interfaith dialogue; support of the World Council of Churches’ Decade to Overcome Violence, the focus of which this year is the U.S.; legal advocacy for Guantanamo detainees; visits to troubled regions such as Darfur in Sudan, the Middle East and Colombia; and a new ecumenical curriculum, “Faithfulness and Foreign Policy”; and
• Environmental programs such as Earth Day observances a colloquium of theologians that, in addressing environmental theology, decried “the false gospel that God cares for the salvation of humans only and not the earth itself, that our human calling is to exploit the earth for our own ends.” 

      Edgar said, “We must tell the world what we already know — that poverty, peace and the health of the environment are deeply moral issues. Framed this way,” he concluded, “we can break through and unite far more people, uniting us in our One Hope.”