08526
July 23, 2008

Peacemaking and the ‘mustard seed’

Conference-goers urged to confront poverty, work for justice

by Evan Silverstein
Presbyterian News Service

ORANGE, CA — For Greg Plant and his wife, Pat, there was something personal about attending the 2008 Intergenerational Peacemaking Conference of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Participants flash peace signs during the opening of the 2008 Intergenerational Peacemaking Conference of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Photo by Evan Silverstein

That’s not surprising since the Presbyterian couple from Sunnyvale, CA, are champions in the fight against poverty, a central focus of the recently concluded annual event, whose theme this year was “Sowing Mustard Seeds: Working for God’s Justice — Confronting Poverty.”

The Plants, who are repeat conference attendees, said they believe as Christians they are called to help alleviate poverty. To that end, the two serve on the national Presbyterian Network to End Homelessness, in which Greg is coordinator and Pat is a board member.

“We work as a team,” said Greg Plant, 65.

Pat Plant, 60, is the Presbyterian Hunger Program’s Hunger Action Enabler for the Presbytery of San Jose and they both serve on the mission committee of Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church, where the two have been members for 20 years.

“I think it’s very important for Christians because if you look at what Jesus did in his ministry he was constantly reminding his followers the big thing was to fight poverty,” Greg Plant said. “He kept saying, ‘Feed my sheep, what you do for the least of these.’ That was a constant theme when Jesus was here and a constant theme he has left with us.”

Greg Plant, right, and his wife, Pat, say as Christians they are called to confront poverty, a central focus of this year’s peacemaking conference. Photo by Evan Silverstein

The Plants were joined by some 270 participants who traveled from across the globe to attend the event here on the campus of Chapman University, July 15-18.

The conference was sponsored by the General Assembly Council’s Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, the Presbyterian Hunger Program and its Joining Hands initiative, the Presbyterian Washington and United Nations Offices, Mission Responsibility Through Investment, the Child Advocacy Office and the Office on Small Church and Community Ministry of the PC(USA).

“Poverty is my number one issue. It’s so important,” said Pat Plant, who helped train new Hunger Action Enablers during the conference and also led a workshop. “The peacemaking conferences themselves have been awesome. I wish our churches were more focused on peace and the need to not be in a war.”

The conference was set against the backdrop of economic globalization, which has created new forms of poverty with more extreme disparities between the rich and the poor, conference organizers said. The annual income of the richest 1 percent of the world’s population is equal to that of the poorest 57 percent, with more than 24,000 people dying each day due to effects of poverty and malnutrition. 

Participants explored the convergence of economic, political, cultural and military systems that force and facilitate the flow of wealth and power from vulnerable persons, communities and countries to the more powerful. 

All gathered to exchange ideas, attend workshops and Bible studies, listen to speakers and come together in intergenerational worship and community building sessions that included energizers and exuberant music.

Conference-goers Neil Bolkcom, left, and Helen Hamilton, both from Washington state, said they were pleased by the conference’s intergenerational emphasis. Photo by Evan Silverstein

“These conferences are places of renewal and rest and building your faith and you try to go back home and lift that up,” said Neil Bolkcom, a participant from Kent, WA. “The best way to do peacemaking is just try to live it each day in whatever situation comes up and try to be an example. The best example of peacemaking is you keep your cool and you try to reconcile. You have to act like a peacemaker.”

Bolkcom, 58, a member of First Presbyterian Church in Kent, said he particularly appreciated the intergenerational thrust of the conference, as did participant Helen Hamilton, 81, who traveled to the conference with Bolkcom from Washington state.

Hamilton is known for her pioneering peacemaking work throughout the PC(USA) and was instrumental in the formation of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program in 1980.

It was Hamilton, who was born in England and raised in Scotland, who convinced Bolkcom to attend his first Presbyterian Peacemaking Conference in 2000 as a means of  keeping the peacemaking torch burning bright by sharing it with someone younger.  

But she emphasized that for the peacemaking movement to remain strong it must be inclusive, not only crossing generational lines but reaching people from different backgrounds. 

“That’s what we decided way back at the beginning — that [the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program] would be a holistic program that would touch people and their everyday lives,” said Hamilton, who worships at Wedgwood Presbyterian Church in Seattle. “We decided we would spell it with a ‘w’ to indicate wholeness. I think that’s what you see here with all these people who come with different gifts, different ways of life, and yet they’re peacemakers and they’re Presbyterians.” 

Jesus calls Christians to be aware of the systems that impoverish people and, through the parable of the mustard seed, teaches how the power of small acts of peaceful resistance can crack those systems open, said conference leaders, who challenged participants to deepen their understanding of Jesus’ teachings about peace, poverty and justice.

Worship leader the Rev. Mark K. Lomax, founding pastor of First Afrikan Church in Lithonia, GA, lifted up the muster seed in his sermons and theological reflections.

“The reigndom of God is like a small mustard seed. It starts off very, very small,” Lomax told the group. “This reigndom of God, this consciousness that God not Cesar, God not the senator . . . God not the governor, God not the mayor, God not the CEO of the company . . . God is the Lord of accomplishments.”

The Rev. Mark K. Lomax

Lomax, who is interim administrative dean at Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary in Atlanta, said the “reigndom of God” makes room for peace by requiring that you love your neighbor like you love yourself.

“There’s a mandate in the reigndom of God to love your enemies not bomb them to hell,” Lomax said. “Not blockade them but to love. Not to enforce embargoes against them but to love them and to forgive in recognition of the fact that God is God. There are these kinds of, I don’t want to call them rules, they just come with being a God kind of person.”

Lomax, chair of the homiletics department at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, was joined at the conference by keynote speakers Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank on social, economic and environmental issues; the Rev. Roberto H. Jordan, president of the Reformed Church in Argentina; and Lisa Schirch, professor of peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA.

During the conference participants browsed a Fair Trade store and attended briefings on world issues.

Each day there was an “Intergenerational Festival” where participants of all ages gathered to learn about poverty, justice, peacemaking and the global community through games, songs, poems and crafts at events called the “Gathering of Seeds,” “Olympicseedfest” and “Celebrate the Swinging Seeds.”  

And there were programs just for children and young adults, too.

“It certainly has been an experience. I have met some people who I probably never would have met if I hadn’t come” to the conference, said 12-year-old Ethan Weidemann Barnes, a first-time attendee from San Anselmo, CA. “It’s an important event “because there’s a lot of places where there isn’t much peace and we need to help make peace.”

The Rev. Buddy Hughes, a retired Presbyterian minister and former mission co-worker from Decatur, GA, tested his peacemaking knowledge at a “peace timeline” during the “Gathering of Seeds.” His objective was to put cards depicting historic peace-related events into the correct chronological order.

One of the cards the 79-year-old Hughes sifted through featured the Hebrew midwives from the Biblical story of Exodus, who refused to carryout Pharaoh’s orders to kill male Hebrew babies in the first recorded act of non-violent civil disobedience.

Another card showed a peaceful sit-in at a lunch counter in North Carolina during the civil rights movement, another displayed the non-violent upheaval leading to the ouster of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s.

Hughes, who attended with his wife, Anne, said he hopes the benevolent nature of those protests will serve as a model for dealing with today’s problems.

“There has to be resistance in the face of injustice but it has to be non-violent,” Hughes said. “Non-violence is the only thing that leads to a peaceful solution because the use of violence only produces more violence.”
 
Meanwhile, there were informal dialogues or “conversations” with conference leadership and national PC(USA) staffers, and an opportunity to hear about projects or programs that are confronting systematic issues of poverty.

There was a town hall meeting with the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, recently elected moderator of the PC(USA)’s 218th General Assembly, who also addressed the group on opening night.

Reyes-Chow, pastor of Mission Bay Community Church, an innovative new church in San Francisco, told the group the first night that he believes nothing is too hard or too wondrous for God.

He said the church will be able to live into a future in which it plays a vital and vibrant role in the world if it steps out in faith rather than clinging to survival, if it’s more intent on being faithful than on being right, and seeks to be together based on a common covenant in Jesus Christ rather than by property or pensions.

“Whether we want to be or not we are stuck with each other,” Reyes-Chow said. “If you can hold onto the covenant that God has put us together then I think we can work through whatever we need to work through, trusting that God has joined us together. When we forget that, whenever we lose sight of the fact that God has joined us together, then we are done.”

Music leader Patrick Evans leads a volunteer choir during the conference. Photo by Evan Silverstein

The symposium’s primary meeting venue in a campus auditorium resonated with rousing renditions of hymns and spiritual songs like “Gloria,” “Alleluia” and “Have Mercy on Us, Lord,” as a volunteer choir joined voices with audience members and conference music leader Patrick Evans, associate professor in the practice of sacred music at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music.

Conference workshops covered an array of topics such as community organizing, Fair Food, trafficking, water privatization, health care access, Enough for Everyone, fair trade, immigration, caring for creation, nonviolent social change, Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, and others.

“We had very good and illuminating plenary sessions and the workshops were very good and had a lot of interesting and practical ways to practice some of the things that we had talked about,” Hughes said.

During the “Living the Story” segments, conference participants heard from international partners affiliated with the Presbyterian Hunger Program’s Joining Hands initiative and the PC(USA)’s Colombia Accompaniment Program who spoke about justice and poverty concerns facing their homelands and how conference-goers can help make a difference.

Joining Hands brings together 10 presbyteries and nine country networks to build bridges of solidarity between PC(USA) congregations, their respective presbyteries and the overseas country networks, which are formed by churches, non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups involved in coordinated hunger ministry in specific communities.

Some 20 international participants from each of the Joining Hands networks attended the event from such places as South Africa, Peru, Bolivia, Sri Lanka and Palestine.

Members of the Joining Hands initiative and Hunger Action Enablers also participated in a pre-conference event that focused on network building and strategizing.