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Bishops Call 'Waging Reconciliation' the Answer to Globalization, Terrorism

Episcopal News Service. September 28, 2001 [2001-277]

James Solheim , Jan Nunley

(ENS) The bishops of the Episcopal Church pledged themselves on September 26 to "wage reconciliation" by "reordering and transforming the patterns of our common life so they may reveal God's justness--not as an abstraction but in bread for the hungry and clothing for the naked," and asked the church to offer its gifts "for the carrying out of God's ongoing work of reconciliation."

The statement by the 135 bishops, gathered in Burlington, Vermont, for their fall interim meeting, came after they spent a week considering various viewpoints on the theme "God's Mission in a Global Communion of Difference." The topic of globalization, with its impact on the world and its implications for the mission of the church, grew out of prayer and preparations for a private retreat with missiologists and theologians that Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold made in June, according to the Rev. Ian Douglas, an organizer of the conference. Douglas is associate professor of world mission and global Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Welcoming the bishops, many accompanied by their spouses, Griswold said that he couldn't think of a topic "more pertinent" than globalization. In the wake of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon-two icons of the power of the United States in today's world-in the week before their meeting, it is time "to look at how our national interests are perceived in the rest of the world," he said. "Even some of our friends are questioning our commitment to the common good."

The underlying issue is one of reconciliation, Griswold argued. "What does it mean to be reconcilers as a church and as a province of the Anglican Communion?" Joining the American bishops for the duration of the conference was the Most Rev. David Gitari, bishop of the Diocese of Nairobi and primate of the Anglican Church of Kenya.

A common wound

Griswold thanked the bishops for making the difficult decision to attend the meeting. "It is terribly important that we gather as a community," he said, especially in "unusual and troubling circumstances." Part of the trauma, he added, is the loss of "our sense of immunity" and being forced to "face our vulnerability and fragility." Many people, he noted, are expressing "a need to be in sacred space. They are open in deeper ways to the mysteries of God." Bishops play a special role, Griswold said, in supporting their clergy and people in traumatic situations.

The bishops most directly affected by the terrorist attacks-Bishop Mark Sisk of New York and Bishop Jane Holmes Dixon of Washington, DC-spoke to the gathering about their experiences in the days following the attacks. When Sisk visited Ground Zero and the area near Trinity Church and St. Paul's Chapel the day after the attack, he said that he was stunned that it was so quiet. Stopping near the rubble of what had been the World Trade Center, "We realized we were standing at the grave of thousands of people."

Because the Pentagon is quite isolated from the city, Dixon said, the experience in Washington was quite different. The city was filled with rumors, feeding into a sense of terror. But the trauma had fostered "one hope in this horror-people of different faiths are coming together in a new way. Since events on that Tuesday we have reached out to one another." For her personally, Dixon said that "the trauma is still with me and I haven't been able to cry yet," trying to deal with "much fear of the unknown."

Mission not about us, but God

Dr. Valerie Batts, a clinical psychologist in Massachusetts, opened the exploration of the theme of globalization with a presentation on "Engaging the Experience of Difference." As the originator of a training model on racism and multiculturalism, she described ways to recognize and understand differences among groups in our society, identifying the ways used to oppress various "target groups." She asked the bishops and spouses to discuss in their small groups the actions they could take "in this time of world crisis to affect reconciliation and justice."

In a presentation on the Bible and mission, Prof. Grant LeMarquand of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Pennsylvania said that people's reading and understanding of Scripture is always done in a cultural context. And he argued that "mission is not a program of the church or a great new idea thought up by Victorian Christians to be the religious arm of colonialism, as much as it has looked that way sometimes. Nor is it an attempt to get more members to keep our buildings going." Mission begins with God and we "simply share in that mission," he added. "Certainly it is a mission into which human beings are recruited but in the end it is not about us but about God."

Globalization not new

The Rev. Leng Lim of Singapore, a recent graduate from Harvard Business School, introduced a session on the economics of globalization. He said that it was difficult to find economists who "see the larger historic and moral issues. It is important to see the whole story, not just the pieces." A survey of the bishops and their spouses at the meeting revealed ambivalence about the benefits of globalization, he reported.

In his presentation, Prof. Richard Parker of Harvard said that the concept of globalization is "not a new phenomenon" but rather "the latest chapter in a fourth or fifth stage of globalization, a wave that began in Western Europe 500 years ago." He argued that "the values, logic, technology, and the social, political and economic forms that are today remaking the world originated in Western Europe (or its North American child), not somewhere else." And that legacy "continues to define the current global era." Just a hundred years ago, over 70 percent of the world's populations and territories were controlled by half a dozen European states. "Today those political empires are gone, and there are more than 200 nation-states in their place," he noted.

"Since those empires ended," he said, "global economic inequality has worsened" and the gap between rich and poor states has doubled, "leaving the richest states controlling more global income than they ever did back when they directly ran colonial empires."

The lives of billions of people has not improved and that "should be profoundly troubling."

Social Gospel era

It is crucial, Parker said, "to see how the systemic global connection of politics, economics and ideology born in that earlier age of Europe's global empires is still shaping the world's overall development even today." As a result of misguided economic policies, "the numbers of very poor during the 1990s grew by nearly 500,000,000."

The "progressive era" of the late 19th and early 20th century "radically reordered power and wealth and reshaped the balance between public and private, as well as the weak and the strong," Parker said. It was a "glorious covenantal renewal, simply the Social Gospel era," an application of Mainline Protestant values to a new urban and industrial world. "The achievements of that Social Gospel movement has ever since defined American life."

"It was a remarkable period, one in which the confidence of America's Mainline Protestant leaders led them to associate Christian moral teachings with scientific advance and social and political reform," and "Episcopalians were among the vanguards" of that movement, he said.

Addressing the bishops of "a proud and powerful church," Parker said, "Your agenda is to weigh, in this new millennium, what this church owes not only the nation but the world." Reminding them that "the Episcopal Church has shown itself capable of leading reforms that have remade human history," he encouraged the bishops to make the coming decade "The Decade of the Globe," using religion's capacity to unite people and to move them to a long-term search for justice.

Ministering in a 'bleak immensity'

After a Sunday of sabbath rest, the bishops returned on Monday to more thought-provoking presentations. Denise Ackermann, visiting professor of practical theology at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, challenged them to consider the "bleak immensity" of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa as a paradigm for mission in the midst of suffering. "The reality of the suffering world is ours," she said. "We too are infected." Quoting African theologian Teresa Okure, she said the "viruses" of sexism and poverty are "more dangerous" than HIV "because they are carriers enabling this virus to spread so rapidly."

"Imagine if you had to choose between a roof over your head and food for your children, and speaking out about HIV/AIDS…It's no choice at all," she told the bishops. Talk about abstinence avoids the moral and ethical issues raised by the pandemic as long as women are not full partners in the conversation, Ackermann said. "This message cannot be heard, understood or followed as long as it is communicated without a properly constructed debate on what constitutes a moral community." During a period of reflection on Ackermann's presentation, Gitari quoted a common saying in his diocese that, where HIV/AIDS is concerned, "everyone is either infected or affected."

Anglican presenter 'profiled' at airport

Repercussions from the September 11 attacks reached the Burlington meeting in a tangible way. The Rev. Christopher Duraisingh of the Church of South India, professor of applied theology at EDS, was invited to present a paper on "Globalization and a World of Difference: The Plural World of a New Pentecost" at the meeting. But officials at Boston's Logan Airport confiscated his computer without explanation and detained him for almost an hour of questioning. According to Douglas, the Massachusetts Port Authority claimed that all personal computers were being confiscated, but Duraisingh observed fellow passengers using computers on the flight. "He was singled out--profiled--because of his name and appearance," said Douglas. "He had to reconstruct his paper from memory."

Duraisingh's presentation addressed two "equally powerful processes" in the modern world: globalization, which is centripetal in nature, and fragmentation, which is centrifugal. Comparing the Genesis story of the tower of Babel with the account of the day of Pentecost in Acts, Duraisingh said the church is called to "dismantle claims to cultural dominance" symbolized by the monolithic tower and replace it with the cultural diversity illustrated at Pentecost. "Pentecost addresses and turns upside down" some typically American thought patterns in a time of crisis: the affirmation of self and nation as powerful and autonomous; the closing of boundaries; the silencing of voices--and replaces them with decentering, "border crossing," and a multiplicity of voices that "finds in God our true identity."

From reaction to renewal

Conference organizer Douglas guided the broader discussion down to the specifics of addressing globalization in the Anglican Communion. Anglicanism is no longer "Anglo," but radically multicultural, Douglas told the bishops--a fact amply illustrated by the Lambeth Conference in 1998. But the community of 38 "equal and autocephalous churches" which make up the Anglican Communion faces two forces which work against the "mutual responsibility and interdependence" they have sought for nearly 40 years.

One is the "ongoing legacy of colonialism," manifest in power plays by one region against another, whether it is money given or withheld by the wealthy West, or alternative structures promoted in the US by bishops from the global South. A second is the transition from the dualistic thinking of the Enlightenment to postmodern pluralism, which generates a backlash in the form of what Douglas calls a "new confessionalism" and a "new curialization." The "new confessionalism" demands the security of clear doctrinal statements, definitions and limits, while the "new curialization" seeks a central authority structure for Anglicanism, frequently in the form of enhanced responsibility for unity on the part of the primates and the archbishop of Canterbury.

But Anglicans must instead move "from reaction in fear to renewal in mission," Douglas said. "In these changing times we must not put our hope in either tighter doctrinal definitions or a more centralized international authority structure," he told the bishops. "Instead a new commitment to God's project, a renewal in God's mission, is needed if we are to remain in communion across the colors and cultures, nations and nationalities that Anglicanism now embodies."

Walking towards difference

The bishops' spouses met concurrently with the bishops for all but one day of the gathering. During a special program entitled "The World Among Us," held at the Shelburne Museum, the spouses reflected on their own mission to "walk towards difference."

"Building bridges between difference is something we can do when we intentionally invite people to dinner," the spouses said in a statement released at the end of the day. "Friendships formed around dining room tables are the stuff of mission and reconciliation. Calls to join programs or to create conversations between various groups in our communities are a work of healing that we can do."

"We usually defer to our spouses," commented Kate Smith, whose spouse is Bishop Andrew Smith of the Diocese of Connecticut. "But here we were challenged: how can I make a difference?"

Critical and strategic distance

Archbishop Gitari, commenting on the conference, said that he was surprised by two things: first, that American bishops are not "preoccupied with [the] agenda of human sexuality" as many African bishops had concluded at Lambeth in 1998. But, he said, "the globalization of computers and e-mails has not helped to change our attitude" as African bishops are bombarded with messages from partisan commentators.

He was also surprised, he said, to find that evangelical Episcopalians were not as marginalized today as they had been on his first encounter with the American church nearly 25 years ago.

He delivered a message from some of the African primates saying that they are "convinced that the Episcopal Church is capable of solving its problems" and therefore would not accept the consecration of American priests by bishops of Rwanda and Southeast Asia to serve as part of the Anglican Mission in America.

Gitari also encouraged the bishops to "exercise their prophetic ministry" in a time of world crisis. "We do not have to agree with the powers that be," he said, citing a statement by President George W. Bush that "either you are with us or you are with terrorists." There is another category of people, said Gitari, who "are neutral. They cannot support terrorism, neither are they convinced you can defeat evil with evil…We should keep a critical and strategic distance so that we can praise our political leaders when they do what is just and true before God and criticize them fearlessly whatever the cost when they depart from justice, which God requires."

Faithful--and patriotic?

In a post-conference press conversation, many bishops reported plans for interfaith conversations and outreach. Some said they were prepared to shift to a more public leadership style. "We need to step out of the safety of our cathedrals," said Bishop Bill Gregg of Eastern Oregon. "We must try to understand that there's a deep logic to what happened, from where violent acts come. Bishop Vincent Warner of the Diocese of Olympia added that the critical question of the hour must be "What does it mean to be both faithful and patriotic?"

The bishops acknowledged that "waging reconciliation" won't be easy, but might be a source of relief from the rhetoric of war.

"There are a sizeable number of retired military in my diocese," observed bishop suffragan Bob Hibbs of the Diocese of West Texas. "The people who were being devoured by their rage were grateful for words of balance and reason. People given to vengeance were relieved to find that the church still spoke of the absolute demands of justice and the countervailing demands of mercy."

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