Third World Churches Seek New Development Models
Episcopal News Service. November 29, 1990 [90308]
Nan Cobbey , Features Editor of Episcopal Life.
Development officials from seven Third World countries in the Anglican Communion last month organized an Inter-Anglican Development Network in an effort to develop new models of partnership and funding that would break their dependence on the U.S. church.
The staff of the Episcopal Church Center's Overseas Development Office met with specialists from Tanzania, the Philippines, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Panama, South Africa, and Haiti.
Membership in the new network will be open to provincial and diocesan development officers and development coordinators of funding agencies within the communion.
"This network is the key part of our development vision," said Carolyn Rose-Avila, director of the Overseas Development Office. She said the office is at a crossroads.
"Our work now should focus on policy issues: sustainable development and economic justice. And we should make ourselves responsible to, and accountable to, an Anglican Communion-wide body."
The group was critical of Guidelines for Development Programs, written by the Mission Agencies Working Group of the Anglican Consultative Council, which it felt was created without adequate consultation with development partners.
"This document represents only one side: the side of the donors," said Danilo Ocampo, development officer of the Philippine Episcopal Church. "It is like a bank's guidelines for granting a loan..., but we are not in a banking relationship.
"Whose resources are we talking about? God's resources. Neither North's nor South's. The question is how should we share them."
James Chege, development coordinator of the Church of the Province of Tanzania, said "the assumption is that development takes place there," indicating with a stab of his finger a point some distance from himself. "They [northern churches] see themselves as exempted from the suffering of the poor. They detach themselves. That is already not partnership, not mutuality. It is again a colonial arrangement."
In addition, the group reacted negatively to a proposal that the Episcopal Church become a conduit for free food -- mainly wheat, rice, and other U.S. surpluses -- through the Agency for International Development (USAID), although Robert Ellis, the provincial development officer from West Africa, said his fellow Liberians need food supplies as a result of the current civil war and devastation.
"Surplus food introduced into a country disrupts the local economy and production," said the Rev. Edmundo Desueza, planning officer for the Diocese of Costa Rica. "The church needs to be very careful about good intentions that can disable people. So much harm can be done in the name of good."
In other actions, the group wrote a letter to Archbishop Desmond Tutu expressing regret at the closing of the Human Development Program, the provincial development office in Southern Africa. It urged him to consider reestablishing a development ministry with the group's support.