Anglican Communion's Secretary General Maintains Focus on Middle East
Episcopal News Service. June 6, 1997 [97-1787]
Marcia McRae, Editor of the Church in Georgia, Newspaper of the Diocese of Georgia
(ENS) As secretary general of the worldwide Anglican Communion, based in London, the Rev. Canon John L. Peterson, the former dean of St. George's College in Jerusalem, has in one sense never left the Middle East behind.
The struggles for peace in that troubled region of the world continue to occupy the attention of Peterson and the international church body he oversees, he said during a recent visit to the Diocese of Georgia.
"The moral voice of this church is raised to address Palestine and to stress justice and peace issues," Peterson said.
In particular, he noted, the Episcopal Church in the United States "has taken a strong stand for justice and peace in the Holy Land and is very supportive of the struggle to bring about justice and peace for Jews and Palestinians." The wider church has "extremely good leadership from Presiding Bishop (Edmond) Browning and Patti Browning," who have spoken with "a strong prophetic voice," he said.
Despite the seemingly intractable differences in the region, Peterson made an optimistic assessment. "I do not think the Palestinian dream and the Israeli dream are opposites," he said. "If people are of good will, those issues can be resolved."
While politicians seek to present the interests of Jews and Palestinians as diametrically opposed, those dreams -- for security and a homeland -- are really quite parallel, he suggested. During his years at St. George's, Peterson witnessed the mistreatment of Palestinians, including members of the college's staff. The Palestinians, he said, are "our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ in the Holy Land," who have "been faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ since the day of Pentecost."
The people "who were oppressed, in Europe in particular, have now become the oppressors in the Middle East, in Palestine, to the indigenous population of the country," he said.
The Communion's concerns are by no means limited to the Middle East, Peterson noted. Asked whether the wider world situation has improved, he said a matter of perspective, like describing a glass as half empty or half full.
After relating a litany of trouble spots from Rwanda to Northern Ireland, Peterson said that one could be discouraged about the current state of humanity. Yet, he added, "another way to look at it is people say, 'No longer will we be occupied. No longer will we be oppressed by another person another ethnic power.' When you think of that, it is a very positive very liberating statement that Jesus speaks about so frequently about in the Gospel, the wholeness of who we are."
Within the Communion, he said, he often serves to encourage communication between different factions or parts of the church. "One of my jobs is to help people understand a particular position taken by a particular church," he said. Concerns about positions on sexuality taken by the church in the United States, for example, are at times based on perceptions that are "more rumor than reality," he said.
The U.S. church is "one of the major players in the Communion, financially, but even more, spiritually and morally," he said. "I think that there is a real sense in this church of justice and a call to justice, and this church responds to the injustice to expose it."
He stressed the importance of the links that he observes between different regions of the Communion. "The Diocese of Georgia is part of a greater whole than itself," he said. "The strengths of this diocese are needed in the totality of the Anglican Communion. We are all interdependent on each other."
A parish, he said, "needs the diocese, the diocese needs the national church, the national church needs the Communion so we can be whole in our being and not live in isolation."
Always drawn to the Middle East and interested in viewing peoples from the perspective of culture and geography, Peterson, a Minnesota native who attended Concordia College, spent his junior year at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, Lebanon. He grew up a Congregationalist and was ordained in that denomination after completing Harvard Divinity School. He taught at Seabury Western Seminary in Chicago after receiving his doctorate, and was ordained in the Episcopal Church. He served as dean of St. George's from 1982 until 1994 when he was selected to serve as the Communion's secretary general.