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[Back to index of March 2007 articles] Stepping up to meet the millennium goals By Bishop John Bryson Chane Several weeks ago, I spoke before a gathering of the World Health Organization at Washington National Cathedral. The WHO had released a lengthy report on the work of Faith Based Organizations in combating the spread of HIV/AIDS. This report underscored the lack of visibility of FBOs in the fight against this deadly disease. There are several reasons for this lack of visibility;
The Diocese of Washington has been a leader as an FBO, finding partners like Fresh Ministries of Jacksonville, Fla., and working with them to acquire $10 million for educational programs in the Anglican Province of Southern Africa from USAID and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These programs, designed to empower young people to make the choices they must make to be free from the scourge of HIV/AIDS, will eventually reach more than 50,000 vulnerable young people in South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique. The diocese has also worked with Washington National Cathedral's Center for Global Justice and Reconciliation to support the center's efforts to acquire and distribute funding through USAID and the President's Malaria Initiative. The creative work of the center has helped Anglican Bishop Denis Salomao Sengulane of Mozambique create an interfaith FBO involving Muslims, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Seventh Day Adventists and Hindus that is now in place to assist in the eradication of malaria in the Province of Zambezia. In recent meetings attended by researchers from the University of Toronto's Medical School, a leading researcher at the National Institutes of Health and the Mozambiquan Ministry of Health, the Rev. John Peterson, canon for global justice and reconciliation, the center's managing director, Jean Duff, and I have worked to form the kind of partnership that must exist between FBOs, governmental agencies and the public health sector if the faith community is to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ beyond the talking stages. While it is important to pray for our brothers and sisters throughout the world, we also must be able to translate our love for our fellow human beings into an equal dose of dynamic action. The work the diocese's South African Partnership Committee, and the generous and compassionate work and outreach of our parishes involved with the Global South are examples of what one diocese can do to have a positive impact on the lives of so many who are sick, dying and underserved. Much of the work we have begun as a diocese - and what we seek in forming new partnerships - is a way of responding to the Millennium Development Goals. It is a sad indictment of the broad interfaith community that the formation and articulation of the Millennium Development Goals and the timetable to halve global poverty by 2015 had to come through the action of the United Nations. The Millennium Development Goals are to:
This indictment must extend itself particularly to the Anglican Communion. As a faith tradition of more than 70 million souls, it has been held hostage by a few at the expense of many. Never-ending battles about sex, power and property have prevented the Episcopal Church and the larger Anglican Communion from becoming faithfully engaged in a total and united effort to work toward the achievability of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. I often wonder how much God really does care about the issues of church governance, the definition of orthodoxy, whether we use the 1928 or the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, whether we ordain and consecrate gay and lesbian persons in committed relationships and whether those relationships ought to be blessed or not. I believe in my own heart that God is far more concerned about our collective care for all his children and the sharing of our abundance as a church in making the lives of all his people free from hunger, want, poverty, disease, violence, illiteracy, inequality, and the right to live as free human beings in a sustainable environment. The MDGs were established in 2000 during the largest gathering of heads of state ever in the history of the world. Shame on the church for not being the primary initiators of these critical benchmarks for human survival. I guess we were just too busy caring for our own agendas! [Back to index of March 2007 articles]
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