As I relinquish my responsibilities as Sr. Warden of
this parish, I feel compelled to try to inform all of us
at St. Andrew's and St. John's of the commitment
made by the United Nations and the General
Convention of the Episcopal Church to the
enormous mission of eradicating extreme poverty
and disease in a generation. The following is an
excerpted version of an address by Alexander
Baumgarten explaining our church's commitment to
this goal. My prayer is that we can each find a way
to be part of this enormous effort.
The Episcopal Church at its 75th General
Convention, that met in Columbus, Ohio, in June
2006, adopted the Millennium Development Goals
as a top mission priority for the Church over the
next triennium.
There is common agreement across the Anglican
Communion and the Episcopal Church that the
Millennium Development Goals are at the center of
the Church’s mission because a world that has
achieved the Millennium Development Goals -- a
world that is free of poverty and disease that kills so
many people every day -- is a world that will look
dramatically more like God’s will for it.
The Millennium Development Goals are a set of
eight targets adopted by the nations of the world for
the eradication of global poverty. One-hundred-
ninety-one nations of the world, including the
United States, have signed on to the Millennium
Development Goals, which stand for the premise
that poverty that kills, poverty that takes the life of
one person every three seconds in the world today,
can be eradicated in this generation. We have the
resources, we have the strategies, we have the
knowledge at our disposal; the only thing we don’t
have is the moral and the political will.
The joint pastoral letter from the presiding bishops
of the Episcopal Church and the Lutheran Church
was an attempt to collect and gather the energies
that have already built up in our two churches and
bring a renewed focus to the fight against poverty
that both of our churches are taking in conjunction
with the ONE Campaign. ONE is the campaign to
make poverty history. The ONE Campaign is a
movement that is now about two years old. It’s part
of a worldwide movement that is called the Global
Call to Action Against Poverty.
What is so important about the Episcopal Church’s
engagement in the ONE Campaign through the
ONE Episcopalian Campaign, and the Lutheran
Church in the ONE Lutheran Campaign, is that it
connects the voices of Episcopalians and Lutherans
to one another and to other advocates in the
movement, so that we’re speaking one by one, but
we’re all speaking with one voice, and that that one
voice is loudly and clearly heard by those who
represent us in Congress and in the Administration
that this is something that should stand at the center
of American priorities right now in thinking about
how we position ourselves in the world.
Churches historically have been very good at
charity, have been very good at giving money to
various causes, and that is certainly very important
and the Bible certainly calls us to that. I think on a
more fundamental level though, the scriptural
tradition of our Judeo-Christian heritage calls us to
build justice in the world, which means creating a
world where charity is no longer necessary. So,
while the churches will be forever committed to
meeting unmet human need in the world, through
efforts like Episcopal Relief and Development’s
MDG programs, the thrust of the church’s mission
of reconciling people to one another and to God is
to bring us to a place where the structures of the
world reflects God’s will for them so that charity
and response to poverty that kills, disease that kills,
hunger that kills, is no longer a basic necessity in
the world.