Fahed Abu-Akel, the Palestinian-born moderator of the 214th General Assembly, spoke Friday of troubles in the Middle East, and urged the council members to think of what life is like for people in other parts of the world. He recently returned from Sudan, where he met a pastor who supported his family of seven on $100 a month, and where every church he worshipped at was full.
The council gave approval for the PC(USA) to help organize, in cooperation with other denominations, what was described as “a high-level Middle Eastern Christian-Muslim delegation to visit the United States to make a witness for peace.” Details on that are still being worked out, but it’s anticipated that the delegation would visit Washington, D.C., and also travel to a number of cities around the country.
Victor Makari, Middle East and Europe coordinator for the PC(USA)’s Worldwide Ministries Division, recently returned from a trip to Iraq – part of a delegation of 13 people who traveled there in late December and early January. According to Marian McClure, director of Worldwide ministries, Makari heard from the Iraqi people the persistent question of “Why, why? Why us, why now, why this way of approaching the problem between our two countries? For many of us, the why question remains inadequately answered by the government.”
Makari told the council of visiting children in a hospital, of watching the smile on a mother’s face as her baby reached out to grasp his finger. “That smile would not have been there if we were viewed as the enemies of those parents,” he said, adding that the Iraqi people make a distinction between U.S. government policies “and the feelings of a people who care.”
While in Iraq, Makari visited partner churches – there are five Presbyterian churches in Iraq, he said – and worshipped on New Year’s Eve with Arab and Syrian Presbyterians. Earlier that day, at dusk, he saw children holding a silent demonstration, “dressed in their best in the cold desert city of Baghdad” as twilight fell. “They were demonstrating with candlelight and olive branches,” Makari said, holding signs in Arabic that said “No to sanctions! No to war!” and “Hands off the children of Iraq!” and “Why? Why War?”
That question, Makari said, was repeated by many he met, asked by Muslim leaders and Iraqi government officials and especially by Christian church partners. Makari said he does not countenance the atrocities the government of Iraq has committed, but does believe economic sanctions have brought the people of Iraq to “a pitiful state,” and said that personally, “I am convinced that this war is not necessary and could be avoided.”
In the U.S., in the peace march in Washington and other ways, “church people are beginning to express their own concerns about what is happening and what will happen,” said council member Syngman Rhee, a native of Korea.
Rhee, a former General Assembly moderator who was born in what is now North Korea, and who fled when he was 19, leaving behind his mother and five siblings, also spoke of his desire that the church be a reconciling force in the escalating tensions between the U.S. and North Korea. He asked Presbyterians to pray for reconciliation, to remember the Christians in North Korea, to encourage the U.S. government to work to achieve compliance with all pieces of a 1994 agreement with the government of North Korea regarding nuclear reactors and energy needs. And Rhee told the council that the U.S. should resume shipment of relief food supplies to the North Korean people, “in accordance with the time-honored principle that food aid never be used as a weapon of diplomacy.”
As he often does, Abu-Akel asked Presbyterians to keep praying for peace in Israel and Palestine, to keep the pain of the people there close to their hearts.
“As I speak to you now, every Palestinian town and village is under complete military occupation,” he said. “This means that people cannot move from village to village or town to town, or even from house to house,” he said. “In the midst of that injustice, vast majorities of both the Jewish community and the Christian community around the world are silent.”
In the Muslim world, the Palestinian crisis fills television screens daily, is viewed as a constant injustice, Abu-Akel said. He called on Christians to do as the prophet Micah instructed, “to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before our God.”
And as he faces his own challenges – Abu-Akel has been formally asked to call the 214th General Assembly back into session, having been presented with the signatures of 57 commissioners requesting that it be done, enough under the rules to make it happen – he told the council that “I want you to pray that I will be anchored in the love of Jesus, second to experience the wisdom of Solomon, and to experience the patience of Job,” not to mention pick up some pointers from Moses.
On Tuesday, after Alex Metherell handed him the petitions – Metherell’s the elder from California who wants to reconvene the assembly to address constitutional defiance – Abu-Akel huddled to strategize and pray in his hotel room with key church leaders, among them John Detterick, the council’s executive director. Abu-Akel said Detterick looked at him and said, “You never know, maybe God wanted to teach us a lesson, how to live with each other.”
Abu-Akel then asked the council to pray, for himself, for the Presbyterian church, for the world.
The council is scheduled to ends its meeting tomorrow, with discussion of the budget deficits the PC(USA) is facing. In other business Friday, the council:
o Voted to approve for another year the Interfaith Listening Project, which brought teams of Muslims and Christians who had already been in dialogue with each other in their own countries to the U.S., for a blitz of conversations with Presbyterians around the U.S. The teams, from places such as Kenya and Ethiopia and Indonesia, met with Americans in church basements and schools and at pot-luck dinners, rushing from state to state, giving Presbyterians and others the chance to learn and ask questions about how Muslims live and practice their faith. With the extension of the program, a new set of 10 teams will be brought to the U.S. to continue the conversations, although maybe not before March 2004, according to Will Browne of the PC(USA)’s Worldwide Ministries Division.
o Voted to continue Donald Campbell as director of the PC(USA)’s Congregational Ministries Division for another four-year term.
