LOUISVIILLE — Seeking to calm the storm over divestment and get people talking constructively about the Middle East, Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly, is proposing a plan.
First, the General Assembly this summer in Birmingham would create a task force to carefully monitor events in the Middle East — a task force whose members would be committed both to working with Palestinian Christians who want to end the Israeli occupation and to deepening relations with Jews and Muslims in the area. That task force would present ideas on “how to move forward on these sensitive areas” to the assembly in 2008.
Second, the assembly would refer all overtures regarding divestment (and there are a truckload of them) to the Mission Responsibility Through Investment committee. Many of those sending overtures want the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to revisit the assembly’s highly controversial decision, made in 2004, to begin a process of phased, selective divestment in some companies doing business in Israel.
MRTI already has said it’s continuing conversations with those companies and won’t bring any recommendation to divest until 2008 at the earliest, Ufford-Chase told the General Assembly Council at the start of its meeting in Louisville April 26. So there’s time, he contends, to slow the train down — to talk together, to listen, to think.
Third, Ufford-Chase is recommending that conversations begin — including MRTI, the Board of Pensions and the Presbyterian Foundation — regarding alternate investment possibilities “that promote peace and strengthen the economies both in Israel and the occupied territories.” A number of the overtures sent to the assembly want to explore this area, he told the council — so there already seems to be some energy coalescing around this possibility.
Both representatives of MRTI and the Advisory Committee on Social Witness policy indicated those groups are supportive of the idea. The council was to decide April 28 whether to endorse the idea, which also calls for any guidance the task force might give to be presented to the assembly “in conjunction with the General Assembly Council.”
In an interview, Ufford-Chase acknowledged that some Presbyterians may be reluctant to answer all the overtures coming to this assembly on divestment with another task force.
“I hope it’s seen as a genuine unity that doesn’t ask people to give up their passion, but brings people together,” he said.
“Some people will be unhappy with it,” thinking it’s imperative for the 2006 assembly to do something about divestment, Ufford-Chase acknowledged. “Some people will feel that on both ends of the spectrum. And my answer is, `I don’t think it’s imperative. These matters are extremely delicate … and they deserve our careful consideration.’ “
Ufford-Chase isn’t flying alone on this one — which isn’t surprising, considering his proclivity for trying to bring together people with a passion for an issue and urging them to figure out together what might be done. At the council’s meeting in February, he announced that he wanted to work on an idea to present to the assembly that might give some guidance on how to constructively approach this contentious issue.
And he invited other council members to join him in brainstorming.
From February to late April, Ufford-Chase told the council, a group has been meeting by conference call — including 10 or so council members and a few PC(USA) staff members. Thomas Gillespie, a council member who’s the former president of Princeton Theological Seminary, drafted a theological preamble for the proposal, which begins: “The Scriptures which Christians share with their Jewish brothers and sisters lift up God’s gift of peace (shalom) and God’s call for justice (tesedeqah).”
The proposal calls for Ufford-Chase to appoint the task force, along with the moderator elected by the 217th General Assembly this summer, in consultation with the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy.
It states that “the political situation in both Israel and Palestine is changing extremely quickly, and we believe it would be helpful to have a group … working to follow, interpret and understand the potential impact of those changes.”
And the proposal stresses the benefit accruing to the PC(USA) from “a serious effort to listen to one another and seek a solid consensus for our actions in the delicate task of peacemaking in this troubled region of the world. The alternative is an `us vs. them’ debate that misses the fundamental reality that most Presbyterians are united in their desires for an end to the occupation and the creation of viable, secure states for both Israel and Palestine.”
In his remarks to the council, Ufford-Chase told of attending a meeting last summer which brought together about 40 young people from regions with a history of conflict — from places like Israel and Northern Ireland. While there, they got word of the subway bombings in London.
“They threw out the agenda,” he said, to talk about the bombings. The teenagers began to share their own experiences, and their stories grew more and more personal.
“It was clearly a moment of catharsis,” Ufford-Chase said, “as they began to get to the deepest levels of their anger and pain and history, all the ways in which they had been personally hurt by violence.”
And he noticed that “the deeper their stories got, the quieter their voices became. And the more they drew their chairs closer to one another” — and he considered that as a possible lesson for the church.
As Presbyterians discuss the most divided and difficult issues, Ufford-Chase said, “perhaps we ought to be lowering our voices, sharing more deeply, and getting closer together.”
