BIRMINGHAM — At an early morning breakfast here, the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (PPF) announced that it is launching a $2 million endowment campaign to fund peace activism and that the denomination’s former moderator, Elder Rick Ufford-Chase, will serve as its first executive director.
“We can’t predict what the future holds,” the Rev. Jim Atwood of Washington, D.C. and the head of the endowment campaign, told a packed ballroom audience. “But we can be confident that PPF members will be there — after all of us here are dead and gone — to witness to the power of non-violence, as seen in the life of Jesus.
” … And we couldn’t be more excited that Rick Ufford-Chase will lead us into the next few years. No, long, long, long into the future.”
Ufford-Chase resigned his advocacy job on the Mexico-U.S. border when he was elected moderator of the 216th General Assembly in 2004. His term ended Thursday night with the 217th General Assembly elected the Rev. Joan S. Gray of Greater Atlanta Presbytery as its moderator.
Ufford-Chase is the first moderator to serve a two-year term, launched after the Assembly began biennial meetings in 2004.
“I’ve been agonizing about where God might be calling me next … and when PPF extended its offer, my agony immediately came to an end,” he said, calling “building peace” the critical work facing congregations here and abroad.
PPF’s current projects include supporting conscientious objectors in the military, backing the No2Torture Campaign and recruiting accompaniers to be an international presence in churches living inside conflict zones around the world. One of the most harrowing zones is the Presbyterian Church in Colombia (PCC), where pastors have been threatened with death and detention for its human rights work in poor communities along Colombia’s volatile north coast.
Two of the three Peaceseeker Awards — granted annually to peace activists — are linked directly to accompaniment. Anne Barstow of New York City was recognized for witnessing to the peril in Colombia and for coordinating the training and recruitment of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) accompaniment there. The Rev. Milton Mejia, the former executive director of the PCC, another honoree, told the gathering: “You have helped protect many lives. And we need this to increase.”
Mejia’s life has been threatened multiple times for his strong stands on human rights.
“Faith is a form of resistance … in a world where misery and death don’t have to be the last word,” said Alice Winters, a longtime PC(USA) mission co-worker in Colombia and a Bible teacher in the country’s only accredited Protestant seminary. “For Jesus Christ is resurrected from the dead and triumphed over death.
“And that is good news.”
Winters said that poor people in Colombia are pushed off their land by multi-national corporations intending to mine for emeralds, dredge for oil, or build a rumored new canal in northern Colombia that borders Panama. “The idea is to get rid of the poor people who are taking up space … and make everybody conform to the global (economic) interests of just a few.”
More than three million Colombians have been displaced by violence in the conflicted regions.
Ann Weems — a popular poet — was the third recipient of a Peaceseeker Award for writing poetry that upholds peace-work. The Rev. Len Bjorkman was named PPF’s moderator emeritus.
Atwood and Weems — and the other 250 attendees — laid hands in prayer on the boxes of campaign appeals that were stacked next to the podium. The letters were later delivered to the Birmingham post office for mailing, commemorating Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”
