HOUSTON — The second annual conference of the Presbyterian Global Fellowship held here August 16-18 reverberated with a passion for mission and hope for a bright future for the church’s work in that mission. “Even though the Church has gone off-course numerous times in history, it has gone through key course corrections that put it back on course,” reminded opening speaker, David Peterson, who also served as host to the three-day event. The pastor of Memorial Drive Church in Houston told the 850 guests to his city, “I believe that the Presbyterian Church is going through a course correction in these days.”
Striking many of the themes introduced at its 2006 inaugural conference, the PGF extended an invitation to the participants to join their efforts to support such a course correction. Unlike last year’s conference, though, this conference did not harp against — in fact, it seldom even mentioned — the problems swirling around its own denomination. Rather, it repeatedly lifted up an emerging, expanding vision for worldwide Christian endeavor.
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| Michael Frost |
Frost’s address began boldly. “I am anxious, my friends, that you do not domesticate the idea of mission. … The call to ‘missional’ is a full-blooded call to recalibrate the church around the call to mission.”
Missional church thinkers see God differently, Frost said. They don’t think of God as distant, up in heaven somewhere. “The God in the Bible is not calling people out of the world to himself, but is entering into the world. The earliest stories of God are about God the missionary sending himself forth.”
In fact, he corrected a regular mis-translation that misguides even leaders of the missional movement. “Missio dei”, the Latin term that has gained wide use, is not “the mission of God” but “the missioning God” or “the God of mission.”
“If you are filled with the spirit of God, filled with the mission dei,” he pressed the audience, “then you are propelled into the world.”
This theme carried through the conference.
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| Amon Eddie Kasambala |
Amon Eddie Kasambala, a Zambian pastoral theologian and minister of the Uniting Presbyterian Church of Southern Africa, urged missional work to grow around the theme of partnership. “Presbyterian Global Fellowship could just as well be called “Presbyterian Global Partnership.” True partnership, he said is a koinonia — communal fellowship — that is filled with laughter, joy, and grace. It is reciprocal. It is based on mutual respect, creating interdependence, and freedom of grace. It is motivated by love for God’s kingdom. And, “it has a keen interest in what the other is doing and offers to participate in practical ways.”
Abuna Elias Chacour, the archbishop of Galilee for the Melkite Greek Catholic Church and author of Blood Brothers and We Belong to the Land urged Presbyterians to continue to engage in the international mission of peacemaking. The recipient of Niwano Peace Prize and three-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize prodded the crowd: “Peace needs builders. Peace needs people who get their hands dirty, not with the blood of any human being but with building dignity for the poor and with helping the powerful to discover that he is destroying his own dignity with his weapons, with his arrogance.”
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| Abuna Elias Chacour |
He urged the participants to love Israeli Jews and also to love his own people, the Palestinian Christians. “We do not need to learn how to live together. We need to remember how we were living together for centuries and centuries. We were sharing everything, prosperity and misery, persecutions and times of peace.”
Referencing a conversation he had two months ago with Israel’s prime minister, he quoted Mr. Olmert: “We hope, we have so much hope for your Christian community in Israel, that you will be the bridge between us and the Muslim community in Israel, between us and the Arab countries, and between Israel and the Christian world. We wish that you will continue to be a voice of moderation.”
He added, ‘But we are not up to that responsibility. We need you. We need your support.” He was not asking for financial contributions. “I am begging for a change of heart, of attitude. I am begging you to use your power to make a difference for the better. You can make a difference. So far you have been the friends of the Jews, and I hope you are. It’s good. Take the side of the Jews. There’s nothing bad in that. But who told you that to be the friends of the Jews should be automatically the enemy of the Palestinians?”
He pressed that point still further. “I know many of you are friends of us Palestinians. I invite you all to be friends of the Palestinians. … But, please, if taking our side would mean for you Christians to become one sided, and to not show understanding for every evil that is done also by Palestinians, then we do not need your friendship. If your friendship means to encourage us to hate the Jews, to reject the Jews, not to recognize them, then what are you doing? You are becoming one more enemy in this very cruel battle, and we do not need any more enemies. We need one more common friend. And you Presbyterians can be the common friend. We want you to be the common friend.”
Gary Haugen, president of International Justice Mission, lifted up the missional calling in the context of the international genocides and slave trade. He was appointed by the United Nations to investigate the Rwandan genocides in Africa. The horror of what he witnessed led to the formation of a ministry aimed to liberate the estimated 25 million humans who are owned as slaves today, as well as other victims of violence, sexual exploitation, and oppression. In his lecture, he outlined five primary causes of such violence: gender/sexual violence (especially rape), police abuse, forced labor, violent land seizures, and illegal detention (approximately 65-85% of persons detained in the developing world have not been tried nor even charged with a crime). He told the stories of a few such victims IJM has helped, including that of a four-year old Debbie who was forced “under threat to her life” to work 16 hour days in a Southeast Asian rice mill.
He also told of the violence that has befallen some IJM workers as their work has riled the perpetrators of such violent acts against humanity.
In addition to hearing these and other major plenary addresses, mostly from international partners, the participants were served up more than two dozen workshop opportunities plus a “Coffeehouse Night” that featured the music of Derek Webb of Caedmon’s Call along with an informal conversation with Michael Frost.
Richard Kannwicher, pastor of First Church, San Antonio, served as master of ceremonies, and as “co-star” of a series of video vignettes that both entertained and pressed the calling to be a missional church.
The conference concluded with the host pastor, Dave Peterson, extending an invitation to individuals and congregations to formally affiliate with the PGF.
