Lutherans in Ecumenical Mission

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Christians gathered in San Jose, Costa Rica, to discuss how to carry out Jesus' "preferential option for the excluded" in a global economic system that gives "preferential option to the wealthy" The event was an ecumenical consultation April 26-28, with nearly 200 delegates from North America, Latin America and the Caribbean considering: "What does Christian mission mean as we approach the 21st century?"
From the beginning of his ministry "Jesus spoke to the marginalized, disenfranchised and dispossessed. He proclaimed sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, healing for the wounded and liberation for prisoners," said the Rev. Will L. Herzfeld, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Chicago. Herzfeld is associate executive director for the ELCA's Division for Global Mission and chairs the National Council Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.'s (NCC) Church World Service and Witness Unit. Herzfeld led the Bible study at the consultation.
Participants in "Missiology Consultation" -- planned by a North and South team under the auspices of the NCC -- participants agreed that mission must address, in practical ways, the problems and needs of the people the churches are seeking to serve. The NCC is a coordinating body for U.S. mainline Protestant and Orthodox missions in the region.
Participants considered the challenges to mission posed by the contemporary context, and outlined a "new model for mission" that respects cultural and religious diversity. It would give "preferential option" for those who have been excluded from economic, political and social life, including indigenous peoples, peoples of African descent, women, children, immigrants and all who are being left out of the globalizing economy. The model also recognizes a reciprocity of mission between the Northern and Southern hemispheres of the Americas.
"Eleven years ago, the Sao Paulo Process began with the goal of overcoming the barrier between donor church and recipient church. I call it accompaniment," said the Rev. Rafael Malpica-Padilla, ELCA's program director for Latin America and the Caribbean. He chairs the NCC's Committee on Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Sao Paulo Process was initiated in 1986 at a meeting between the NCC's Committee on Latin America and the Caribbean's "Northern" funders and directors of recipient "Southern" projects. The process draws its name from that meeting's venue -- Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The "Missiology Consultation" was the first since 1929 to bring together official delegations from North American denominational mission boards that work in Latin America and the Caribbean. They will cooperate as they work to overcome an 80-year old understanding of mission that casts churches of the north as donors and those of the south as recipients. Together they seek a new way of understanding and conducting mission.
The consultation was punctuated by descriptions of how economic globalization is wreaking havoc on communities across the Americas and worldwide as factories are closed, jobs moved, companies downsized, wages cut and workers exploited while a relative few persons reap profits.
The consultation included the participation of two historic African American denominations (the African Methodist Episcopal and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches), indigenous people, people of African descent, women, lay theologians, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, evangelicals, Pentecostals and representatives of civil society.
The challenge for the new millennium, said the Rev. Dr. Joan Brown Campbell, NCC general secretary, "is to educate people to think ecumenically. The challenge for the unity of all God's people is a radical word. The church should work to remove the barriers of race, gender, nation states, handicapping conditions. The quest for unity is not to save the church but so that the world might believe."

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Ann Hafften, Director (773) 380-2958 or NEWS@ELCA.ORG
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