News
By Mark Beach (*)
The World Council of Churches (WCC) United Nations Advocacy Week came with a bit of good news and bad news on climate change.
First, the bad news:
A United Nations (UN) official told some 80 participants gathered for the annual global advocacy week that it appears there will be no binding agreement on climate change signed by world governments at the upcoming Copenhagen climate change meetings in December.
This means "climate disruption" will continue unabated "unless governments can ramp up the courage to address it," Olav Kjorven, assistant secretary-general and director of the Bureau for Development Policy at the UN Development Programme, told the group in an opening keynote address on Monday, 16 November.
The WCC UN Advocacy Week, held in New York City, USA, from 15 to 20 November, brings together church activists from around the world to explore several topics, including the situation of people displaced by climate change, indigenous concerns around the world and continuing violence in Colombia. It is also a time when the activists build contacts and visit officials at various UN missions in the city.
The group meets in the Church Center for the United Nations across the street from the UN General Assembly, standing literally in the shadow of the towering UN office and administrative complex.
So what was the good news?
There is still a chance something significant will be decided in Copenhagen, so the church needs to put on pressure for an agreement to be met.
"Are we ready to be the counter-culture church of our calling?" asked the Rev. Elenie Poulos in an opening sermon to the group on Sunday evening, 15 November. "Now maybe more than ever, the world needs the kind of leadership the church has to offer."
Poulos is a Uniting Church minister in Australia and a member of the WCC Commission of the Churches on International Affairs.
"This is the leadership the world needs – a leadership of faith and justice that is a living demonstration that a different life is possible," she said.
Kjorven echoed Poulos, saying that religious groups around the world have yet to realize the real impact they could have on moving governments to address climate change immediately as well as other justice concerns.
"There is another simple fact," Kjorven said in his presentation. "You have an enormous economic clout as well that is too rarely recognized even amongst yourselves."
"You reach more people on a regular basis than any other institutions in the world today," he added.
Kjorven pointed to the fact that religious groups, including Christian churches, own roughly 8 percent of the land in the world, much of which is forested. "In the financial markets, religious institutions are the third largest actor through pension funds."
When the faith groups decide high carbon activity "is a sin, to put it in your terms" he said, and start to shift from high carbon to low carbon lifestyles, "it will send shock waves through the financial markets."
"Just do it"
The fact that religious groups and in particular the churches have enormous potential to impact climate change and in general influence leaders and dismantle global injustice was not missed in a keynote address Monday by Lois M. Dauway, a member of the WCC Central Committee and the interim deputy general secretary for the General Board for Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church.
But Dauway wondered if the church was up to the task.
Saying she has been feeling "testy" lately about what the church needs to do to dismantle global injustice, she told the group the church needs to adopt a theological approach to deal with justice issues such as climate change.
"I call it the Nike School of Theology," she said, referring to the well-known manufacturer of sports and recreational shoes.
Borrowing from the Nike brand slogan to make the point of what the church needs to do, Dauway said that it was time for action, "Just do it, just do it!"
She told the group that churches and the ecumenical community have the theological wherewithal to dismantle global injustice, but "we simply do not have the will."
Recognizing that the church has done many good things, she challenged the group to do more. "If we in the churches are truly going to make a change in this world, we must realize that it takes more than eloquent resolutions and sermons on peace and justice," she said.
It takes listening to those who suffer and joining with them, "sometimes leading, sometimes being led" and pooling the resources of the churches. "We could indeed turn the world upside down in the name of Jesus," Dauway said. "Lord knows we have the power, so let’s just do it."
"The planet and its people are running out of time, and we need to do more than just resist the dominant paradigms," Poulos said in her sermon. "We must transform them. We need an economic system that is not based on greed, materialism, individualism and the fear of scarcity."
Kjorven said that given the collapse in the Copenhagen agreement, there were things to salvage at the December meetings, "such as a framework for a future agreement", possibly by 2010.
But he emphasized that now was the time for the religious groups to step up. "We need a much stronger voice when it comes to the social justice aspects of climate change," he said. "And we need change for the long term."
The advocacy meetings, which are sponsored by the WCC United Nations Liaison Office, continue through the remainder of the week with most of the visits to UN missions in New York to take place on Thursday.
(*) Mark Beach is WCC director of communications.
More on the United Nations Advocacy Week of the WCC
Sound recording of the keynote address by Olav Kjorven
