One of the many great things about being part of the National Council of Churches is the sense of uplift that comes from connecting with the energy and creativity of our 36 Protestant and Orthodox communions, their congregations, and ecumenical and interfaith groups nationally and at the grassroots. Recently a local ecumenical study group contacted me for information on various "Kairos documents" that the faith community has generated in the last century. They are exploring the idea that our nation and world may now be at a Kairos moment-a time when God provides "a moment of truth" to respond faithfully to situations of chaos and death. A time so decisive that our response reflects our understanding of what it means to be the church.
In the press of daily events it is hard to judge objectively whether or not we have arrived at such a moment. But I can say that the challenges to which the NCC and its member communions are striving to make a faithful response are of an extraordinary magnitude. We are called to be peacemakers in a time of war. We work to protect God's creation in a time when global warming and the extinction of species are changing life on a planetary scale. We proclaim "Let Justice Roll" in a time when the divide between rich and poor is becoming a chasm.
I want to report briefly on what we as a community of communions are doing to address these challenges so that we may be a witness in the world, sharing our enduring sense of hope. That we are able to mount such a response during difficult economic times is a testament to those many people in member communions and on the staff who have worked to make the NCC financially viable. I am pleased to report to you that the end of our fiscal year-on June 30, 2004-marked the third consecutive year in which the NCC has balanced its budget. And during these years, our long-term investments have grown from $2 million to approximately $10 million.
While our program ministries still must make hard choices about how they spend their resources, the Council's financial stability has provided the climate in which we can confidently do some strategic planning and in which our programs currently have achieved great successes. Let me share a few of the highlights:
As I write, the campaign Let Justice Roll: Faith and Community Voices Against Poverty is getting underway in 15 cities nationwide. Already major rallies and worship services in Portland and Eugene, Ore.; Seattle, Wash.; and Rochester, N.Y., have engaged thousands of participants. Let Justice Roll events are scheduled in other cities throughout the summer and into the fall, including venues in Boston during the Democratic National Convention and New York City during the Republican National Convention. We are pressing candidates, convention delegates and public officials to make poverty a campaign issue. We are asking and want them to answer the question, "What will you do to end poverty?"
While we want candidates to let voters know where they stand on the great moral issue of poverty, we also want people who live in poverty to make their voices heard-particularly at the ballot box. A major goal of the campaign is to register, educate and mobilize low-income voters in large numbers. To do so we are working with national groups such as the Center for Community Change, Faithful Democracy, Call to Renewal, the Interfaith Alliance and other faith-based and community-based groups.
In fact, the campaign, which is a part of the work of the NCC's Justice and Advocacy Commission, has brought the Council into an exciting collaboration with many organizations. In every place where the campaign is unfolding, state and city councils of churches, interfaith organizations and other faith-based and community-based groups have rallied to the cause. The breadth and variety of organizations involved and the numbers of people who have turned out for events have encouraged everyone who has worked on Let Justice Roll. This collaboration has sparked renewed community efforts, and local groups have pledged to keep building on the events of this campaign, no matter who wins the November elections. (Learn more at www.ncccusa.org/letjusticeroll/.
We work diligently to shape public policies that truly advance the common good and that respect the dignity of all persons. This takes patience and persistence. We also know that on this day tens of millions of Americans suffer in poverty. Their needs are immediate. In response, we are working with The Benefit Bank, a burgeoning effort to get desperately needed benefits into the hands of low-income people-by tapping into the public and privately funded benefits for which they qualify but may not be receiving.
Every year more than $35 billion in already appropriated or entitlement funds go uncollected. Potential applicants may not know about some of these funds and/or find the application process daunting. The Benefit Bank, a Web-based software program, assists low and moderate income individuals to apply for all benefits for which they may be eligible, working from a single computer, and with the help of a counselor in a trusted setting such as a church or a community organization. The NCC has helped extend the Benefit Bank greatly.
More than 250 families have received $513,000 in benefits in Philadelphia. Grants of $850,000 from the John and James Knight Foundation will fund programming of the Benefit Bank in Florida, Ohio and Mississippi. Our goal for Florida is to enroll 25,000 families and bring $50,000,000 in benefits that they are owed.
Quality public education also is a poverty-related issue. For so much of our history as a nation the public schools have been the route out of poverty for children of color, poor immigrants and others born into low-income families. Our Education and Leadership Ministries Commission, as a part of its wide portfolio, has taken up the banner of quality education for all public school s tudents at a time when public education is under attack. ELMC's Committee on Public Education and Literacy is exploring ways in which churches can support the schools and the students, parents, teachers and administrators who make up the public school community. It has nurtured an important relationship with the National Education Association and hopes increasingly to bring the faith and the educational communities together for dialogue.
Our Communication Commission has responded to the poverty emphasis in many ways, most recently by brokering an ABC Television special "Hunger No More: Faces Behind the Facts," that will air beginning on October 24. Production is under way with several interviews filmed in June at the 30th anniversary of the hunger advocacy organization Bread for the World-which drew major figures in the fight to end hunger. The NCC also will produce a study guide to accompany the TV broadcast and the subsequent videocassette of the program.
All these and many other efforts are helping to implement the pledge of the 2000 NCC General Assembly to make our work against poverty a top priority. The growing prevalence of poverty in our nation since that pledge was made strengthens our resolve to mobilize with and on behalf of people in our country who live with poverty-the 34.9 million who are hungry or "food insecure," the 44 million who have no health insurance, the millions more who live in substandard housing.
The United States was picked as the 2004 geographic focus for the World Council of Churches' Decade to Overcome Violence (DOV) - primarily because of what the WCC called "the courageous opposition of U.S. churches to war in Iraq and their efforts to alleviate suffering at home and abroad." The NCC, U.S. churches, and many other faith-based groups were part of the huge global peace movement that mobilized up to 10 million protestors against war in Iraq. While the war is now a grim reality, passion for peacemaking has not abated. For example, the NCC is supporting the Decade to Overcome Violence in several ways, including a conference that our Faith and Order Commission is planning for October 17 on Christology and Peace. The commission also has played a part in publication of the new DOV-related book Seeking Cultures of Peace: A Peace Church Conversation (Cascadia Publishing House). Commission support of the DOV comes in addition to ongoing work on major theological studies scheduled for 2004-2007.
The NCC's International Affairs and Peace Office has been at the center as plans for the DOV U.S. emphasis developed. It is involved in a host of ecumenical efforts for peace, always mindful of the challenge that Jesus Christ laid before us when he said, "If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace!" We are trying to do the things that make for peace in Sudan, where we have been involved in several high-profile events to call attention to genocide in the Darfur region. We stood with human rights advocates in a mass rally in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. We acted on our concern for the plight of the Cuban people-urging our government to end the destructive embargo and pressing the Cuban government to reverse lengthy prisons sentences it had meted out to dissidents. And we participated in a Church World Service trip in solidarity with Afro-Colombians, with our president, Bishop Thomas L. Hoyt Jr., playing a key role.
Currently, we are working with the Ecumenical Patriarch to bring together an international, interfaith conference on multireligious collaboration for peace. The conference is scheduled for October 11-13, 2004, in Istanbul, Turkey, where the Patriarchate is located.
The war in Iraq is the context for this conference and for so much of our work. We are just beginning to understand how easy it was to take America to war in Iraq in the absence of an adequate national debate on the war, on the rightful role of the UN, and on how America should relate to others in the community of nations. Many citizens, including church people, are unprepared to take part in such a conversation. That is why the NCC designed and field-tested a curriculum on America as a world citizen for use in congregations and ecumenical groups. We found an eagerness on the part of church people to engage in this study, and during the pilot phase we had to turn away many congregations that wished to participate.
Now we are preparing to take this project to scale, with the learnings from the testing phase and with generous support from foundations. The Ford Foundation is making a grant of $300,000 to carry this work forward. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which supported the pilot project with $75,000, is making a second grant of $100,000. Over the next few years we hope to help our congregations catch a vision of the positive role that our country could play in creating a cooperative, sustainable world order.
The importance of our Interfaith Relations Commission in peacemaking has become ever more visible since September 11. The commissioners and the churches they represent have been working hard to increase interfaith understanding and harmony in U.S. communities, a counterweight to those who speak or act violently in the name of religion.
Recently the commission sponsored a workshop on "religion-related violence" during the July 7-13 Parliament of the World's Religions in Barcelona, Spain. Leaders of the world's diverse faiths-many from places such as New York, Madrid, Bali and Manila that have experienced such violence-engaged in a search for resources for the prevention and healing of violence. Many New Yorkers who attended the Parliament will bring home what they learned at the workshop, especially at an interfaith dialogue that the NCC is planning for September 11, 2004, in New York City.
The NCC is part of a growing religiously motivated movement for the environment that provides a "home" for people of faith working to protect God's creation. Recent achievements include energetic campaigns for clean air and water that drew strength from an informed base of supporters-the result of many years of educational and advocacy efforts. This year the NCC Eco-Justice Working Group is celebrating its 20th year-two decades in which the NCC has helped local, regional and national church bodies become an effective network for environmental voices. In spring 2004, the NCC's Eco-Justice Program released a resource for Earth Day Sunday, Life-Giving Breath of God: Protecting the Sacred Gift of Air, which focused on cleaning our air for the benefit of today's and future generations. Thousands of congregations received the resource. In the same season, nearly 100 national and state Christian leaders, representing millions of congregants, signed a letter to President Bush deploring Administration action that weakened environmental standards. The letter also ran as a full-page ad in The New York Times.
The Eco-Justice Program continues to build a foundation of faith-based environmental awareness-including training events, which in 2004 have focused on H2oly Water: Source of Life. Events in Annapolis, Toledo and Detroit have engaged clergy and lay leaders in a study of threats to water resources and what congregations can do to preserve and protect God's gift of water.
As I began this report, I referred to the amazing profusion of efforts for peace and justice in congregations and communities everywhere in our country. They energize those of us working nationally-and we can offer something in return: ways to connect and amplify your voices. The NCC's most successful such effort to date is FaithfulAmerica.org, a new online advocacy service for persons with religious motivations for involvement in civic life. It's not yet two months old, but already it's one of the most successful such Web launches in history, having welcomed its 100,000th member over the July 4 holiday. FaithfulAmerica.org's first major project is a television ad aimed at Arab viewers, featuring statements by American clergy-Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Muslim-expressing sorrow for abuses in Iraqi prisons, and pledging "to work to right these wrongs." Visitors to the new site have responded by giving more than $150,000 to run the ad on Arabic-language TV networks, where it got a wonderful reception from viewers.
Not aligned with any political party, FaithfulAmerica.org offers its members an easy way to send messages to their elected officials, communicate with each other, and sign petitions. Membership is free, and is open to all persons of faith at www.FaithfulAmerica.org.
This is a brief overview of the NCC 's activities at the end of the 2003-2004 fiscal year. It is not comprehensive by any means. The very word ecumenical derives from the Greek for "the whole inhabited earth" and our concerns are broad indeed. They also go deep. For every news story you may read about our work there is a long history of relationship building, research, education and advocacy that goes on daily. It prepares us for such a time as this. If history shows this to be a Kairos moment, I believe it also will show that together we responded faithfully.
Whether you are a leader in a communion, a congregant, a part of the ecumenical network that stretches across our nation, or belong to a faith-inspired grassroots organization, I am glad that you are part of our common work. Let us pray for that work, which we do for the sake of the world that God so loved that God became embodied in our midst. And let us pray for each other.
National Council of Churches USA
475 Riverside Dr.; New York, NY 10115
(212) 870-2227