Title: Disciples, UCC leaders write on future of Jerusalem
Date: January 10, 1997
Disciples News Service
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Contact: news@cm.disciples.org
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INDIANAPOLIS (DNS) -- Leaders of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ recently issued a joint pastoral letter on the future of Jerusalem.
The letter, signed by the Revs. Richard L. Hamm, Disciples general minister and president, and Paul H. Sherry, president of the UCC, is a prelude to the expected introduction of resolutions concerning Jerusalem at 1997 meetings of each denomination's central deliberative body.
The future of Jerusalem is one of several "final status issues" that will not be settled until various interim matters are resolved between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Final status talks, scheduled for May 1996, were stalled indefinitely after the November 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The pastoral message cautions that "Christians should not presume to define and delineate the significance of Jerusalem for their partners in the Abrahamic tradition." Nonetheless, it seeks to "articulate principles and hopes that we, as Christians, believe should be realized in the determination of the status of the Holy City."
Chief among the positions is that Jews, Christians and Muslims share a passionate regard for Jerusalem as a "city of hope and holiness...where redemption and renewal have been promised."
The letter commends Israel for extending free access to Jerusalem's holy places to the international Christian community since Israel assumed control of the city in 1967. But it also laments that under present conditions, Palestinian Christians and Muslims living in the West Bank and Gaza are deprived of the right to worship at the places held sacred to their traditions.
Furthermore, the continuous closure of Jerusalem and of Israel itself to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories has "had a devastating impact on the Palestinian economy, on education, on health care and on the unity of families."
Israeli actions in Jerusalem prior to agreements on the future of the city are "of grave impact as well." They include: extensive building of exclusively Jewish settlements in and around the city; the expansion of the municipal limits of the city to include those settlements; and building on confiscated Palestinian land. Such policies have displaced Palestinians and magnified "the fears of . . . Palestinian residents that they will be overwhelmed and marginalized in the city that they consider to be the center of their national life."
"For Jerusalem to realize its vocation, it cannot . . . belong' to any one people or religion," the pastoral letter asserts. Hamm and Sherry state clearly that neither they nor their communions can "presume to define this solution in political terms." But they call on those who negotiate the future of Jerusalem to "recognize its truly unique role . . . (and) define new modes of sovereignty and governance so that Jerusalem will (be) . . . a living antidote to the contemporary diseases of bigotry, intolerance, ultra-nationalism and exclusivism."
The Disciples 1997 General Assembly and the United Church's 1997 General Synod are expected to consider resolutions that call for the communions to examine the significance of Jerusalem in their theologies, their inter-religious relations, and their practices of tourism and pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
The Disciples, with general offices in Indianapolis, have nearly 1 million members and more than 3,900 local churches in the United States and Canada. The UCC, with national offices in Cleveland, has 1.5 million members in more than 6,100 local churches in the United States and Puerto Rico. The two denominations have been in "full communion" as ecumenical partners since 1989.
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