On a mission to reduce world poverty

from The Boston Globe

By Rich Barlow | March 10, 2007

Is any Christian against ending world poverty? If not, why is the Rev. Ian T. Douglas, a professor at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, evangelizing about the Christian obligation to help poor countries?

"At some level, it should be a no-brainer," concedes the Rev. William W. Rich, who has arranged for Douglas to speak Wednesday at Trinity Church Boston, where Rich is senior associate rector in charge of adult Christian education.

Douglas, a scholar who has been prominent in the Episcopal Church's governance, is part of Trinity's lecture series on the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000 and reaffirmed in 2005 by President Bush. The eight goals include halving world poverty by 2015, stabilizing the environment, advancing women's rights, and accelerating efforts to eliminate disease.

Douglas also is to speak about the goals next Saturday in Houston before the nation's Episcopal bishops. His flurry of activity is not just personal enthusiasm for battling poverty. (This is a man, after all, who has refrigerator magnets listing the eight goals.)

Douglas worries that his church, on the brink of possible schism with its global fellows in the Anglican Communion over gay rights, may need a reminder not to ignore the poor in the heat of its internal debate over "who's in and who's out."

"The devil's not stupid," he says. "And the evil one wants nothing more than for church folk to be so overly consumed with church issues that we hide our light under the bushel."

Then there's the need to nudge secular leaders in the ribs. The leading industrial nations have vowed to boost development aid to 0.7 percent of their gross national product. Yet the United States remains stuck at about 0.18 percent, Douglas says. Two years ago, a UN report pegged the United States the second most miserly nation in meeting the target, ahead of only Italy.

The need to connect Christian mission to the goals also arises, he says, from evolving ideas about what mission means. In the 19th century, it meant extending colonial empires. A half century ago, the church's mission became a global witness of Christians around the world. Today, perception has shifted again, and mission has come to be seen as a divine construct: God's mission to restore the original order of creation that was ruptured by human sin, including poverty.

Some Christians, such as the Atlanta-based Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies, may prefer more traditional evangelizing, Douglas says. He may be overly pessimistic. "Most EFMA member missions would agree . . . evangelism and social concern should not be viewed as mutually exclusive," Steve Moore, the group's president and chief executive, writes by e-mail. He says his members have increased their attention to HIV/AIDS, poverty, and justice issues in the developing world.

Rich says he wanted Douglas to speak at Trinity in part because Americans naturally worry about homegrown poverty rather than out-of-sight deprivation overseas. And let's not forget the genesis of this particular poverty project. "The Millennium Development Goals were developed by the United Nations," Rich points out. "Some people in the church -- and I'm not one of them -- but some people in the church look with suspicion upon goals for Christian mission being developed by a body outside of the church."

The goals' drafters called upon developing-world governments to fulfill their aid pledges. "No one's left off the hook of both culpability and responsibility," Douglas says. "All the people of the world are called to [be] asking ourselves, what do we have to do, in whatever spheres of influence we have, to live into that vision of a restored world?"

Douglas's insistence on the centrality of foreign aid to Christian mission grows in part from personal experience. More than two decades ago, he served as a missionary in impoverished Haiti. At the end of his assignment, he says, the Haitian bishop bade him farewell at the airport by telling him: "You've been with us almost two years. Now your missionary work begins." While his work in Haiti had been valuable, the bishop was saying, Douglas's real mission was to exhort his fellow Americans into concern and action.

"I'm just trying to live into that missionary vocation that was given to me," he says.

In the gospel, Jesus warned that the poor would always be with us. Does Douglas really believe that the development goals will be achieved by 2015?

The goals "are almost impossible to achieve by 2015," he says, "so let's get to it."

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