Peace Messenger

Ryan Bell on "Announcing & Enacting Peace in an Age of Empire"

Hollywood Adventist Church Pastor Ryan Bell sets forth the biblical mandate for peacemaking at the newly-launched ReligiousLiberty.TV:

God’s shalom is perhaps the central theme of God’s creation restoring work; the central metaphor throughout scripture for the complete wholeness of creation, which God is restoring....

So, peacemaking – announcing and enacting peace in our world – is evangelism. It is bearing the good news to a world awash in violence, war, poverty, disease and every other injustice. The good news of God’s kingdom envisioned by the prophets (Isaiah most notably), incarnate in the person of Jesus and taught by him in passages like the Beatitudes, is a good news of God’s shalom gaining the upper hand in the world....

...[B]eing peacemakers in God’s kingdom today means speaking and acting for justice for the poor, the outcast, and the war-torn. It means speaking out again an unjust war and actively working to bring that war to an end. It means speaking truth to power and holding power to account for the righteousness that God envisions. In short, being peacemakers in God’s kingdom means being radically committed to overcoming evil with good.

Michael Peabody edits the new ReligiousLiberty.TV site, described as "a leading independent online resource for news, information, commentary, and insights on contemporary issues involving the free exercise and establishment clauses of the United States Constitution."

Adventist Protests Extra-Judicial Killings & Environmental Destruction in Marathon Walk

From "Pastor to walk for an end to killings," by Eldie Aguirre and Orlando Dinoy, Inquirer.net, June 14, 2008; forwarded by Monte Sahlin:

DIGOS CITY, Davao del Sur, Philippines -- A 58-year-old Seventh Day Adventist pastor has launched a walk from his hometown in Matanao, Davao del Sur to Aparri in Cagayan Valley to dramatize his call for an end to unabated extrajudicial killings of journalists, militants, and suspected criminals, plus the massive environment destruction.

Edervin Samson of Barangay (Village) Camanchiles set off alone on Thursday and has been in contact with his family through a mobile phone....

"I wanted to stop the practice of extra-judicial killings, which is against the law of God, and to encourage people to renew their faith in Him," Samson told reporters when he passed by here on Thursday.

The trek to Aparri and back is a new endeavor according to the pastor and is the most daring walk he made in his life as marathoner. But he said his past experience in marathons would surely help him in attaining his goal....

"Humans are only stewards of this planet and we don't have any right to kill people or destroy the environment that God has entrusted to us," he said.

Samson said he would be stopping by selected areas from time to time to preach the Gospel....

The Prophetic Word

Excerpts from Pastor Trevor Kinlock's sermon, "I'm Sick of It!", preached at Calvary Seventh-day Adventist Church in Newport News, Virginia, May 10, 2008:

A fiery preacher named Jeremiah…criticized the nation and its smooth-talking pastors and they threw him in jail and burned his sermon notes (Jer. 36:37)….

Beloved, they cannot handle the message of the prophet, they cannot handle the message of truth, when it challenges the structures of power….

[The prophets'] message is universal, and its speaks to nations, social conditions, and religious institutions and orthodoxy.  “Woe,” and “repent” are the two consistent words of the prophet.

And so, church, if we have a prophetic message, we ought to speak out against the nation when the nation contravenes a “thus saith the Lord.”  Help us God!

And so I declare this afternoon, “Woe unto you, George Bush, for lying about weapons of mass destruction.  Woe unto you for invading and destroying a nation, and arrogantly trading the blood of thousands of American soldiers for oil and strategic dominance.  Woe unto you. Shame on you.  There’s a problem with that....

Repent, America, for exploiting the poor and enlarging the rich.  God is not pleased with that….

Woe unto you, America, for glorifying violence, perverting sexuality, debasing the institution of marriage, and worshipping the “almighty dollar.”  Woe! Woe! Woe!  God is not happy with you.  God is not pleased with you.  God is going to deal.  Judgment day is coming….There’s a God that sits in heaven and He deals with those who oppress His people.  So you better repent!

Last day church, don’t be afraid to preach the prophetic word. Remnant church, Seventh-day Adventist church, don’t be afraid to speak truth to power....

Listen to the sermon at PraizeVision.com.

Care About Global Poverty? Try Vegetarianism

Bruce Friederich's "Top Ten Reasons to Go Vegetarian," posted at AlterNet, 19 May 2008:

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but it's about one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals...

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment...

4. Avoid Bird Flu...

5. If You Wouldn't Eat a Dog, You Shouldn't Eat a Chicken...

6. Heart Disease: Our Number One Killer...

7. Cancer: Our Number Two Killer...

8. Fitting Into That Itty-Bitty Bikini...

9. Global Peace Leo Tolstoy claimed that "vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism." ...

10. The Joy of Veggies...

Adventists at Envision 08

Adventist peace activists and bloggers Ryan Bell and Johnny Ramirez have both recently posted information about Envision 08, a major conference on Christian engagement in the public square, June 8-10 in Princeton, New Jersey.  The conference promises to bring together sixty leading scholars, artists, activists and pastors and offers twenty "learning tracks." One of these, "Religious Pluralism and Christian Faith," will be co-lead by Samir Selmanovic of Faith House Manhattan and the renowned Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School. (Johnny's post also includes video of a lecture by Volf on 'How Do You "Un-Do' the Culture of War?")

Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, John Perkins, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis and many, many more noteworthies will be among the speakers and learning track leaders.  This should be an exceptionally enriching experience for those dedicated to following Christ in the public square.

A New Way to "Proclaim Jubilee"

Brian Swarts, an Adventist activist for justice and peace, and currently national field organizer for Jubilee USA, calls for action on the Jubilee Act at the God's Politics blog.  The proposed legislation recently won support of the House Financial Services Committee and is now before the full House of Representatives.

This week Congress will vote on the Jubilee Act, the most important debt legislation since 2000. I was an undergraduate theology student when the Jubilee 2000 movement made headlines, and it transformed the way I saw my faith. In short, I discovered the prophetic power of faith to transform injustice and what it looks like to see the Word made flesh....

The Jubilee Act will expand access to debt cancellation to all the countries that need it to fight extreme poverty. Without debt cancellation, it will be nearly impossible for many countries to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015.

Read Brian's full piece at the God's Politics blog.

A History Lesson for Bull Connor

From “I See The Promised Land,” Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last speech, delivered to supporters of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, April 3, 1968:

I remember in Birmingham, Alabama [in 1963], when we were in that majestic struggle there we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out.  And [police commissioner] Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round.”  Bull Connor next would say, “Turn the fire hoses on.”  And as I said to you the other night, Bull Connor didn’t know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn’t relate to the transphysics that we knew about.  And that was the fact that there was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out.  And we went before the fire hoses; we had known water.  If we were Baptist or some other denomination, we had been immersed.  If we were Methodist, and some others, we had been sprinkled, but we knew water.

That couldn’t stop us.  And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we’d just go on singing “Over my head I see freedom in the air.”  And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can.  And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, “Take them off,” and they did; and we would just go on in the paddy wagon singing, “We Shall Overcome.”  And every now and then we’d get in the jail, and we’d see the jailers looking through the windows being moved by our prayers, and being moved by our words and our songs.  And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to; and so we ended by transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.

Published in James M. Washington, ed., Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. (HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 281-282.

"Little Rock Nine" Member Calls Adventists to Help Repair the World

Terence Roberts, one of the nine black students who desegregated the Little Rock Central High School in a tense and dangerous confrontation fifty years ago that proved to be a decisive moment in the struggle for racial equality, was a Seventh-day Adventist. In fact, the segment on Little Rock in the Eyes On the Prize documentary series includes a clip from a press conference in which Roberts (pictured at right facing two Arkansas National guardsmen, September 4, 1957) made a point of identifying himself as an Adventist.

In an interview with Adventist Review associate editor Roy Adams, featured on the cover of the February 21 issue, Roberts talked about some of his struggles with the church in recent years, as well as his hopes for it.  By the early 1990s, says Roberts, he and his wife Rita had become "rather disenchanted with the church because of its slow movement on racial issues….What had kept us in the church for a long time was the church’s emphasis on health and education. It made so much sense! But we always sort of chafed over our inability to move faster on race."

When asked by Adams what one brief message he would give to Adventists, based on his experience, Roberts responded:

I would say that the message of Jesus Christ (as I read it) is that we have to become involved in issues of social justice. We’ve got to look out for people in society who, because of the oppressive forces, aren’t doing well. That’s what Jesus seemed to do. He went about helping the downtrodden. It’s important for us as Adventist people, as Christian people, as spiritual people, to understand the need to work toward social justice. (And in many ways Adventism is heavily involved—involved in humanitarian work, in work with refugees, etc.) I recently ran across a concept, out of the Hebrew tradition, called tikkun olam. It means “repairing the world.” The idea is that all of us are called upon to help repair the world, even though we know in advance that we probably would not complete the job.

Dr. Terrence Roberts is a clinical psychologist and a professor at Antioch University (Los Angeles campus).

The Militarization of Africa

Excerpts from "Africa Policy Outlook 2008" by Gerald LeMelle. Foreign Policy in Focus, February 7, 2008.

Militarizing Aid

The United States has dramatically ramped up military activity in Africa since 2002. Representative Donald Payne (D-NJ), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health on the House Committee for Foreign Affairs, and many others have described this trend as the “militarization of U.S. aid to Africa.” The total amount of U.S. military sales, financing and training expenditures for eight African countries considered particularly strategic for the “war on terror” has increased from about $40 million over the five years from 1997 through 2001 to over $130 million between 2002 and 2006....

Private Sector Role

Deepening U.S. military ties to the African continent are visible in both the official and private sectors. Since 2002, the U.S. International Military and Training Program (IMET) has invested approximately $10 million a year to train African military personnel, and the FY 2008 budget request increased this sum to $13.7 million. At the same time, under State Department oversight, commercial sales by U.S. manufacturers delivered $281 million worth of weapons and equipment from FY 2006-2007 to Algeria alone. Such licensed commercial sales to sub-Saharan Africa were just $900,000 in 2000, but for FY 2008 they are estimated to reach $92 million, an 80% increase from FY 2006....

AFRICOM's Inspiration

This growing militarization of U.S.-Africa policy is certain to escalate sharply in 2008 as the United States hurtles full speed ahead with the launch of Bush’s still ill-defined Africa Command (AFRICOM)....

AFRICOM began initial operations in October 2007 with temporary headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. But much like 150 years ago when Western countries argued that their real goals in Africa were to bring liberty and democratic ideals to the continent, the Bush Administration has been trying to convince skeptical audiences in Africa and elsewhere that AFRICOM is ultimately driven by altruistic motives.

AFRICOM’s projected structure would place humanitarian work previously done by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under the directive of Department of Defense (DOD). To U.S. and African civil society groups, and even to AFRICOM’s critics in Congress, the Bush administration has argued that the State Department will remain responsible for diplomacy and development while AFRICOM will “support” USAID and other humanitarian organizations in the delivery of humanitarian aid and assistance. The Bush administration suggests there will be more civilian oversight of AFRICOM than any other military command. Yet it remains hard to see how African policy will not be driven by military engagement as opposed to a genuine partnership if the State Department and USAID are positioned under the Defense Department in AFRICOM....

AFRICOM is being touted in Soldier of Fortune and other private military contractor industry publications as ushering in a bountiful new job market. In Iraq, contractors hired by the U.S. government were accountable to no one, resulting in unacceptable human rights violations. It is reasonable to be concerned that mercenaries and other contractors hired for AFRICOM’s work will follow a similar pattern....

Debt: Opportunities and Threats

The Jubilee Act, a bill that would lead to the cancellation of 100% of the debt of 67 impoverished countries without the destructive economic and policy conditions found in previous debt reduction initiatives, is gaining bipartisan support in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. If made into law, the act would be a leap forward toward the eradication of Africa’s $200 billion-plus debt burden that acts as the biggest impediment to sustained development on the continent....

HIV/AIDS: A Legacy Issue

As the HIV/AIDS emphasis in his February trip to Africa demonstrates, Bush wants to leave the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) as a celebrated part of his legacy, but public health experts agree that this program has so far fallen drastically short of the funding levels necessary to make serious progress against the pandemic. Effective implementation of U.S. global HIV/AIDS programs under PEPFAR has also been hampered by ideological constraints in this program and an over-reliance on name-brand drugs as opposed to the more cost effective generic versions.

The next iteration of this plan needs to increase funding levels to a minimum of $50 billion to fight global HIV/AIDS over the next five years, eliminate ideological limitations and provide the full U.S. fair share of support for the multilateral Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria....

Adventist Church-State Council Supports Legislation Against Human Trafficking

From "The Church Joins the Fight Against Modern Slavery," by Michael Peabody, Esq. (Pacific Union Recorder, October 2007). Peabody is  the Vice President of the Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council in Sacramento, California.

According to the Los Angeles Human Trafficking and Child Prostitution Report, revised in August 2005, every 10 minutes, a woman, child or man, is recruited, smuggled or brought into the United States to work as forced laborers on farms, as prostitutes, in sweatshops, or in domestic settings. They are treated harshly and often tortured. Many times, their (often false) passports or identification are taken away and they are told that they will never be able to leave until they have paid off exorbitant fees demanded by the traffickers.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church has been a staunch opponent of slavery throughout its history....

When United States government leaders simultaneously passed the fugitive slave law, which demanded that slaves be returned to their masters, and proclaimed a national day of prayer and fasting, Ellen White furiously responded, "[These leaders] have deprived [slaves] of their liberty and free air which heaven has never denied them, and then left them to suffer for food and clothing. In view of all of this, a national fast is proclaimed! Oh, what an insult to Jehovah!" (Ellen White, Testimonies, vol. 1, p. 257).

Today there are men, women and children living in the Pacific Union who have been deprived of their liberty and free air. They are suffering in deplorable conditions in sweat shops, brothels and farms. We have been called to help them.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church State Council is supporting legislation (Assembly Bill 1278) authored by Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D–San Francisco) that enhances the initial anti-trafficking legislation passed in 2005 by making it a crime for traffickers to demand that victims repay inflated transportation costs by working in these types of conditions, and increases the penalty for those who bring minors to the United States to work in slave-like conditions. The bill will also give law enforcement officials the ability to seize the assets of the crime syndicates that are often behind the practice. AB 1278 is a two-year bill that is currently traveling through committee and is expected to be voted on in 2008.

To learn more about AB 1278 and what you can do to help the victims of human trafficking, visit churchstate.org.

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