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Social Action Handbook 2017 Social Action Handbook The Presbyterian Church in Canada Print Warning This document is approximately 315 pages long. Social Action Handbook 4th Edition, 2004 Revised for the 143rd General Assembly (2017) Justice Ministries Life and Mission Agency The Presbyterian Church in Canada II Introduction Contents Preface . IV Evangelical Faith and the Radical Compassion of Love for the World . V How to Use this Book . X Table of Contents . XII Glossary of Acronyms . XIV Topical Index . XV III Preface Welcome to the 2017 edition of the Social Action Handbook (SAH) which includes material from the 143rd (2017) General Assembly. The SAH is included in the CD-ROM version of the Acts and Proceedings. Every congregation may order one free copy of the CD-ROM. The SAH is posted on Justice Ministries’ website presbyterian.ca/justice. There are approximately 325 pages. The first edition was published in 1978 and covered the period from 1960 to 1976. The second edition was issued in 1984 and included reports from the 110th General Assembly (1984). The third edition was published in 1988 and then updated annually. The 2004 edition was a major revision, the first since November 1988. The 2004 edition is updated annually. In preparing the 2004 edition, Gail Turner, then Program Assistant in Justice Ministries, examined Acts & Proceedings going back fifty years in order to verify references and to identify reports that had been excluded from previous Social Action Handbooks. Gail is to be thanked for the care and commitment she brought to this project. In planning the 2004 revision, Justice Ministries held several consultations on how to make the SAH as user friendly as possible. The previous edition, in a three ringed binder format, had grown to almost 800 pages. The two most frequent suggestions were to shorten the SAH and to highlight decisions made by General Assembly. The SAH is now much shorter. The reports are summarized. Each report is referenced to the specific Acts & Proceedings. The SAH is an unofficial record of decisions taken by General Assemblies of The Presbyterian Church in Canada on a variety of issues. Readers are invited to refer to the original reports for the official record. Every effort has been made to summarize the original reports as faithfully as possible. I take this opportunity to acknowledge the contributions made by staff and volunteers of The Presbyterian Church in Canada who created the Social Action Handbook in 1978, who updated the Social Action Handbook annually and who produced the various revisions. The church owes these individuals a debt of gratitude for their efforts in chronicling the church’s engagement on faith and justice issues. The theolgocail and ethicsal issues considered and the decisions made by General Assembly serve as a reminder that Christianity is a public faith that reflects the lordship of Jesus Christ over all of creation. It is Justice Ministries’ hope that this 2017 edition of the Social Action Handbook faithfully serves The Presbyterian Church in Canada, to the glory of God. Stephen Allen, Associate Secretary, Justice Ministries July 2017 IV Evangelical Faith and the Radical Compassion of Love for the World Arthur Van Seters Principal Emeritus, Knox College, Toronto Introduction Back in the 1960s Sam Butler was on the staff of Knox Church, Toronto, as a lay missionary to the neighbourhood. His remarkable ability of getting to know the young people in the local public school down the street and the kind of challenges they faced became legendary. He could tell you where almost every child in the schoolyard lived and often something about their home life. As he shared their journeys and his own deep faith in Christ, many found a home in the congregation – and later, so did many parents. Gradually Knox became one of the most cosmopolitan congregations in the city. Many may not have used the language of social action to describe this evolution but at heart it expressed an evangelical vision for the social reality at the church’s very doorstep. Spiritual and social were woven together in mission. This memory of my personal experience of Sam and the congregation of my childhood and university days reminds me of a statue just off Queen’s Park near the Medical Building at the University of Toronto. Robert Raikes, the 18th century founder of the Sunday School, stands with Bible in hand looking at the viewer. Raikes was the editor and publisher of the Gloucester Journal through which he urged the improvement of education for poor children since so many of them were ending up in over-crowded jails. Because these children worked in factories, classes were held on Sundays. It was the start of a movement that spread across the UK and on to Europe and North America. Interestingly, the British government supported these schools and this eventually led to its development of public education.1 Moving beyond conservative-liberal dichotomies I tell these stories because they are not what one first thinks of in connection with a Social Action Handbook. Too often the church, like the larger society, caricatures some as liberal social activists and others as conservatives who focus just on personal faith. Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the priests who gave us the Book of Leviticus, reached beyond such ideological stereotyping. They always connected worship and ethics, priest and prophet, worldliness and sacrament.2 Indeed, the radical societal reforms demanded by the Israelite prophets were profoundly rooted in their conservative appeals to Torah teaching. They believed that faithfulness to Yahweh, the God of Israel, demanded not only personal obedience but also systemic social transformation. According to Isaiah 58, true worship called for releasing the yoke of injustice and letting the oppressed go free. It required sharing bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless into one’s own house! (vv. 6-7) Because the legal system was corrupt, Amos pleaded, “Hate evil and love good, and establish justice in the gate.” (Amos 5:15) Rooting social action in the Gospel of Jesus, the Crucified But I have a further reason for sharing these stories; the church’s social concern and action is rooted in theology, in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. When the followers of John the Baptist came to Jesus and asked if he was really God’s Anointed One, he gave them a very concrete answer. “Go, tell John what you see and hear: those who are suffering from lameness, blindness, deafness, etc. are healed. Tell him also that those 1 Emily Chung, “Sundays best for educator,” Toronto Star (March 25, 2005). 2 Finally Comes the Poet (Fortress Press, 1989), 39. V who are poor are hearing good news.” In effect, people who were marginal in society were to be treated with respect and compassion; in fact, they were at the very heart of Jesus’ mission. According to Jesus there is no good news (or Gospel) if the grace of God does not affect the lives of those most in need. In saying this Jesus realized that he was being radical because he added, “Blessed are those who do not take offence (literally, are not scandalized) because of what I have said.” (Matthew 11:2-6) The theological factor here needs further elaboration. The world of first century Palestine was no different from our 21st century Western society. Back then people believed that everything depended on merit. Those with greater influence also decided who counted and who didn’t. But in God’s perspective, this distorts our having been created after the image of our Creator and vastly underestimates the reality of the Fall. The former reminds us that to God every life is precious; the latter clarifies our loss of identity as God’s creatures and subsequent spiritual alienation. Few Christians have spoken more boldly about these truths than a Harlem lawyer and lay theologian by the name of William Stringfellow. In 1964 he addressed the Synod of Toronto and Kingston with a sustained analysis of the evil of racial injustice against Black people living in the United States.3 He did so because he saw all around him what he called naiveté about the Fall - “the era in which persons and nations and other creatures exist in profound and poignant and perpetual strife.”4 In other words, Stringfellow exposed the root cause of those conditions that compel the church to engage in social action. For him the Scriptures pointed to the brokenness of human systems, the failure of nations, the afflictions suffered by creation and the catastrophic forcefulness of the principalities and the powers. One only needs to see the reaction of the congregation to Jesus that day in the synagogue in Nazareth when he preached on the implications of the Year of Jubilee. This was the Levitical legislation appealed to by the prophet in Isaiah 61, the text for Jesus’ sermon that day. When Jesus illustrated the call for liberation by pointing to God’s grace to undeserving foreigners (a Phoenician widow and a Syrian general), the powers reacted. The congregation was filled with such rage they tried to murder the preacher! Their understanding of social reality was radically different from that implicit in the message of Jesus. And this brings us to the heart of the Gospel, the cross of Jesus. This is where Stringfellow finds hope in the midst of suffering and injustice. The cross, he says, is not a religious symbol, nor even just a reference to some past event. Rather, it is “the invincible power of God’s love for the world.” It is “unfazed by any hostility or hatred or violence or assault.” The cross is “not threatened by death” and “perseveres no matter what” even reaching out to one’s enemies.5 It is in the very nature of God to be utterly self-giving and to be open to the other.
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