July 2008 Newsletter
Twenty Years Later: A New Resolution
Just twenty years ago, at the 1988 General Convention in Detroit, a major resolution was presented to the church gathering: “Taking Action for Economic Justice.” It was a response to a paper prepared by the Urban Bishops Coalition decrying the increase of poverty during a time of growth and prosperity.
The resolution, sometimes called “The Michigan Plan”, urged a major investment by the church, its organizations and its members in the self-help projects generated in lower-income communities. The resolution passed the convention and many dioceses and parishes took up the banner. We either started community loan funds and credit unions or placed money in already existing investment vehicles. Some of us supported housing development corporations to create low income housing throughout the country. Others created business incubators and micro-enterprise funds for small business development.
In doing these things we discovered that community investment and community development were not as easy as they sounded. We learned that we also needed public support and we needed to do serious advocacy with state and national governments to get that support. We learned that communities had to organize themselves to accomplish these community projects and to speak clearly to legislators. Finally, we needed to overcome divisions among us and our parishes according to race, class, ethnicity, urban and suburban differences. We needed to reach for new levels of cooperation and collaboration.
Recently the call was raised for a new and revised economic justice proposal, twenty years later, to meet a new and more serious economic crisis. We are
experiencing an economy that has not been kind to working people and lower income people. Changes in the world economy are literally changing the way we do business. We find ourselves in a recession that includes both decreases in salaries and increases in prices, putting the squeeze on many of us.
The Episcopal Network for Economic Justice is engaged in preparing a new economic justice resolution appropriate to the decade we live in. We are starting from seven current trends that affect all of us: globalization of the economy, unaccountable large corporations, the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, immigration, environmental degradation, reduction of government services, and the reduction of moderate and middle class income and wealth. We are seeking to understand these trends more fully, especially in their economic aspects. We are asking what light our faith, our spirituality, and our theology throw on this new situation. We will recommend to the 2009 Convention some carefully developed action plans by which so that the Church and its membership can respond to this crisis.
