Katharine Jefferts Schori, The Gospel in the Global Village (Canterbury Press, 2009).
Katharine Jefferts Schori is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. – the first woman primate in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Before her ordination as a priest, she was a professional oceanographer.
In these inspiring sermons and speeches – delivered in many parts of the world – we are listening to someone from the school of the prophets, especially her favorites: Isaiah, Micah, Amos, Martin Luther King, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Tutu’s commendation is fulsome: ‘This is a splendid collection… Katharine Jefferts Schori uses elegant language, arguing her points cogently and persuasively, to speak eloquently about God’s Kingdom of shalom, justice, and compassion, when we will know war no more, disease or hunger, and poverty will have been eradicated because we are sisters and brothers in one family and these awful things are an abomination. My admiration for her has grown after reading these pieces’.
So has mine.
Her major themes echo the Anglican Consultative Council’s Five Marks of Mission: [1] To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom, [2] To teach, baptize and nurture new believers, [3] Respond to human need by loving service, [4] Seek to transform unjust structures of society, [5] Strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and renew the life of the earth.
She’s particularly concerned about issues of social and restorative justice, the repudiation of violence, peacemaking, and ‘speaking truth to power’.
The Millennium Development Goals provide a constant refrain – relieving hunger, providing education, caring for the sick, working for the full and equal dignity  of all human beings, and caring for all creation. ‘We live in the first era in human history where it is possible to promote the basic stuff of life for all humanity’.
Again and again she says there’s something gravely wrong in a world where the division rich and poor continues to expand, ‘where some live in palaces and recline on ivory couches while others starve outside the gates’. A billion people lack access to clean water; 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation. Two million children die every year as a result – one every fifteen seconds. Half of the 6 billion people on this earth live on less than $2 a day; 1 billion on less than $1 a day (and most of them are starving).
Her stories are memorable:
* There’s Connie Duckworth, who through an enterprise called Arzu pays Afghan women $150 of the going rate for their rugs – but only if they agree to send their girls to school.
* And Greg Mortenson, ex U.S. army medic, mountaineer and humanitarian, who insists that education and literacy for girls globally is the most important investment all countries can make to create stability, bring socio-economic reform, decrease infant mortality and population explosion, as well as improve health, hygiene, and sanitation standards globally. Mortenson believes that “fighting terrorism” only perpetuates a cycle of violence and that there should be a global priority to “promote peace” through education and literacy, with an emphasis on educating girls. “You can drop bombs, hand out condoms, build roads or put in electricity, but unless the girls are educated, a society won’t change” (from the Wikipedia article about this remarkable man, who built over 170 schools in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan).
* And – twice in this book – the women in the Niger Delta where oil exploration had devastated villages, poisoned the drinking water and the fish by spilling crude oil. After years of protest and frustration a large number of women marched to the oil companies’ corporate offices, sat down outside the building, and took off their shirts. ‘They didn’t shame themselves in that culture; they shamed anyone who saw them, and they shamed those oil companies into negotiating…’
Her heroes are those with a prophetic voice, who shame/goad us into action. (‘Prophets are not much fun to have around; they don’t get invited to a lot of birthday parties’ said Garrison Keillor). They include Dom Helder Camara – ‘a mystic in love with the poor’. And her mantra is Archbishop William Temple’s: ‘The church is the only institution that exists primarily for the good of those outside it’.
She also addresses with candour, grace and clarity the divisions in the Episcopal/Anglican communion – particularly over the issue of homosexuality. Here, too ‘we must aim for a justice that seeks the full inclusion of all, particularly sexual minorities, rather than being mired in a traditional understanding of sexual ethics’.
Regarding Science and Faith she speaks with a special authority, as both a scientist and theologian. They are both important interpretive lenses for interpreting/understanding the world.‘If all the ice on Greenland were to melt, the sea level would rise about seven metres – about twice as much change as human beings have known in recorded history – more than enough to inundate a number of Pacific nations, New Orleans, New York, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Venice, and most of coastal Bangladesh’.
In terms of the evangelistic component of mission, she likes the approach of Roland Allen, missionary in China in the late 1800s. ‘He saw his vocation as going into a community long enough to give the scriptures and the sacraments, and then getting out of the way’.
Her prayer:
Make us instruments of your shalom O Lord.
Where there is division, let us heal.
Where there is hunger, let us all be fed from the same table of your
abundance.
Where there is illness, motivate us to make well.
Where there is ignorance, may we share your mind.
Where there is oppression, let us liberate…
To the glory of your Son, who came among us to heal the world.
What should you do with this book? Order several copies – one each for pastors/clergy you know. The church we attend is adding one to its library.
Rowland Croucher
January 2011.
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