Petition to the General Conference, 2004,
The United Methodist Church
In accordance with the instructions for preparation of petitions,
the following is submitted for action by the General Conference, 2004.
PAGE NUMBER: Page 1 of 4
SUGGESTED TITLE/SUBJECT MATTER: The Church's Response to Ethnic and Religious Conflict
PETITION CONCERNS: #71: Adopted 1996 (To be amended 2004)
FINANACIAL IMPLICATIONS: None
PETITION TEXT:
The tragic conflicts in such places as Bosnia, India, Indonesia, the Middle East, Nigeria, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka, as well as interethnic conflict in the United States, reveal the deep potential for hatred, fear and religious belief to stir up and violence in humankind. These conflicts pose a great challenge to the Christian church as the mediator of Jesus’ gospel of love and reconciliation in the world, as well as to the wider religious community. The church’s pain is only made greater by the fact that so many of these violent conflicts pit one religious group against another: Protestant against Catholic; Muslim against Jew; Hindu against Buddhist; or Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim against one another.
When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them (a Samaritan village)?” But he turned and rebuked them. (Luke 9:54-55)
We confess that as Christians we too have responded to religious and ethnic differences out of fear, ignorance and even hatred. We have too quickly resorted to violence as a means to resolving conflicts.
The rising tide of violence in the world threatens to engulf communities, nations, and world civilizations. As we approach the year of our Lord 2000, It is time for the church to become proactive in resolving conflict nonviolently and developing alternatives to violence. Specifically:
- We call upon the General Board of Global Ministries to
enter into continue discussions with Christian Peacemakers, Witness for Peace, International Solidarity Movement and other non violent movements, a group that provides a Christian presence in situations of international, interreligious, and interethnic conflict, to explore the possibility of including United Methoidsts on the teams that are sent to areas of conflict:
- We call upon the General Board of Global Ministries to incorporate the principles of nonviolent conflict resolution and interethnic and interreligious dialogue in the Shalom Zone Program.
- We call upon the General Board of Church and Society, together with the General Commission on Religion and Race, and the General Commission on Christian Unity and Interfaith Concerns to hold a series of interreligious dialogues to develop new approaches to mutual understanding, respect, and cooperation, and to develop, for use in local church and community settings, guidelines on how to set up local dialogues and how to develop and implement alternatives to violence.
- We call upon our seminaries and United Methodist-related colleges and universities to offer courses on alternatives to violence and to sponsor local community initiatives to diffuse ethnic and religious conflict. We also call on our seminaries to encourage the study of the theological roots of violence and of Jesus’ teachings on nonresistance and resisting evil; and
- We call upon the U.S. government, working with the United Nations, to give leadership
in retraining by redirecting funds from the its foreign military exercise training programs to the UN High Commission for Human Rights and other international human rights organizations for the tasks of peacemaking, peacekeeping, reconstruction, and rehabilitation. This means reallocating funds from building weapons to building communities, from teaching to kill to teaching to protect life. Modest beginning in such an effort can be seen in community policing initiatives in many of our cities, in the peacekeeping force in Bosnia, and in the nonviolent transition to democracy in South Africa.
- We call upon the General Board of Discipleship, together with the General Board of Global Ministries, to address our growing multi-fiath contexts in developing church school curriculum by utilizing resources from ecumenical and interfaith organizations.
- We call upon local churches to be engaged in “Creating Interfaith community” – a Women’s Division-initiated mission study – throughout the coming quadrennium.
- We call upon annual conference to organize high school and adult trips through United Methodist Seminars (a program offered by women’s Division and the General Board of Church & Society) to study Ethnic and Religious Conflicts and alternatives to violence.
Adopted 1996 (To be amended 2004)
DATE: November 24, 2003
SUBMITTED BY: Kathryn J. Johnson, on behalf of
PETITIONER IDENTIFICATION: Methodist Federation for Social Action
(endorsing petition as authored by GBGM)
TELEPHONE: 202-546-8806
FAX: 202-546-6811
E-MAIL: kj@mfsaweb.org
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