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Reformed churches warn against 'wealth accumulation for the few'
Episcopal News Service
Issue:
Section:
2003-111-5
Posted: Tuesday, May 20, 2003
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At a time when the eight leading industrial nations (G-8) are preparing for a summit where the world economic order will be the centerpiece, churches in the southern hemisphere are warning that economic relations between rich and poor countries have reached a crisis point.
The world economy has provoked 'crises of debt, trade, marginalization, insecurity, economic inequality, unemployment and the destruction of the environment' in many countries, said leaders of Reformed churches from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America in a statement. Their declaration came ahead of a June meeting in Evian, France, of the leaders of the G-8 countries (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States), also known as the Group of Eight.
In their statement, the 27 church leaders cautioned that the world economy had entered a 'new stage of capitalism' characterized by 'deregulation and speculative investments' which had 'destructive effects' on their national economies. The statement was drafted by representatives of members of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) from the southern hemisphere who met in Buenos Aires at the end of April.
The church leaders rejected the world's dominant economic model, saying it had made the economy 'a totalitarian faith system of wealth accumulation for the few, endangering life as a whole on our planet. This system is a structural sin.' Poor countries had no effective say in the decisions of the world financial bodies that determined the way of life for those countries, they said.
'We were unanimous in our recognition of the negative effects of the IMF [the International Monetary Fund], World Bank and WTO [World Trade Organization] and their domination and exclusion of the Southern nations,' they noted.
Seong-Won Park, executive secretary of WARC's department of cooperation and witness, said the statement reflected a certain tradition in the Reformed churches (Congregational, Presbyterian, Reformed and United) of taking strong stands on pressing issues of the day. 'The Reformed churches historically speaking have taken very decisive action against explicit injustices--political, social and economic,' he said.
In 1934, representatives of Reformed and other Protestant churches took a formal stance against Nazism during the Third Reich in Germany, and in 1982, the WARC general council declared that theological support for the apartheid system in South Africa was a heresy.
But taking a stance against an intangible form of injustice, Park acknowledged, was more difficult than standing up against 'clear, tangible, objective enemies such as Hitler or apartheid.' What's different about today's world economy is that 'now your colleagues are your competition. Human rights, life are not the centre of concern, but profit,' Park said. 'The neo-liberal economic model excludes people and is being promoted to the level of idolatry.'
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