1. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, providing relief for the weary, and housing for the homeless downstream.

2. Presenting the case for social justice globally upstream so as many humans as possible do not need the actions/works mentioned in number 1.

3. Living as community under the rule of "Love your enemies no matter what and no matter whom" in this polarized global political and economic situation.

My suggestion is:

• that MCC continue with its peace building programs around the world.
• that MCC continue providing material resources to those who can not live on their own because of certain difficulties.
• that MCC continue spreading the gospel of Christ to those who have not received/heard it and serving in the name of Jesus Christ.

 
Florence Akello

1. Poverty and hunger.
2. Peace
3. Affluenza's connection to poverty and hunger and environmental degradation.

I support new wineskins and even new wine, but it better still be the same old "winemaker." To believe there are multiple, and equal winemakers reduces MCC to the level of the Red Cross or the United Way.

Priorities should be Peacemaking, Poverty reduction, and Relief work following disasters.

1. Peacebuilding
2. Sustainable Development
3. Humanitarian Aid, including disaster response

I attended the Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada gathering and was very much impressed with the format and content of the meeting.

One issue that I would like to address further is the authority of MCC management. There was some discussion that people would like the churches to have more say in the activities of MCC.
MCC is a Christian organization which seems to have a very good mix now. Any changes to be made should be evolutionary tweaks and not radical changes. While church input is always welcome, it must be recognized that there are quite a few different branches of Mennonites involved in MCC. Allowing more church control is bound to cause problems as it will bring in authority without experience. As well, the different branches of the church will each bring their own agenda. Combine this with increased input from the global church and you have the recipe for confusion and a lack of control by those who we empower to manage MCC.
Lets leave the running of MCC to those we empower to do so.
Having said all of that, I believe it is essential that MCC management be very vigilant in assuring that lines of communication are kept open and that all bodies of the church that have an active interest in MCC are kept in the loop.
I pray that MCC continues to serve in the best interest of God and God's people. The Mennonite community has an organization to be proud of.

As Susan I say that since peace building is for everything, MCC should continue helping in peace building, educating children about peace building that will be a good idea and promoting the volunteer exchange pragrams and international visitor program like the one we have in Uganda under living with shalom (working wonders in terms of peace building). I would love to share more but the question said 3.

Thanks very much,
Birungi Susan
March 5/09

This sounds good to me! To add to #3, I would ask that MCC institutionalize its awareness of and appreciations for other cultures including their indigenous religions, thereby promoting culturally competent services in partnership with the people whom we strive to serve.

Over the years, MCC has developed three programmatic priorities: relief, development and peace ministries.  These follow from our theology, our understanding of the world, and our communal strengths.  It is difficult to see how one area could be selected at the expense of the other areas and yet it is also difficult for MCC to be able to to effectively spread its work too widely. I like the idea of specializing our efforts within these 3 areas yet remaining flexible to work alongside others  in whatever areas  people might ask. In our relief efforts we might specialize in supplying food and shelter.  In capacity buiding , I think we have strengths in education, health and agriculture. Conflict resolution connected to interfaith dialogue would be a most appropriate emphasis for our organization.
 
 

Connecting Peoples

Connecting Peoples is and should continue to be the key programmatic priority of MCC. When you meet people from other places you are less likely to want to do harm to them. This is peace-building!

MCC is about people-to-people relationships. Mutual transformation happens to our service workers, our sending churches and our partners. Please keep connecting peoples a key part of what you are!

MCC's top three programmatic focus should be:
1. International development: I urge the agency to double her effort in bringing about global development works. Much focus should be on:
Scholarship provision that is offered and followed up closely on how monies are spent and scholars' performance.
More partnering in establishment of projects as, school, hospitals, churches. The agency should have representatives at those local instituions who engage their hands plus opinions with those of the locals.
The agency to keep promotion of sale of local hand work produces such as curves and models from countries they haven't ventured into, to encourage the same to boost their economy and become more creative and willing to utilize appropriately the available resources and or materials.
Promote medium scale business among the unemployed and the under employed.

2. Peace building: The agency to work alongside youth groups throughout the world to form peace clubs and promote ethnic, national and international cohesion through this manner.
Organize and support workshops in countries where peace and justice is a requirement.Especially third world countries.

3. Relief: there is a growing need of basic needs suppy in majority world. The organization to increase wings and cover every part where there is need. Also they should work to inform people of ways to sustain the less they possess. ie, acquiring shelter and its management, acquiring food and its management and acquiring clothing and their management, and acquring money and spending wisely.

1. Replace Economic Development with Sustainable Growth.
Thesis: It is feasible to develop a subsistence level model for Sustainable Growth that will enable a healthy lifestyle that does not require following the traditional path of Economic Development and will provide a path for millions of people, Sustainers, to progress without further straining the fragile balance of the earth's ecosystem. This model can and should be developed whether or not the consuming peoples, Takers, act in a responsible and timely manner to reduce their spewing of carbon into the air.

2. Promote Kingdom Living at the community level abroad.
Thesis: The Anabaptist Vision is first and foremost about God's Kingdom. It is not about one person getting ahead, getting holy or getting to heaven.

3. Proclaim a vision for Kingdom Living to North Americans.
Thesis: We cannot proclaim the gospel without living it first. We are living at a sinful level that is unsustainable.

1. Poverty

2. Poverty

3. Poverty

Unless the church (MCC) addresses the issue of poverty, the church (MCC) will become irrelevant. The danger is that we will think we are doing this very adequately and therefore nothing needs to change. Too many times we answer our own question. The question needs to be answered by the poor, disadvantaged person themselves, i.e, "does what I am doing help you in your difficult situation?"

Our social scientists(social, economic, anthropogical) and theologians need to help us determine whether our actions and the love with which we carry them out are indeed effective. I suspecct we all agree that we need more than the anecdotal "you are really good people. I am glad you came." The poor can easily hear that as simply: "Go and live well.........but with no means than before to do so." With the best intentions, I wonder if we haven't in the eyes of the poor, too often become a community of talkers, rather than walkers.

Let us in Christ's name, walk with the poor; sharing all our resources; learning from them about community, how to be stewards of the environment, and many of their self-sufficient sustainable solutions.

I have a lot of faith in our Mennonite & Brethren-in-Christ community. We have much to contribute and to learn. Let's be willing to risk even our good name on behalf of the poor.

I like MCC's current aims, and I believe that other people have made good suggestions along similar lines. I think that MCC's true aim is to follow the example and command of Jesus to love the Lord through active love to our neighbors. Therefore, any of the goals mentioned are an attempt to define love or some aspect of love. Realizing that no one human can fix all the problems in the world, I hope that by working together for the following goals we can attempt to exemplify love.

1. Peacemaking - working toward reconciliation
2. Poverty - working to reduce the gap between rich and poor (which could include educating the affluent on the effects of extravagant living or encouraging service workers to live closer to the level of the people they serve)
3. Good stewardship (of all creation) - relief for people after disasters, development work, environmental care

I believe MCC’s priorities should be:
1. Do justice: Work for food and economic security for all peoples in a sustainable, equitable and respectful manner.
2. Love kindness: Respond with emergency relief in situations of disaster whether “natural,” the result of Global Warming, or the consequence of war or conflict.
3: Walk humbly with our God: Encourage our constituency to live simply, responsibly and peacefully in our complex, fractured and unjust world. Become international peacemakers and interfaith bridgebuilders, as all people have been created in the image of God.

Doug Hostetter

1. Poverty eradication - job-creation projects, equipping women to be the additional money-maker for the family, fair trade, infrastructure development that will enable trade to occur, vocational training, technical assistance to small businesses, to community building. Note that a lot of political and social unrest occurs because of economic problems. By addressing poverty, MCC plays a direct role in creating stability in the community

2. Peace & justice education & advocacy - law changes, alternative services, conflict resolution, counseling and education in violence-stricken and/or post-war communities, etc.

3. Sustainable development - care for creation, climate change adaptation (teaching communities how to read early warning and what to do in times of natural disasters, how to deal with decreasing clean water sources, etc.), food production, advocating for clean and renewable energy, etc.

1. Listen to poor people, including christian
2. MCC must to be more proactive over all in the church life
3. Peace and social services

1. Build capacity of the Church (local and global) to engage meaningfully (as salt and light) with other communities and religions
2. Intervene (via the Church and by demonstration) in conflict areas to bring about peace and justice
3. Demonstrate God's compassion through provision of relief post disasters (man-made and natural) & God's justice through empowerment of vulnerable / marginalized communities (focussing on women) via the Church and itself

Ravindra Raj
Calcutta, India

MCC's top priority should be to respond to the felt needs of the "least of these" (marginalized).  If we set our own priorities we limit the space of the marginalized to talk about their own felt needs and issues and to identify those things they want us to help them respond to.  To set this as a priority means that we must be willing to listen closely to the marinalized as they often do not state their issues directly and clearly.  We have to be ready to spend sufficient time with them to hear and to understand.  This may mean that we need to step out of our comfort zones at times. 

my top three programatic priorities for MCC are -

should continue giving relief, build schools ,Ivep/salt/yamen ,talk about jesus to the needy lastly implement or gather views from x Ivepers on new changes

Max Paul Malinga (IVEPer from Uganda)

In general, strong support for the five priority areas identified by the Istanbul regional gathering – just, peace, support development of local organizations; environment; education; and poverty alleviation.

Advisory committee also suggested that MCC could prioritize or work in the following areas: health (including people with mental disabilities); domestic violence (woman/child abuse); vulnerable children (school drop-outs and street children); intensifying agricultural production while minimizing inputs (such as land and water); elderly people (particularly those with no support systems) increased advocacy in Canada/U.S. context.
 
MCC Jordan Advisory Committee

No doubt we need to continue doing relief work, but I think MCC's other two priorities should be peacebuilding and social justice.

Over the past number of years, we have recognized that war exacerbates and creates poverty and so we have embraced peacebuilding as a priority. What is needed now is more attention to social justice and advocacy. Increasingly, we need to recognize that people are poor not because they don't have skills or knowledge but because they can't compete in a world that is stacked against them or because their land and resources have been taken over by international companies (benefiting many of us in the U.S. and Canada.) What is needed then is not "development" but justice: access to land and water, livable wages, fair trade policies, sustainable environmental practices and an end to militarism and military force.

I believe this means continuing to have strong national programs that can help our churches address injustice and violence in our own communities as well as address national policies that create inequality and feed violence and war. These programs can be a strong ally to international programs (by giving them more integrity) as well as help us be more relevant in our own communities. For how can we partner with sisters and brother in other countries if we can't do this at home? How can we do "development" with others when our own "development" is built from resources taken from them? We can share our wealth but this has much more integrity if we are also working hard to end our participation in the unjust policies which create poverty.

I would list these three interdependent priorities:

1. Development/relief (MCC's foundational strength) - should continue a broad focus on engaging poverty, hunger, disaster relief, engagement and advocacy for social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and social capital (relationship-building and community-organizing to empower communities to improve their living conditions and build networks of connection and support).

2. Peacebuilding - (an expansion of the above) to work for broad-based systemic social, economic, and political justice and peace in places of conflict and injustice. This includes education for conflict intervention and transformation, strategic nonviolence training, trauma healing, restorative justice, and advocacy on foreign policy. NGOs like MCC are generally recognized as being strategically "in touch with grassroots" in ways that governments and the state generally are not. This is an asset we should not take for granted.

3. Interfaith dialogue for peacebuilding - as a faith-based agency we should build on the above two foundations to build bridges of collaboration for peace across religious lines. Mennonites have managed, through initiatives such as MCC's in disaster relief, development, and peacebuilding to garner a great deal of respect across the lines of culture, politics, and religion. The spiritual/moral/ethical core of religious values is a rich source of common ground where teachings about compassion, justice, peace, mercy, forgiveness, etc can and should put us into common cause with each other to work for peace. We should engage this common ground more deliberately as a strategic locus of work as part of our calling to a ministry of reconciliation and peacemaking in the world.

1.  Exposing the structural violence embedded in technology transfer and neo-liberal market oriented economic development.
2.  Work with the churches to recover its calling to be the body of Christ by being a nonviolent community living in right relationship to the land, growing food, organizing local food systems, providing people with skills of living and praying.
3.  International advocacy work in solidarity with grassroots organizations working on issues of food sovereignty, climate change, the patenting of life and the control of seeds,  and the injustices of agrofuels and the global land grab occurring around the world to secure "green" energy.
 

Greetings,
    Three priorities that I would like to suggest.
 
    1.  As in the past, MCC should make the provision of food and water of high concdern.  MCC has been creative in finding new ways to supply food and water to needy people.  Now more than ever this should be on top of the llist, as we hear that food prices are rising making it more and more difficult for  some people to find enough to simply exist.  The new ways to find water should be boldly researched. (such as the sand dams in Africa.
 
    2.  We live in a violent world.  It seems that many people feel the way to counteract violence is with more violence.  M CC should devote even more effort and leadership in teaching, acting out, and encouraging the way of Peace.
 
    3.  There are more refugees in the world than at any time previously.  These are the most helpless people in our world and need our expressions of love and support.  By assisting these powerless people we are aiding present and future generations of people.
 
Ted Walter (MCC alumnus)

1. The Poor:

James 1:27 "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world."

2. The Kingdom:

Mark 1:14-15 "Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.'"

3. The Faith:

2Co 3:18 "And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit."

Luk 18:8 "When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

All of the suggestions so far have nice sounding words, relief, developement, peace etc. with wonderful cliches added on. One could add a few more, listen, learn, act. Who can argue with any of these? Few have any concrete suggestions on how to implement any of them. To be true to the Gospel MCC needs to do Relief Work but only when requested and when truly needed. In addition to that MCC should concentrate on Health Care and Education but rest assurred if no effort is put into birth control the world will indeed be worse off twenty years from now than it is now! So the program priorities are Relief, Health, Education and the fourth one to assure success must be birth control.

1. Serving our Lord Jesus by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless. We need to demonstrate God’s love by taking care of people’s immediate needs.

2. Serving our Lord Jesus by promoting peace and reconciliation. Peace is not man’s natural state, thus God’s word emphasizes the role of peacemaking as a fundamental duty of the believer.

3. Serving our Lord Jesus by spreading his word. But you can’t read the word of God if you can’t read, so I believe the third programmatic focus should be education. We Anabaptists have always believed in reading and thinking for ourselves. You cannot do that if you cannot read. And on a purely practical note, I believe that research has shown that the most efficient way one can spend development funds is by educating women. Let’s build some schools.

In the end, I believe it is important to always remember that we do not do these things because we are nice people. We help people because it is the command of our Lord that we do so. If we keep that in mind, we can’t go too far wrong.

No. 2 should be omitted. The second MCC personnel engage in "social justice globally" MCC is politically interfering with national sovereignty. This is NOT the mission of those who are followers of Jesus. Political interference is not mentioned anyplace in scripture.

Rather, it is important that each individual christian walk "justly" and humbly before God. Until each individual christian does this, it is hypocritical to even think that MCC can engage in "social justice globally".