Arli,

I cannot more strongly affirm what you have said here:

"God calls us to 'interfere' and 'intervene' in each other’s communities, and to do that in a way that honours the dignity and knowledge and experience that all members of the partnership bring to that interaction and engagement. We cannot ignore the needs of people who are hungry and thirsty and oppressed in many countries around the world. We cannot support leaders who oppress their own people. We cannot ignore the local leadership who know best how to set priorities and implement programs in their own communities. We must find a better way of being the church, globally, and locally in today’s world."

This has been at the heart of my work, largely with African colleagues, for a number of years now.

Our vision for at least one aspect of what MCC could become involves the combination of the following:

MCC seeks to combine the best of existing organizations in all four areas below:

•    We share with Amnesty International a global leadership and a global network of concern for the poorest of the poor – people who are both economically impoverished and politically oppressed by exploitative governments. We speak truth to any and all exploitative powers.

•    We integrate this with a Fair Trade/Anti-Sweatshop/Ten Thousand Villages exposure of the way Christian consumers subsidize enslavement through consumption of the products of multinational corporations exploiting labor and resources offered by citizen unaccountable governments - particularly those governments that claim to be led by Christians,

•    We integrate this with a Doctors Without Borders view of the world (and the Church) that transcends international borders and personally intervenes nonviolently, if necessary, without permission from exploitative governments (but only with the encouragement of many of the exploited and on the basis of credible data illustrating that the degree of local persecution for practicing their God-given dignities are among the worst on the planet),

•    We integrate this with lifegiving life giving forms of Christian Peacemaker Teams type direct action, following the rule of Christ (Matthew 18:15-17) in personally inviting the transformation, particularly of Christian-led authoritarian governments and Christian executives or stockholders in exploitative corporations, in solidarity with those left the poorest of the poor through this evil system. This almost certainly involves arrests, deportations, or worse and calls upon preparation produced by reflection upon our early Church and Anabaptist legacy (see the book Martyrs Mirror in particular).