Barry Higgins and Fiona Morgan, originally from Sydney, are part of the Christian Care for Cambodia team in Phnom Penh through the Australian Baptist agency, Global Interaction. Barry is focussed on developing conflict resolution resources and teaching part-time at the Phnom Penh Bible School. Fiona is engaged with at the Cambodian National Centre of Disabled Persons which works in the community with people with disabilities and their families.

The Micah Declaration makes encouraging reading. Below are a series of reflections – some of my responses to the document and the movement which created it.

Through the Micah Network, Christians from both North and South have together decided to make a renewed stand for the poor, the weak and needy. Here in Phnom Penh, it’s impossible to walk out your front door without connecting with people who make up that group we call ‘the poor.’ No longer a faceless, helpless mass of humanity, ‘the poor’ are people we worship with each Sunday, buy food from, work alongside. They now have faces, families and stories, and they are certainly not helpless. For me, this brings a new urgency to the Micah Network’s challenge to the churches to ‘Build twin towers of justice and peace through creating a coalition of compassion.’*

As the effects of globalisation lead to an increasing chasm between resource poor and resource rich communities, the Micah Network challenges the church to unite in the battle for justice and poverty reduction. The church has always been called to work alongside the poor and those who suffer injustice, and the lives of countless people have been transformed through these efforts. But the Micah Challenge reminds us that without a renewed effort to work together, the massive challenge of reducing poverty and working for a more just society will forever remain an unattainable dream.


Building Bridges for Justice

Coalition building is the heartbeat of poverty reduction. Without a renewed struggle to tackle injustice and poverty through building coalitions, notions of twin towers of justice and peace remain limp creedal statements, words frozen on a page. For the Micah challenge to become more than just words, agendas and prejudices that inhibit groups concerned with poverty reduction from working collaboratively must melt away.

More than a decade ago, Cambodia’s doors were opened to development workers, who were asked to assist in the re-building of this country – so shattered by years of war and genocide under Pol Pot. Mission agencies and development practitioners bombarded Cambodia with a swag-bag of alternatives that often-times splintered rather than helped effective community co-operation. Those involved meant well, and while some groups made an effort to build coalitions and cooperate with other groups, many did not.

The Cambodian church where we worship continues to feel the effects of those whose focus seemed to be not so much on the rule and reign of God, but on hoisting up denominational and organisational flags. Our church began to operate as a small house church when Christianity was legalised in the early 1990s. The Khmer men and women who met together to worship and to assist others in need felt no reason to belong to a denomination, but decided simply to work together with other churches where appropriate. Many in our church, for example, have utilised the non-denominational Theological Education by Extension program for leadership development. The church has also partnered with, and supported, churches in rural areas made up of people in even more difficult circumstances than those in our church.

Several years ago, however, one foreign denominational group offered to buy the church a building (they have always met in the home of one of the group of leaders), pay salaries to leaders (the leaders all support themselves through having outside employment, thus ensuring sustainability) etc. This was all, of course, on the condition that the church take on their ‘brand’ of faith and join their denomination. The church leaders saw no benefit in being linked to this denomination, and did not take up the offer. Another member of the congregation, however, happily agreed to comply, the result being that half the congregation left for the new building in the hope of receiving other financial incentives. Just one of many examples of the splintering effects of a non-collaborative approach to mission in Cambodia.

In order to maximise our potential to work for a more just society, we need to create coalitions of compassion that are multi-layered – cross-denominational, multi-faith and multi-racial. This is especially true in a country like Cambodia – a long succession of battles, internal conflicts, rebellions, territorial partitions and supervision by foreign countries makes collaborative development initiatives challenging. Cambodia is only just recovering from 30 years of war and intense violence, violence which has scarred the internal emotional landscape of peoples' lives as well as the land itself.

Under the Khmer Rouge, people were taught not to trust anyone. Children were encouraged to betray their parents. Helping others was punishable by death. Today, torturers and the tortured from the Khmer Rouge years live side by side in some villages. No tribunal has ever been held to bring to justice those responsible for the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. Bridges of peace need to be built before programs aiming to reduce poverty or bring justice can really succeed.

The Micah statement’s confession of the churches’ failure to build bridges in a world of conflict is important. Yet it is interesting to note that we do not specifically mention a need to build bridges between religiously divided communities. Why is this not stated along with ethnic and economic divisions? Religious conflict is something we in the evangelical community must face squarely, as we have at times contributed to this conflict.

There are many examples where our actions have further weakened already fractured communities. Buddhists in Cambodia often point out that those who become Christians are at times ‘rewarded’ with financial gains; for example, the practice of distributing rice to those who attend church, or the awarding of high paying jobs with international organisations to those who are Christians (1% of the population).

Some might even describe such practices as one of the forms of globalisation denounced by the Micah statement, that is, 'the dominance of cultures that have the power to project their goods, technologies and images far beyond their borders.' We need to have enough faith in God to believe that our proclamation of faith stands on the integrity of our witness and the message itself. And we must work to modify our practice and build bridges between Buddhists and Christians, otherwise the communities’ ability to work together for justice and development is undermined.

Building bridges of peace between Christians and those of other religions is a challenge that we cannot ignore. But a first step must be, as proposed by the Micah statement, the building of bridges between all Christians – to network and co-operate as we all grapple together with the challenges of globalisation and building a more just world.

In Cambodia, there is a desperate need for bridges of peace to be built within the Christian community itself. The Christian church in Cambodia is just 1% of the population. In the past 15 years the number of Protestant Christians in the country has grown from approximately 5,000 to 100,000 people. The Roman Catholic community is significantly smaller but has also grown in recent years. 75% of the Protestant Church is represented under one umbrella group called the Evangelical Fellowship of Cambodia (EFC). This includes a variety of denominations, mission agencies, independent groups and a number Christian International Development Agencies. The formation of the EFC a few years ago is in itself a promising sign of cooperation for mission, peace and justice.

Another small contribution to the massive task of building peace in the Christian community and the country itself has been the very recent creation of Christian PeaceBuilding Services (CPBS) in Cambodia. Christian PeaceBuilding Services represents an attempt to build a program that will assist churches, development agencies and other community groups, even couples and families, to develop collaborative solutions to problems. It has grown out of an acknowledgement by church leaders (specifically those within the Evangelical Fellowship of Cambodia) that services to build peace and help people deal with conflict are desperately needed in the church and broader community. Over the next six years over 50 trainees, 70% Cambodian and 30% expatriate will complete a one year training program in peace building. Successful graduates from this program will form the core of a largely volunteer PeaceBuilding Service, seeking to offer a variety of interventions aimed at increasing the capacity for peace in families, communities, churches and organisations.

In the process of developing this service, linkages have been made between myself and other people of faith who on many issues hold a very different perspective to my own. This cooperation has reminded me that collaborations for justice, peace and compassion in our world require a flexibility which balances co-operation and prophetic vitality. We certainly need to build links of co-operation with those within the Christian community who interpret the “signs of the times” as we do. Yet we also need to know when to join hands in common causes with Christians whose religious and socio-political vision is based upon a different biblical vision to our own. We who seek to represent a more radical evangelicalism need to build co-operative links to more fundamentalist evangelicals who interpret the signs of the times in almost the opposite way to ourselves. It is not a matter of simply choosing which ‘tribe’ we belong to, but seeking to belong to a series of tribes at different points and for different purposes. Without this we over-simplify and stereotype those who we perceive as being ‘against us’ on one cause, thus decreasing our ability to work with them on other causes. Often times this weakens our ability to bring good news to the poor.


Kingdom Values

It is very appropriate that we keep in mind that ‘the church is not merely an institution or organisation, but communities of Jesus that embody the values of the Kingdom.’ Yet we from wealthier countries should always be careful to ensure that the Kingdom values we emphasise come out of peoples’ own reflection on the words of Jesus, rather than imposing our own reflections. This is especially the case when working with the very poor. It means accepting that conversion is a gradual two way process and that our agendas and assumptions as people from wealthy background cannot always be transferred onto those with whom we work. For example, seeking political justice in Cambodia is not so easily envisaged by people who have no experience of a genuine workable democracy, whose experience confirms that the strong and powerful always win in the end.

Since working in Cambodia it has become necessary to rethink what bringing the Kingdom means. We may want to quickly encourage the poor to organise against injustice and oppression as part of their commitment to Christ, yet we at times fail to acknowledge the enormous implications these Kingdom values have on very basic questions of survival. What do you say the policemen whose failure to take bribes will leave him without enough food to feed his family? How can you ask the prostitute to leave a profession that ensures the survival of her extended family without offering a readily available alternative?

As the Micah Declaration suggests ‘Work with the poor involves setbacks, opposition and suffering.' Generally there are no easy answers to the problems of the very poor, otherwise they would have thought of the answers themselves.

In order to maintain a long-term vision it is important to be ‘inspired and encouraged by stories of change.’ Sometimes we need to celebrate the apparently small and insignificant changes not only in formal development programs, but in people who make life-affirming choices in the face of difficult circumstances. For example in Cambodia we can celebrate the efforts of a very poor family who do all they can to care for a disabled child, while having to cope with so many other needs at the same time. While not an achievement that will be cited in poverty reduction textbooks, when a child with a disability finds a way of relating meaningfully in their community without all the technological gadgets available in rich countries, this is a cause for celebration.

The Micah Challenge is a call to reduce poverty through collaborating with the poor and all those concerned with poverty reduction. This should involve those who make up the Christian Church seeking to work together, yet must extend beyond this to people of other faiths. Collaboration must be primarily at the grass roots, where the poor grapple with complex realities, requiring understanding and reassessment by those of us from wealthy societies. Only then can we learn to celebrate the ‘small’ and the large ways that the Rule and Reign of God is in our midst.

Barry Higgins
15 August 2003

* All quotations from the "Micah Declaration on Integral Mission" (2001)
See text on http://www.micahnetwork.org

The Micah Challenge is a global campaign of the World Evangelical Alliance and the Micah Network to mobilise Christians against poverty. In the spirit of Micah 6:8 "...what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." And in support of the Millennium Development Goals to halve poverty by 2015.

The Micah Challenge Homepage www.micahchallenge.org