Under the radar: Massive
relief fund diversion underway
Commentary by Parker T. Williamson, The Layman, May 12, 2010
PDA joins global
aid alliance
The Layman
In the name of collaboration, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) has joined one of the world’s largest “humanitarian, church-based bodies.”
According to a March news release from the Presbyterian Church (USA), the partnership will improve PDA’s ability to serve when disaster strikes.
“By working collaboratively with our international partners in ACT Alliance, PDA is able to extend and expand the reach of its vital humanitarian response activities,” said Randy Ackley, coordinator of PDA. “As an active member of this strong global network, we offer support to disaster-affected people here in the U.S. and in virtually every corner of the globe.”
The partnership also will pool PCUSA-funded resources with a global alliance with 100 members working in 125 countries. According to a PCUSA news release, the Geneva-based ACT Alliance operating budget is approximately $1.5 billion.
Formerly known as ACT International, the global relief agency was established in 1995. PDA joins the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, International Orthodox Christian Charities and Lutheran World Relief as the U.S. members of the alliance.
Presbyterian Church (USA) and disaster relief officials of other denominations have forged “Action by Churches Together (The ACT Alliance),” a common pot from which to disburse an anticipated $1.5 billion annual flow of parishioner compassion.
Those who read the fine print learn that two ladles may be dipped into that pot. One is publicly touted as “aid and development,” while the less advertised dipper is called “advocacy,” a.k.a. politics.
With their advocacy tool, ecumenically oriented church bureaucrats can channel hurricane, tsunami, wildfire and earthquake disaster windfalls into a wide range of community organizing projects, some of which are listed in their advocacy plan as “public campaigning and actions,” “lobbying and policy engagement,” “targeting international institutions,” and working for “changes in structures and systems which impoverish and marginalize people.”
The fund will be facilitated by a select, 18-member staff group at the World Council of Churches (WCC) headquarters called “The Secretariat.”
Non-Christian Alliances
In pursuit of its agenda, the ACT Alliance will be authorized “to increase its effectiveness” by using contributions from Christians to fund non-Christian “civil society groupings,” that in some places “will be a major driver in determining the organization’s advocacy agenda and the positions taken.”
Approved on Feb. 27, 2009, ACT’s founding document was orchestrated at WCC headquarters in Geneva. The WCC will occupy one of two permanent seats on the ACT governing board, and its chairman will chair ACT General Assembly meetings. The organization was formally launched on March 24, 2010 by approximately 100 member organizations.
The Presbyterian Connection
Presbyterian World Service and Development and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA), both of whom are agencies related to the Presbyterian Church (USA), signed on as founding members. PDA brings into the consortium a cache that includes millions of unspent disaster relief funds, including more than $6 million of the $24 million collected after the US gulf coast was devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
PDA officials say that they have plans to spend $6.8 million of the Katrina balance on gulf coast activities in 2010 and that the fund will be depleted by 2011. But they are busily replenishing their coffers with Haiti and Chili contributions, along with undesignated One Great Hour of Sharing gifts “to allow us to respond to disasters when they occur.”
Members of the ACT Alliance pay a membership fee (unspecified in the organization’s founding documents), an “income related fee” that is applied to organizations with an income of more than $1 million and is calculated as a percentage of the organization’s total income, an “appeal fee,” which is levied by the ACT Secretariat, relating to its special appeal projects, a fee for “program support for specific initiatives,” and a voluntary contribution to underwrite the Secretariat’s administrative charges related to “specific global initiatives.”
In its founding document, the ACT Alliance admits to defining its work with broad brush strokes: “For the ACT Alliance, the understanding of which activities are included as part of advocacy is a wide one.”
According to a definition that appears in the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance’s 2006 guideline, advocacy includes “action on political, economic, cultural and social issues by churches and their members, church-related agencies and other organizations which aims to influence policies and practices of those in position of power and influence in order to bring about a more just, peaceful and sustainable world.”
According to the document, advocacy can be carried out at a number of levels, “from the grassroots to national, regional and global, with strategies ranging from awareness-raising to mass-campaigning, lobbying or citizen mobilization.”
Guns and butter
This is not the first time that the PCUSA, has linked up with the WCC, to channel donor designated funds away from their intended use. In the 1970s, the southern branch of the denomination (PCUS) launched a core of part-time workers called “hunger action enablers” to raise money for its hunger fund. Driven by a passion for feeding the hungry, the enablers visited numerous congregations, distributing grotesque pictures of children with bloated bellies and rattling off a statistical death toll of malnutrition and morbidity.
Congregations were exceedingly generous when confronted with graphic images of human suffering, and southern church leaders soon realized that they had hit the jackpot.
The former northern branch of US Presbyterianism conducted parallel campaigns with similar results. As their campaigns progressed, and with denominational merger in sight, hunger bureaucracies in northern and southern branches created a joint hunger task force to conduit massive money streams that were pouring into national church treasuries.
Attacking the root causes of hunger
By the mid-1970s, leaders of denominations that belong to the WCC began expanding their use of disaster response contributions. In 1973 a National Council of Churches think tank called International Documentation of North America (IDOC) produced a report for denominational leaders in which it argued for systemic, preventive measures aimed at reducing hunger. “To be more specific,” said the document, “this paper contends that the system which creates and sustains much of the hunger, underdevelopment, unemployment, and other social ills in the world today is capitalism … As such, it is an unjust system which should be replaced.”[1] The IDOC paper urged denominational leaders to think beyond programs that directly feed the hungry and vector their work toward socio-economic, political changes that they said would “attack the root causes of hunger.”
Shortly thereafter, the joint PCUS/PCUSA Hunger Program amended the purposes toward which it would direct hunger funds. Previously, those funds were limited to direct food aid and development. Now, a third purpose was added. Borrowing language from the
ir WCC colleagues, Presbyterian bureaucrats committed funds “to attack the root causes of hunger.”
Later that year, the WCC sponsored “The World Conference on Salvation Today” in Bangkok, Thailand. Here, Christians were encouraged to work together with non-Christian religions to achieve liberation from oppressive socio-economic, political regimes.
Guerrilla Warfare
On Sept. 3, 1978, guerrilla forces under the command of Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo opened fire on an Air Rhodesia civilian airliner that was transporting Christian missionaries. A handful of survivors, including women and children crawled out of the wreckage. Ten of them were shot and mutilated by the guerrilla fighters. Eyewitnesses who managed to escape the massacre described it in detail, and their testimony appeared on the pages of TIME Magazine.
Subsequent investigations revealed that Mugabe and Nkomo’s Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe had received an $85,000 grant from Presbyterian Church mission and hunger funds that had been filtered through WCC offices into a “Special Fund to Combat Racism.” Denominational officials argued that they had given the money to the guerrilla organization with the understanding that it would be used for “food, health, and social and educational programs.” They defended the expenditure, saying it was consistent with their goal of “attacking the root causes of hunger.”
With support from the Presbyterian Church and other members of the WCC, Mugabe consolidated his control of Zimbabwe. In a cleanup operation designed to cut off potential challenges to his power, he unleashed his Fifth Brigade against his former ally Nkomo’s Ndebele tribe, committing wholesale genocide and insuring the fact that he would rule a one-party state.
Mission accomplished
Today, Zimbabwe is in ruins. Once a food exporting country, Zimbabwe has been hurled into a massive hunger crisis. Zimbabwe is the first country in the 21st century to hyperinflate. In Oct, 2009, its inflation hit 79,600,000,000 percent per month. At that point, Zimbabwean currency ceased to exist as a medium of exchange. Meanwhile Mugabe continues to torture and kill those who oppose his one-party rule.
In 1998, when the WCC held an assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe, Mugabe paid a courtesy call to the assembly in order to thank denominational leaders – including an entourage of PCUSA officials led by Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick – for supporting his revolution. “Today I present to you the country towards whose liberation you struggled, a free Zimbabwe,” said Mugabe to vigorous applause. “Zimbabwe thanks you, the World Council of Churches.”
Today, most of the PCUSA leaders who directed the 1970s transfer of disaster money to politics and revolution have retired from office. Clifton Kirkpatrick left his post as the denomination’s stated clerk and his chairmanship of the WCC to head the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a close WCC ally that shares its socio-economic, political goals.
Although its leadership has changed hands, clearly the WCC’s support of revolutionary politics has not, as evidenced by the ACT Alliance documents that PCUSA relief and disaster assistance executives signed in 2009.
In a document titled “Prophetic, Pragmatic and Practical,” published by the WCC’s Ecumenical Staff Working Group on Global Advocacy, Jenny Borden cited the connection between ACT Alliance policies and former WCC guerrilla warfare support. She celebrated the WCC’s history of inquiry into “the role of economic systems in maintaining unjust structures,” and its willingness to foster “huge debates on liberation, whether liberation movements could use violence, [and] whether there was a difference between oppressing violence and liberating violence.” She lauded the WCC for its actions in the 1970s that fostered “liberating violence” through its Special Fund to Combat Racism. “In all of this,” she said, “the WCC was in the centre of the debate and the controversy – being prophetic, leading, advocating and having high visibility for its work.” Borden commended the ACT Alliance for building on the WCC’s liberationist foundation.
One wonders if there are Presbyterians today whose awareness of the WCC’s liberationist history will spark questions regarding ACT Alliance documents that their leaders have signed. Will they note that the advocacy language used in the denomination’s 1973 hunger fund documents is virtually identical to language that appears in the recently signed ACT documents? Do they care that their leaders have authorized a massive transfer of disaster relief money into politics?
In the fall of 1978, Presbyterians in the pews were stunned to learn that their hunger fund contributions empowered savagery abroad. Money that they gave to feed the world’s poor ended up funding havoc and misery for millions of God’s people.
Will Presbyterians continue their generosity toward victims of earthquake, wind and fire when they discover that the fruit of their compassion has landed in the laps of community organizers and politicians?
[1] International Documentation of North America, Number 54/Summer, 1973, p.1.