“In the halls of power people know who we are.” Such is the common boasting of labor unions, political action committees, and other interest groups. But churches? For Jim Winkler, General Secretary of the Capitol Hill-based United Methodist Global Board of Church and Society (GBCS), favorable opinion in the halls of power is important.
Last month Winkler delivered a sermon at the Truth Poverty Summit, sponsored by Mississippi United Methodist Peace with Justice. In it, he presented an argument for a Christian approach to poverty and defended the controversial politics of his lobby office.
Winkler began by noting God’s “preferential option for the poor” and that some Christians have difficulty accepting this. He said, “I suggest to you that currently we as a church – not God, but we as a church – have a preferential option for the needs of the wealthy.” This bias against the poor has produced discrepant income levels and may lead to danger. According to Winkler, “When you have economic disparity between wealth and poverty, you are going to have, I believe, political and social unrest because it’s tough. It’s a tough situation.”
The question for the United Methodist Church, he contended, was, “How will we, the church, call these systems to account and to see beyond the bottom line?” By way of answering this question, Winkler offered “God’s Renewed Creation,” a recent pastoral letter by the Methodist bishops focusing on environmental issues like climate change. Paraphrasing liberal theologian William Sloane Coffin’s reaction to President Bush’s definition of the “axis of evil,” Winkler said, “The real axis of evil in the world is pandemic poverty, a world awash in weapons, and environmental degradation. And the bishops said, you know, he’s on to something there. And they framed this wonderful document…through those lenses.”
Winkler proceeded to connect “God’s Renewed Creation” to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Formulated in 2000 and agreed upon by all UN countries in 2001, the MDG is eight international development goals with a deadline for completion of 2015. Among the goals are eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing child mortality, promoting gender equality, and ensuring environmental sustainability.
Of the MDG he said, “Each of these goals is biblically grounded and should be supported by everybody. In fact, I would suggest to you those eight goals that I just read, that’s the war on terror.” Recognizing the shock value of what he said, Winkler sought to clarify his statement. “What I mean by that is we cannot build enough bombs and airplanes and tanks and bullets and various other weapons to defeat terrorism as long as we have extreme poverty and hunger in the world. If we combat extreme poverty and hunger by providing hope to people, we can end terrorism. People must have hope, but they also have to have justice.”
In light of the enormous and as-yet intractable nature of the problems identified by the MDG, how does Winkler think they can be solved by 2015? Fortunately, he offered a solution. “It may well be that the urgency of these crises will force us to change the way we live,” he said. “The rules of international trade must be arranged in a manner that doesn’t punish the poor. Significant changes in the daily lives of people will be required to deal with climate change and other environmental problems. And new international resolve will be required to bring an end to warfare.” That’s all it will take – just a little arranging, some mandatory lifestyle changes, and the end of war. Unfortunately Winkler didn’t share any further details of his plan, such as how these changes would be brought about and who would enforce them.
The second part of Winkler’s sermon was a defense of GBCS and its political lobbying. Acknowledging the controversial nature of the organization he heads, he jokingly described it as “the most popular and beloved of all the general agencies of the United Methodist Church.” Despite the regular objections to Winkler’s lobbying, he believes that, “It’s not unusual what we’re doing on Capitol Hill.” Further, he sees his efforts as a good thing for the UMC. “United Methodists are – we’re right in the middle of the action,” he said, revealing that his definition of “the action” is the political, and not religious, arena.
With remarkable candidness, Winkler described the difference between the advocacy work of the UMC and that of other prominent Christian groups. “The largest denomination in this country is the Roman Catholic Church, and we work with Roman Catholics on a number of things. But I’ll be honest with you, sometimes it’s hard to work with Roman Catholics. There’s kind of the residue of ‘the one true church’ and so forth. The second largest church in this country is the Southern Baptist Convention, and Southern Baptists don’t work well with other Baptists.” Unlike these groups, Winkler believes, the UMC is “known and respected – more than we know and more than we think – by others in this country for our involvement in trying to bring it to be on earth as it is in heaven.” Winkler sees the essence of GBCS’s work as “offer[ing] a firm…moral and ethical witness in the halls of power.”
Fully aware of the criticism leveled at GBCS and the UMC, Winkler conceded that, “Many of our own people sometimes think our church has dwindled into insignificance, that our day is done, that we’re obsolete. Sometimes the drum beat that we hear is that the United Methodists and the Presbyterians are not mainline…but we’re oldline.” To this charge Winkler offered the following reply: “But in the halls of power people know who we are. And if you think about what’s happened in this country in the last 50 years or 60 years, we’ve seen amazing changes: the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental justice movement, the movement in the nuclear arms race, the end of apartheid in South Africa, to seek rights for migrant laborers – I could go on and on and on.”
He continued, “The church had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table on every one of these social justice movements…And now we are pillars of all these movements, I can promise you because I’ve been at the tables where the importance and the value of the United Methodist Church is recognized and appreciated.”
Winkler’s comments make it clear that he sees criticism of his work, the “kicking and screaming” that he must overcome, as a sign of the righteousness of his cause. By this logic, opposition from Methodists merely confirms the goodness of GBCS’s chosen causes. And Jim Winkler thinks United Methodists should be grateful for the work he does. After all, the important people in the halls of power know who they are.
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