Overview
Vision
The Micah Network and the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) have created the Micah Challenge campaign to grasp a moment of unique potential. A moment when the intention of all of the world’s leaders to halve poverty by 2015, echoes something of the mind of the Biblical prophets and the teachings of Jesus concerning the poor. A moment when the world has the means to dramatically reduce poverty and hunger!
Micah Challenge is a global campaign to mobilise Christians against poverty. The campaign aims to deepen Christian engagement with impoverished and marginalised communities, and to influence leaders of rich and poor nations to fulfil their promise to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
These two aims - one looking inward and calling on Christians, and the other looking outward and calling on leaders - are interlocked. For many Christians, churches, and Christian organisations, engagement in political advocacy with poor communities will be a new step built upon a new understanding of Christ's mission for the church. Micah Challenge is encouraging these Christians to explore and embrace 'integral mission'. While for many Christians who are already engaged in work with poor communities, Micah Challenge offers a global framework for speaking up with the poor, particularly for achievement of the MDGs.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
Micah Challenge seeks to be a campaign in Christ. We try to make time in prayer integral to all of our work. One Micah Challenge activity now shared by a global community of many thousands, is a weekly prayer and study series. Part of our weekly prayer is to 'meditate on the statistics' of poverty, so that we might better understand with our hearts the facts of poverty.
Statistics from the United Nations and the World Bank in 2006, show that:
- A billion people struggle to survive on less than $1 a day.
- 824 million people in the developing world were affected by chronic hunger in 2003.
- 77 million primary school age children are out of school. The sub-Saharan region has made significant progress since 1990/1991, but overall only 64% are enrolled, and in Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger, fewer than half the children of primary-school age are enrolled in school.
- Globally, more than one in five girls of primary-school age are not in school, compared to about one in six boys.
- Though survival prospects have improved in every region, 10.5 million children died before their fifth birthday in 2004 – mostly from preventable causes. Sub-Saharan Africa, with only 20 per cent of the world’s young children, accounted for half of the total deaths, a situation that has shown only modest improvement.
- More than 500,000 women die each year in childbirth, most of them in developing countries. Only 46 per cent of deliveries in sub-Saharan Africa, where almost half the world’s maternal deaths occur, are assisted by skilled attendants.
- Worldwide, 39.5 million adults and children are living with HIV/AIDS and almost 4.3 million new infections have occurred in 2006. Twelve million sub-Saharan African children are orphans. Around 59 per cent of HIV-positive adults in sub-Saharan Africa – a total of 13.2 million people – are women.
- 1.1 billion people still don’t have access to safe drinking water.
- Low-income countries paid $26 billion in debt service on public debt in 2004. The debt relief program for the most heavily indebted poor countries has reduced future debt payments for 28 nations but this reduced level is still too high.
The Millennium Development Goals are:
- Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
- Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
- Goal 4: Reduce child mortality
- Goal 5: Improve maternal health
- Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
- Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
- Goal 8: Develop a Global Partnership for Development
The MDGs are a compact between rich and poor, and a roadmap to halve poverty. In 2000, all 191 member states of the United Nations, and the global financial institutions, publicly promised to halve poverty by 2015 by achieving the eight Millennium Development Goals. They reaffirmed their promise at the World Summit of 2005. The Goals include measurable, time-bound targets. They are achievable, but not by 'business as usual'. Mobilising civil society to speak up at every governmental level is critical to ensuring that governments keep these promises.
"What makes these goals so remarkable is their clear commitment to a timetable. By being so time-specific, they give us an exceptional set of “advocacy levers”. The development community, and all who are committed to working for a more just and compassionate world, can and must use these levers to hold our leaders accountable and insist that they fulfil their promises. If we fail in this, the MDGs will undoubtedly go the way of many other “commitments” to end poverty – another set of broken promises to the poor, another tragic joke at their expense."
- Steve Bradbury, Co-Chair of Micah Network.
National Campaigns
In his 2005 book "God's Politics" Jim Wallis foresaw that "Micah Challenge is taking direct aim at the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals..to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. Micah Network and the World Evangelical Alliance believe that achieving these goals will indeed require a "spiritual engine" that provides both moral energy and political accountability...Their advocacy will be local, national and global, holding the nations to account for what they have already agreed to.. Given the amazing growth of evangelical Christianity around the world, especially in the global south, the emergence Micah Challenge could be of great significance."
On the eve of 2007, Micah Challenge National Campaigns are mobilising Christians in 32 countries. A small International Secretariat, based in London, facilitates formation of national campaigns, coordinates this rapidly growing south-north community, and manages Micah Challenge's international relationships including participation in the leadership of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) and cooperation with the UN Millennium Campaign.
Like the international campaign, most of the national campaigns have been jointly convened by the national Evangelical Alliance, representing churches, and locally based Christian community development organisations who are members of Micah Network. Together they invite the Christian community to participate, and also cooperate with the broader civil society movement against poverty in their country (usually the Global Call to Action Against Poverty platform in that country).
At December 2006, Micah Challenge national campaigns include:
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Six of the eight G8 member countries - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, UK, and USA; and three other European campaigns in the Netherlands, Switzerland and Belgium.
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Eight campaigns in Africa - Burundi, DR Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.
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Nine campaigns in Asia – Australia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Nepal, New Zealand, and the Philippines.
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Eight campaigns in Latin America and the Caribbean - Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.
Micah Challenge is a uniquely unifying Christian project that has the potential to help many more Christians to understand and embrace the integral mission of Christ.
"In recent years we have seen the enormous potential for good of well-organised global campaigns using new communication technologies; and that express the widespread moral outrage in our communities against the persistent violence of poverty. We can take heart from the achievements of recent campaigns such as those that urged the elimination of landmines and the cancelation of the crippling debt repayments required of most low income countries. When the political will to fulfil the MDGs wavers, as it surely will, a massive grassroots campaign in support of those goals will reinvigorate it."
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Steve Bradbury.
Impacts on poverty
In 2005-2006, Micah Challenge contributed to substantial outcomes in the fight against poverty through prayer, participation in the global movement, and inspired national Micah Challenge initiatives that prove the enormous potential spoken of in the quote above.
In 2006, local churches organised by the Jubilee Centre in the copper-belt region of Zambia engaged their normally absent parliamentarians in workshops on HIV/AIDS. Within three weeks, as a result of this practical, prayerful approach to advocacy, availability of anti-retroviral treatment in the district of Mwinulunga rose by 43%! The churches challenged parliamentarians to make Micah 6:8 their guiding framework as representatives and leaders, and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Mwinulunga, and in Zambia, the guiding framework for economic planning. The Jubilee Centre enabled the communities to present the parliamentarians with accurate figures showing that delivery of programmes had fallen far behind the government's own targets. The Jubilee Centre is one of the agencies leading Micah Challenge Zambia and this methodology will now be replicated throughout Zambia by Micah Challenge.
In a second church-led strategy, communities across the copper-belt region got pre-poll contracts from candidates in the 2006 national election. The contracts will help to guarantee that election promises to achieve the MDGs in the region will be delivered.
Micah Challenge Australia's mobilisation of churches in the constituencies of influential Christian members of Government, influenced the Government's decision in 2005 to increase annual overseas aid by 1.5 billion Australian dollars by 2010. That is about twice the total annual amount raised by Australian charities for overseas relief and development.
Engagement of evangelical Christian leaders in the USA in lobbying before the World Summit in 2005 contributed to a substantial deepening in US support for the MDGs indicated by the President's first public statement of commitment at the Summit.
The Zambian examples quoted above indicate the potential impact of empowered citizenship within poor countries. Micah Challenge has been successful in engaging churches who have not previously participated in advocacy with the poor, including evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic churches. Many of these churches are rapidly growing and influential within their communities and countries.
History and Organisation
Micah Challenge was launched globally on October 15, 2004 at the United Nations in New York.
It is governed by an International Council comprising four representatives from each of the two parent organisations, who together form the nucleus of the Council; one representative of the host agency; observer participation by the two Directors of the two parent agencies; and other members invited by the Council to contribute their knowledge and experience. At December 2006, the joint chairpersons are Rev Joel Edwards, General Director of Evangelical Alliance UK, and Alfonso Wieland, Director of Paz y Esperanza (Peace and Hope), Peru. The Council has appointed Michael Smitheram as International Coordinator for the campaign and Tearfund UK is the current host agency, providing facilities for the International Secretariat.
The Micah Network brings together more than 295 Christian organisations providing relief, development and justice ministries throughout the world. The majority are community development agencies in the South. The Micah Network aims to:
- Strengthen the capacity of participating agencies to make a biblically-shaped response to the needs of the poor and oppressed;
- Speak strongly and effectively regarding the nature of the Church's mission to proclaim and demonstrate the love of Christ to a world in need;
- Prophetically influence the leaders and decision-makers of societies to maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed and rescue the weak and needy.
The Micah Network’s first International Consultation in Oxford in September 2001 developed the Declaration on Integral Mission. The Declaration sets out the biblical basis for Micah Challenge.
A key excerpt reads:
“Integral mission or holistic transformation is the proclamation and demonstration of the gospel. It is not simply that evangelism and social involvement are to be done alongside each other. Rather, in integral mission our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life. And our social involvement has evangelistic consequences as we bear witness to the transforming grace of Jesus Christ. If we ignore the world we betray the word of God which sends us out to serve the world. If we ignore the word of God we have nothing to bring to the world. Justice and justification by faith, worship and political action, the spiritual and the material, personal change and structural change belong together. As in the life of Jesus, being, doing and saying are at the heart of our integral task.”
The World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) was founded in 1951 and now embraces about 420 million evangelical Christians in 127 countries. In structural terms, the WEA is a global network of 127 national and regional evangelical church alliances, 104 organisational ministries and six specialised ministries serving the worldwide church.
The WEA General Assembly of 2001 reached the following resolution, which also provides a cornerstone for the Micah Challenge:
“As a global Christian community seeking to live in obedience to Scripture, we recognise the challenge of poverty across God’s world. We welcome the international initiative to halve world poverty by 2015, and pledge ourselves to do all we can, through our organisations and churches, to back this with prayerful, practical action in our nations and communities. We believe …if the poverty targets are to be met:
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There needs to be a commitment to achieve growing justice in world trade in the light of globalisation; this must recognise the role of trade, particularly in arms, that fuels conflict and causes widespread poverty and suffering
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It is vital that a new deal on international debt is agreed by the G7 leaders as a matter of urgency and carried through by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank
… we urge governments and financial institutions of both North and South to act decisively, transparently and with integrity to combat corruption … taking the necessary steps to break the chains of debt and give a new start to the world’s poorest nations.”
Blow the halftime whistle!
2007 is halftime for the Millennium Development Goals, from commitment in 2000 to achievement in 2015.
Micah Challenge invites you to ‘blow the halftime whistle!’ on May 26, 2007 (Pentecost) to begin a 'halftime' period of intensive advocacy and prayer. Then on July 7 (07/07/07!) communities will 'kick-off' the second half, in media events worldwide.
At 'halftime' hundreds of thousands of local churches mobilised by Micah Challenge national campaigns will know the halftime score, and will lobby political leaders at every level to get on track to keep their promise to halve poverty by 2015. Leaders kicked-off the first half, communities will kick-off the second!
Halftime!
The 'halftime' period, from Pentecost to 07/07/07, will feature:
- street theatre/media conferences in major capitals on May 20 and 26 to "blow the halftime whistle!";
- 'kick-off' events and stunts to begin the second half on 07/07/07;
- advocacy focused on the major political moments: the G8 meeting in June; the start of the US Presidential election primaries and other national elections;
- a Christian leaders' Summit/Media Conference hosted by the World Evangelical Alliance in Berlin on Monday June 4;
- dialogue between Christian leaders/communities and political leaders at every level using national/local MDG report cards;
- Micah Challenge national campaigns will facilitate national Christian leaders' 'halftime statements' including national and common global calls on national leaders;
- a seven week series of prayer, study and reflection;
- cooperation with GCAP platforms around the world; and
- a new 'white band whistle' designed by Micah Challenge Peru.
Please check your national Micah Challenge website for participation and programme details.