A 10-year Look at the Accra Confession

Ten years after the Accra Confession was adopted, the state of the global economy and environment — issues addressed in the document — are still significantly in need of improvement, says an open letter presented to church leaders last week.

The letter was written by  participants in the "Consultation on the Accra," which was held in Ocho Rios, Jamaica to mark the 10th anniversary of when the Accra was adopted by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Accra, Ghana.

In its open letter, the consultation called churches to continue working to seek a new reality of “social, economic, and ecological and political justice.”

Specifically, it calls for added emphasis on fighting human trafficking, supporting the many ways available to establish sustainable agriculture, and to stand behind groups and campaigns seeking a living wage for workers around the world.

The consultation presented its letter at a World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC) mission meeting, also held in Jamaica and attended by the communion’s Caribbean and North American churches.

When the World Alliance of Reformed Churches became part of World Communion of Reformed Churches in 2010, the WCRC expressed support of it.

The CRC is a founding member of the WCRC and has taken to heart many of the tenets contained in the Accra, said Peter Vander Meulen, director of the Office of Social Justice.

In the CRC's case, the Micah Challenge and the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) have been the vehicles through which the denomination has worked to address issues such as worldwide poverty and ecological degradation contained in the Accra, says Vander Meulen.

“We believed that if we made progress on the MDGs using the Micah Challenge approach we would be going in the same basic direction as the Accra.”

And progress has been made by working through the Micah Challenge, a global movement of Christians aiming to deepen engagement with the poor. The MDGs goals seek to cut poverty around the world in half by 2015.

Vander Meulen also says the recent consultation was a significant 10-year look backwards to the inception of the Accra and to see what the Caribbean and North American churches have been able to do to implement it.

“The answer: Very, very little that directly refers to the Accra Confession, ” he says.

But, at the same time, he said, the CRC and other churches have used the confession as a prophetic call to action.

“We have not ignored it,” he said.

Setri Nyomi, general secretary of the WCRC, says the Accra Confession’s main focus has been, and 10 years later remains, to support various ways, such as those followed by the CRC, to change the root causes of injustice around the world.

He emphasizes that the Accra Confession “wasn’t intended to be adopted by member churches. Instead, it was (and still is) meant to be a prophetic call to the churches, one which they were invited to engage with and in.”