The Permanent Committee, Programs for Mission and Ministry proposes that the Executive of General Council:
Receive the report “Towards 2025: A Justice Seeking/Justice
Living Church” as an integrative report of the work of the
PCPMM and make it available to the commissioners to the 41st General Council to inform their work and reflection on the identity of The United Church of Canada.
The Permanent committee, Programs for Mission and Ministry, in reviewing its work through the 2009-2012 triennium discerned a common thread that linked each aspect of its work. Given its mandate to ensure that work comes before the Executive in an integrated manner it undertook and offers this report as one means of fulfilling that direction. The report will continue to serve as a working document for the PCPMM. It also believes that it can assist the General Council and its Executive l in their deliberations on the identity of the church.
Why an Integrative Report?: A Contribution to Discussions about United Church Identity & Preparations for the Church’s Centenary
This report being presented provides an integrative framework for four areas of work mandated by previous General Councils: Becoming an Intercultural Church, Commitment to Inclusion, Indigenous Justice and Right Relations and Living Faithfully in the Midst of Empire. They have been knit together in an integrative framework because they relate one to the other, the completion of one is linked to another, and progress in one area strengthens work in another. Taken together they contribute to a unique and more holistic understanding of this area of the work charged to the General Council Office and other courts and ministries of the church, an area which could be named the challenge of being a “justice-seeking/justice-living church”:
Woven together these areas of work produce a new vision of a diverse justice-seeking–justice-living church engaged in the world for love, justice, and the integrity of creation, transformed from the inside out and from the outside in. It’s a compelling vision of a church willing to risk discipleship in today’s world and seeking to embody the transformation it has already proclaimed, open to and inviting others to join in and change the journey. It unites areas which have defined the United Church as a denomination— the apology to Aboriginal peoples, the honouring of diverse sexual orientations, and social justice, with new and growing areas of challenge for the church such as becoming an intercultural church, honouring all gender identities and our commitment to inclusion… It is justice-seeking in that it seeks to become a different kind of church in the future; it is justice-living in that it takes concrete actions to change and begin to live into that reality now.
The Covenanting for Life Working Group of the Permanent Committee for Programs for Mission and Ministry understands the development of this integrative framework report as being a key step in living out the church’s commitments made at the 2006 and 2009 General Councils to live faithfully in the midst of empire. It pulls together key areas of work necessary for the church to live out this commitment. As part of the church’s declared commitment to live faithfully in the midst of empire, they offer this integrative report as
