"The Camino and the MDGs: Trust and Risk" -- by the Rev. Devon Anderson

In July my husband Michael and I hiked the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. The trail starts in France and winds westward across Spain, ending at the Cathedral in Santiago which is believed to house the mortal remains of St. James the Apostle. Pilgrims have been walking this trail since the 10th century.

We did not have time to walk the Camino’s entire 500 kilometers, but instead began our journey in a mountain-top village called O Cebreiro, about 150 km away from Santiago. Off we went, with our noses planted in our highly-detailed trail book. Within the first ten minutes we were lost. We had managed to lose the trail before we had even begun, and we stood alone on a hillside scratching our heads like two complete dorks.

We retraced our steps and started again, this time with the trail book put away and our eyes open, searching for a prominent yellow arrow – the first of hundreds we would see painted on a rock or building or fence post – to point pilgrims along the way.

And so we learned the first of many lessons: the Camino takes care of you.

People had told us this before we left, but we didn’t know what it meant until we were there. The Camino provides everything you need to walk it: places to sleep, food to eat, water to drink, shade for rest, scenic hamlets for reflection, village churches for prayer. And it also points the way. At every juncture or split in the road one need only stand for a moment and look around, searching for the yellow arrow that never fails to appear.

And yet, the Camino can only take care of you if you let it. It can only work its grace if you are able to let go of what you know, or think you know, let go of what’s been read or anticipated or planned. The Camino requires eyes looking up, not down. It begs an open heart, able to be swept up in the moment, wide open and noticing, listening. And the Camino asks to be trusted -- that the need for certainty and knowledge be left behind, if only for a time, to allow the Camino space to do its work.

Flying home after this greatest of adventures I began the Herculean task of making some sense of it all. I would return to many and various church projects, the greatest of which is the next phase of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Pilot Project in the Diocese of Minnesota. The MDG Leadership Team has worked faithfully this summer to change and strengthen the model based on our many learnings from the first phase in Lent. While energized by the success and steep learning curve of phase one, the process has been challenging and not without bends in the road around which we cannot yet see.

It occurs to me that the process of mobilizing people around global poverty might be like walking the Camino – something that, if it is of God, will take care of us if we let it. If we trust God and take big risks in the name of mission, if we keep our eyes open and our hearts aware and listening, if we can sustain, if only for a time, an ability to keep our need for certainty in check – if we can do all these things -- we will be a few steps closer to the kingdom of God. We can plan, strategize and study all we want – and we are. But part of the process of organizing action around MDGs requires the spiritual discipline of openness, observance, listening and the willingness to be guided by the whims of the Spirit. Namely, keeping our hearts and minds looking up, not down and learning to trust. And this part will inform the rest, God willing, infusing our busy-ness with community and God and spiritual transformation.

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The next phase of the MDG Pilot Project in the Diocese of Minnesota!

Deadline for Participating Congregations: September 15, 2008
MDG Pilot Project Training: October 17-19, 2008 (Buffalo, Minnesota)
Campaign Kick-Off: First Sunday in Epiphany, 2009

For more information, please contact any member of the MDG Leadership Team:

Devon Anderson
Paulette Briese
Joe Burgess

Kurt Hall
Kate Hennessy
Michele Morgan

The Rev. Devon Anderson is a priest, the chair of Diocese of Minnesota MDG task force, and the recipient of an Episcopal Church Foundation grant to develop models for equipping congregations for engaging global mission and the MDGs.

"The Power of Together" -- by the Rev. Devon Anderson

On Easter, four Minnesota congregations completed a MDG pilot project designed to mobilize individuals within the congregation to collectively act in order to seed a parish global mission initiative. Powerful public narratives have been delivered, house meetings held, pledges received, funds gathered, decisions made, success celebrated.

All in all, the first phase of the pilot program has enjoyed a very good run. Those four congregations raised about $35,000 -- with 200 people participating (this out of $8,000 seed money from Diocesan Council!)

But the sweetest gift of these efforts has been the learning.

What has so nourished and enriched many of us is what we have discovered about ourselves, our parishes communities, our diocesan household, what we have learned about the way we relate to one another, and about the way we would like to relate to one another.

Through the many layers of learning has emerged one hard-earned revelation: We are better together than we are by ourselves. Even more than this, it is through our participation in, and commitment to, Christian community that we are best equipped to be faithful to the Gospel. It is when we work and minister together, when we gather our gifts and resources and pool them collectively, when we work across the congregations and the boundaries of theology and geography, it is in those moments that we are most alive, most effective, most faithful to the Gospel imperative to love one another and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Over and again we learned, despite our resistance and better judgment, that we are better off hashing it out in Christian community than enjoying the peacefulness (and some would argue, inertia) of our own company.

Standing at the conclusion of the Lenten MDG project, we celebrate the achievement of our measurable goals -- more than 200 people mobilized, tens of thousands of dollars raised and pooled, plans for relational global mission initiatives begun. And yet, these goals pale in comparison to the transformative experience of successfully working together toward a shared purpose in mission, the results of which were far more extensive and deep than any one human being could have exacted alone.

Through the power of together, the pilot congregations will have gathered needed resources to participate in the global movement to minimize human suffering and despair caused by extreme poverty. It is with hope and expectation that we offer this experience to the diocesan community, in the hope of inspiring a thirst for more and wider experiences of collective action and power to the glory of God.

The Rev. Devon Anderson is a priest, chair of the Diocese of Minnesota MDG task force, and a recipient of an Episcopal Church Foundation grant to develop models for equipping congregations for engaging global mission and the MDGs.

"Minnesota: MDG Campaign Uses Community Organizing for Congregational Transformation" - by Kate Hennessy

Diocese of Minnesota communications coordinator Kate Hennessy wrote this story about the diocese's innovative approach to bringing the MDGs home in congregations. The project is spearheaded by the Rev. Devon Anderson, EGR diocesan contact and blogger.

Epiphany weekend 2008 witnessed the birth of a new phase of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) campaign in the Diocese of Minnesota. Individuals representing four churches from across the diocese met at King’s House in Buffalo with the diocesan MDG Leadership Team and trainers from the Kennedy School for Public Policy for a Leadership Team Training Weekend. The focus of the training was to learn how to engage the skills of community organizing in the new MDG Congregational Campaign, the goal of which is to transform the Episcopal Church into a powerful effective force for the elimination of global poverty by 2012.

The first pilot programs for this exciting project will run during Lent at St. Anne’s, Sunfish Lake; St. James on the Parkway, Minneapolis; St. James, Marshall; and St. Paul’s, Duluth. These churches represent a wide cross-section of the Diocese of Minnesota, spanning four different regions; involving urban, rural, and suburban parishes; and including Total Ministry to program-size congregations.

The goal of the Lenten campaigns in each church will be that 50% of its members pledge 0.7% of their incomes to an MDG project. It is important to note that the main focus of the campaigns will be on participation — the goals are set for number of people participating in pledging 0.7%, and not on how much money the congregation wants to raise.

The movement will not end there, either. The task force's vision is to use its learning to coach a group of ten, use their learning for another group of twenty, and then continue to grow, involving more diocesan churches in each round, with the eventual hope of taking the program to the national church.

Telling our own stories
The tactics and strategies the teams will use to accomplish this goal include skills that are traditionally used in community organizing, such as the use of public narrative, which organizers believe is the single most effective tool available to mobilize people to act. Public narrative is the art of demonstrating how values become action through the simple but powerful act of telling one’s own stories. At the Leadership Training, team members had the opportunity to learn firsthand that each of them did have an important story, and that telling that story could move others to action.

After seeing public narrative demonstrated by the Kennedy trainers and Project Coordinator Devon Anderson, each person constructed and shared a story of how the challenges and choices in their own lives resulted in their being interested in fighting global poverty and coming to this training. These stories were then expanded to include the individual’s involvement in their parish communities and then to include a call to action for this campaign. One parish team member was so moved by a fellow member’s public narrative that she made her pledge on the spot, stating, “I really was not going to pledge; I was just going to give my time to the project. I didn’t think I could afford to give money, but my team member’s story was so powerful, I’ll find a way.”

At the end of the campaign, the pledges from the congregations will be pooled in a common fund, and those who pledge will engage a collective decision-making process for how to invest the funds. Each pledge will entitle the pledger to voice in the process. The hope is that by working together in this way, congregations will find themselves joyfully and creatively engaged in doing the Gospel mission in a new way together.

“The MDG project's top priority is learning," says The Rev. Devon Anderson, Project Coordinator. "As our diocese figures out how to link together and engage mission work, our MDG project provides a chance for congregations to learn and experiment with working together around a common area of interest in mission. What excites me most is that we have leadership teams that are willing to risk something big for something good. Being out on the edge is fraught with anxiety and uncertainty but it is also a brave thing because it firmly places the vision ahead of the fear.”