A Mouse Among Elephants: The Mennonite Central Committee Office at the United Nations

I. Introduction

How to make peace is on everybody's mind. Terrorists attack civilian populations; powerful countries attack powerless ones. The world stands at a crossroads in its pursuit of international peace and security. As a direct expression of Christian mission Mennonites and other churches work for forgiveness, reconciliation, and justice. Together they have created a vision and an instrument for their mission in the Decade to Overcome Violence.

But what about direct engagement with political institutions in the cause of peace? I will take the case of the United Nations and the work of the Mennonite Central Committee office in New York and propose an outline for a theology of the common good grounded in an Anabaptist understanding of the church.

The United Nations has become the most important set of international institutions for building peace since World War II. It oversaw the development of laws that severely restrict the conditions that legitimate war. As importantly, it championed short and long term alternatives to war. For the short term, it developed mechanisms for negotiating conflicts before shedding blood over them. For the long term, it unfolded strategies for fairer trade between rich and poor countries and the sustainable development of resources by poor countries.

Can - and should - the UN continue to provide the framework for developing alternatives to war? How do Biblically grounded pacifist Christians respond to the present world crisis in which non-state actors, like terrorists, as well as states, are willing to break all the rules? To address this theme, I want to outline three issues. I'll start with a summary of the purpose of the UN. Then I will talk about a theology of witness to institutions of power, like the UN. Finally, I'll proceed to describe MCC's role at the UN and the conflicts and opportunities it faces in its work.

II. The Purpose of the UN

The United Nations is a set of international institutions established after WW II, according to its Charter, "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". In order to pursue this goal the UN was set up to resolve threats to peace through negotiation and to promote wholistic development in every country. The genius of the UN is that it is the only global institution in which the most powerful nations are held accountable to the least powerful ones. One striking example of this role is the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The original nuclear countries, China, Britain, France, Russia, and US, wanted no checks on their domination of the world through their possession of nuclear weapons. But the UN provided the setting in which many smaller countries could demand that the nuclear powers ban atmospheric testing and agree to stages of dismantling their weapons as the price for other countries agreeing to forswear the development of nuclear weapons.

The UN is a fallen agency, just like national governments. Its mandate, in the providence of God, is a limited one. It was never intended to replace national governments with a world government but to foster co-operation and interdependence among them. The fundamental problem of the UN is not that it is too strong but that it is too weak. Most governments still lack enough of an enlightened sense of self-interest to seek co-operation over manipulation and domination. At its best the UN is an honest broker in two crucial areas. One is to promote co-operation and negotiation as alternatives to war. The other is to persuade the rich that their enlightened self-interest lies in giving the poor the capacity for self-determination, and, to persuade the poor that their enlightened self-interest lies in organizing economic and political life within the bounds of the present international system.

III. The Witness of the Church to Institutions of Power

Let me begin with two stories that have helped me focus the challenge of the Christian witness to structures of governance. The first one concerns my squash partner, a Jehovah's Witness. Usually we just play squash but once in a while he feels compelled to warn me against what I do. "You know the United Nations is the anti-Christ, right? It's the beast in Revelation that arises over the world a second time; the first time it came as the League of Nations. Believers have no place in worldly institutions; our kingdom is not of this world. War is inevitable and it's not our job to stop it."

My second story comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, in the form of a letter from a Quaker colleague working in the Middle East. Of all the Christian groups, Quakers are the most hopeful of evoking, 'that of God in everyone' to transform unjust structures. But living and working in the Middle East has challenged that assumption for my friend. Let me quote from a recent letter he sent me. "Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the impossibility of ever eliminating violence, oppression, hatred, and selfishness. ... The negative incidents piled up relentlessly. ... So I sat in my apartment and cried."

From an Anabaptist point of view I find parts of these views attractive and parts of them troubling. Jehovah's Witnesses have an appealingly straightforward picture of the world. They realize how stubborn evil is; they preserve the purity of the church. But, in the end, their view leaves me with the sinking feeling that I am washing my hands of the plight of my fellow human beings.

I admire the quiet Quaker refusal to be stopped by the stubbornness of evil but, like my friend, I see the shortcomings of its optimism about changing human institutions.

After World War II Mennonite theologians of mission and ethics realized how implicated they were in the tragedy of human conflict. Through encounters with other traditions, especially Reformed theology, followers of the Anabaptists returned to the Bible. They came up with a theology of the kingdom and the church that provides an alternative to both withdrawal from public institutions and over identification with them. Let me summarize it in the simplest possible terms. We know that the world is fallen; no one but God can save us. At the same time we rejoice with Paul in Colossians that, "God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son" (Colossians 1:13). It is precisely the experience of already participating in God's reign that awakens a yearning in us that it might come in all its fullness. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

The church is God's first, but not his final, act of making good on his work in Christ. In it the wall dividing Jews and Gentiles, former enemies, has been broken down. The writer of Ephesians is bold enough to call the church, 'the new humanity' ( Ephesians 2:15)! It is God's initial experiment in restoring creation; it is God's alternative community where 'up side down' ways of dealing with conflict, possessions, failure, and loss are possible. In the early church slaves became sisters and brothers of free people. Thus began - much too slowly - an undermining of the institution of slavery in society at large. In other words, the potential for human relationships unleashed in the coming of Christ has consequences not only for the church but also for the world.

The church is already a participant in the new age of God's reign, but it is also still part of the old age of fallen institutions and people. The fact that Christians live in both ages at the same time is what so vexes us about working with worldly structures for our neighbors' good without believing that they can save us. We make common cause with earthly institutions of power because sometimes they can rescue us from hell. But they can't get us to heaven. (Dag Hammarskjold himself made this point when he was Secretary-General of the UN.) As a church, we need enough humility and love to work with earthly rulers on a next step toward justice but we do so out of the hope and passion of the heavenly kingdom (I Peter 3:15-16).

By intuition more than by a long process of figuring it out, the church affirmed the place of institutions that provide people with order, justice, security, and opportunity. God stands behind such structures of power, Paul argued in Romans 13. Christians share with all people the need for agencies that restrain evil and promote good.

Our spiritual ancestors claimed that the church is, 'within the perfection of Christ' and that the state is, 'outside the perfection of Christ'. The experience of North Atlantic Mennonites today is different from that of our ancestors. We are not persecuted. We have more in common with our neighbors, at least socially, than what sets us apart from them. We drive big cars and at the same time worry about their effect on the environment, we want better schools and so forth. We are part of a quest for the common good. The problem is that Mennonites (certainly in North America) have never developed a theology of the common good.

I propose that a deeper understanding of the Trinity is the surest basis for such a theology. Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is the source of the church's mission. But is God also at work in the world? How can we know that? The book of Acts describes the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit as the One who precedes the disciples, who is already at work when the disciples engage the world (Acts 10, 17).

In my work at the United Nations I have found it enormously helpful to think of the Spirit as the vanguard of the church, the One who empowers the church but is also ahead of it, drawing the individuals - and institutions - of creation back into God's plan for them. Such a theology of the Trinity affirms that the world is not left to its own devices - even if it wants to be! The structures of creation and society are often reluctant, even rebellious agents of God's will. Instead of liberating, they oppress; instead of promoting peace, they make war. But God blesses them when they act as stewards, as keepers of creation.

IV. Practicing the Church's Witness

In my work with MCC at the UN I regularly find myself thinking of my Jehovah's Witness friend, who can't see God at work outside the church, and my Quaker friend, who puts too much stock in the goodness of human institutions. The shortcoming of the first position lies in thinking that the church doesn't need the world; the shortcoming of the second one lies in thinking that the world doesn't need the church.

What is the alternative? In his book, The Christian Witness to the State, John Howard Yoder introduced Mennonites to the notion of the 'middle axiom' as a way of finding common ground between the church and a public institution. A middle axiom is simply an agreement between different groups about what has to be done to tackle a particular situation of injustice. It is an assumption shared by two parties, to which both are accountable. For example, broad international agreement has been reached that it is immoral to turn children into soldiers. This compact has been enshrined in a UN convention. Now churches and other groups can appeal to this convention and say to offending governments, "We all agree that letting children fight is wrong; all we ask is that you implement what you have already agreed to." Middle axioms make possible provisional but sustainable working agreements between the church and other shapers of society's structures.

V. MCC's Role at the UN

What I have just laid out is a digest of twelve years of reflecting on the purpose of our church's UN office. But what does our office actually do on a day-to-day basis? It often feels as if our office is a mouse among elephants, trying not to get trampled underfoot, trying to reach the ear of the critter to whisper our message into it.

Our job is to be a bridge between MCC's work in local settings with local partners and the UN's work in national and global programs. We take information and analysis from our work on the ground and try to find an entry point for it in the UN system where we can be heard and where we can expand our grasp of a situation. By the same token, we take information and analysis about UN policies and programs back to MCC's head office and local settings. In the process we learn how decisions are made by UN agencies and how they affect our work in emergency aid, peace making, and capacity building.

Let me illustrate our work with one straightforward and one complex example, to show you the range of our activity. The first example shows how the MCC UN office in New York functions as a bridge between people in the field and UN agencies. Recently Kathryn and Dan Smith Derksen came to New York City at the end of their service term in Uganda. One of their roles was to monitor human rights violations by the Lord's Resistance Army, a militia that forcibly recruits children and makes them into cannon fodder in their battles.

We arranged a meeting for the Smith-Derksens with the Office for Children and Armed Conflict. This is an agency set up by the UN to monitor the recruitment of children for war and to press for an international convention prohibiting soldiers under age 18. The MCCers were able to provide detailed, local, current documentation of the continuing role of children in the ongoing civil strife in northern Uganda. Because the UN is obligated to work through host governments and because it operates on a national or regional scale, the eyewitness reports from a local setting documented the effect of forcing children to fight on families who had names and faces.

Now for the complex example. The economic and military sanctions imposed by the Security Council on Iraq are the most elaborate, complicated, and politically charged issue our office has ever worked on. Let me illustrate the application of a middle axiom to the question of sanctions.

To ease the devastation of Iraq's civilian population 'smart sanctions' were proposed to target the true offenders of international law, like government or business elites, who benefited from smuggling embargoed wares.

Our office was able to participate in the deliberations of a UN sub-committee recommending mechanisms to measure the humanitarian impact of sanctions. Some members of this committee had concluded that in Iraq even smart sanctions wouldn't ease the suffering. A few of them made the case for lifting the embargo altogether. MCC shared this view.

What happened at one of the meetings of the sub-committee makes the dilemmas we face clear. I was there on the day of an unforgettable meeting with a top UN advisor. He had been persuaded to enter a conversation sponsored by a joint committee of NGOs and UN humanitarian staff. At a crucial point in the exchange he declared, "I will negotiate with you on smart sanctions, on targeting elites and not ordinary people, but if you've invited me to support the lifting of sanctions, I'm leaving the room right now. Such a position contradicts the Charter and puts me in an impossible position with the Council".

You could have heard a pin drop. No one spoke up. Before our eyes the dynamic of the debate had changed! And I was there. Had I squandered a prophetic moment? Should I have shouted out, "I protest. Only the lifting of sanctions can end the starvation."? Instead, we supported the subcommittee's proposal for smart sanctions because at least they offered the possibility of easing conditions. At the same time we continued to press members of the Iraq Sanctions Committee to lift the embargo altogether. Was that a bad compromise?

VI. Closing Thoughts

The UN is the only all-encompassing set of structures holding the most powerful countries accountable to the least powerful ones. If the UN didn't exist, we'd have to create something like it to come to terms with conflict and injustice between and within nations. The United Nations itself is the great Middle Axiom. Yet we work with it not because it is our hope. We work with it because our hope lies outside human institutions; it lies in the fact that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself and has entrusted that message to the church (II Cor.5:19). Part of our mission is to carry the ministry of reconciliation into the political order.

On Good Friday our closing hymn in church was 'I bind my heart'. As soon as we started singing I was gripped by its appropriateness. 'I bind my heart this tide to the Galilean's side, to the wounds of Calvary, to the Christ who died for me'. This is where the Gospel begins. But it doesn't end there; listen to the next verse. 'I bind myself this day to the neighbor far away and the stranger near at hand, in this town and in this land.'