What Congregations Can Do
While the church of our beliefs has rhetorically encouraged economic justice, sustainability, compassion, and community solidarity throughout Christian history, its social teachings often have not been accompanied with enough understanding of the real world to transform them into effective proposals for reform. This source of inaction must stop.
1. Be a Community of Discernment. The faith community shouldn’t pretend technical competence it does not uniquely possess. It can and should, however, engage in moral analysis of laws and economic systems, denounce their morally unacceptable outcomes, name the sin that is causing pain, and insist that more humane policies and systems be sought and implemented. That is an authentic prophetic task of the community of faith in economic life, regardless of the extent or organization of markets.
2. Broaden Adult Education Programs. Nor should the church shy away from mastering the technical competence needed to understand the workings of stakeholder and stockholder capitalism. The churches of America are full of people with knowledge about economic life and its institutions. They should be recruited to develop adult education materials and social witness policies to accord with the church’s social teachings.
3. Encourage Education for Community Action. Individual congregations need also to bring together their theological reflections about economic life with education in community action for economic justice. Biblical and theological reflection is best oriented to active involvement in the world. Active learning best takes place when pastors and members of congregations carry out sustained, collaborative work on social issues. See, in particular, the book compiled by Mobilization for the Human Family called Speaking of Religion and Politics: The Progressive Church Tackles Hot Topics for suggestions of social issues congregations may choose to explore.
4. Celebrate Good Corporate Behavior. Congregations also may work through their denominations and ecumenical bodies to identify good corporate behavior. The Presbyterian Church (USA), for instance, gave awards to Motorola for putting a stop to its production of parts used to make land mines, and to Starbucks Coffee for adopting a code of conduct for suppliers that requires evidence of adequate wages and human rights for workers.
5. Link Investment Decisions to Mission Policies. Congregations that own invested assets need to consider carefully the social responsibility of the policies of those corporation. Congregations and denominations can form partnerships with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) in New York, which monitors corporate actions on social issues and coordinates the filing of proxy resolutions decrying inappropriate conduct by particular corporations. ICCR and its church partners, for example, have supported resolutions on water pollution and toxic chemical wastes associated with paper production, working conditions and environmental and health hazards associated with foreign-owned factories in Mexico, exploitation of child and slave labor in Third World countries, particularly in clothing manufacture, discriminatory lending patterns in low income and minority neighborhoods by banks and mortgage companies, pay equity and equal employment opportunity, arms sales to foreign governments, and exorbitant executive pay unrelated to company performance.
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