World Evangelical Alliance International Director on Poverty and G8

The head of the World Evangelical Alliance, Geoff Tunnicliffe, was in Germany last week for the Rostock rally, and to meet with church and government leaders.

He represents around 430 million Christians worldwide as head of the WEA and is currently driving forward a humanitarian campaign called Micah Challenge to make sure politicians do everything in their power to halve extreme poverty by 2015.

Christian Today caught up with Mr Tunnicliffe to find out more about the social justice work of the WEA and its response to G8.

CT: You met with many church and political leaders while you were in Germany. What has been a particular highlight been for you?

GT: I think one of the highlights for me has been the growing awareness for German evangelicals to embrace an understanding of integral holistic mission in terms of word and deed, proclamation and demonstration. I was very impressed with that growing vision among young and old evangelicals here.

I was here for Kirchentag [a five-day German Christian conference] and I think it makes a statement about the continued relevance of the church in society and what is being called post-Christendom Europe.

To gather 100,000 Christians in Cologne in what is a growing secularised continent is quite impressive.

CT: You met last week with a representative of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office. How did it go?

GT: I was very pleased with the reception. They seemed to affirm our commitment to Micah Challenge of holding governments to account but also playing a significant role as Christians in nation-building and contributing to the global response to the poor and neglected in societies around the world.

CT: G8 leaders agreed a $60bn aid package for Africa. Are you pleased with that?

GT: Actually I am quite disappointed. On one level, the good thing is that they reinstated the goals of Gleneagles for aid but the disappointment is that there is no timetable of when that is going to happen and in reality not much of the money that has been committed again is new money.

At Gleneagles they said they were going to commit to full availability of antiretrovirals but now they are talking of 50 per cent. Five million people could now die because of that decision.

CT: Post G8, what is your long-term response to that outcome?

GT: We are going to continue to reinforce our message of what they need to do and what we need to do. We are not giving up on our goal of keeping them accountable and going back to the Gleneagles promises. We will seek to take that up at the national level through the Micah Challenge campaign so that hopefully when they come back together in Japan - where Africa and climate change will again be at the top of the agenda - we will continue to see progress.

We will also continue to encourage Christians to deepen their commitment in many different ways like at the community level, providing care for the poor and suffering, creating jobs, providing healthcare, promoting safe lifestyles to combat Aids.

We will also encourage Christians to advocate for the poor in their local communities and with their governments.

I think wherever churches are they need to have both local and global involvement, and I think encouraging churches to think in a missional way about impacting society starts with their own community. And that comes down to the person in the pew. How are we going to encourage that individual to deepen their commitment? If every church increased its budget of giving to the poor by additional one per cent, that's a huge amount of resources that would be made available. So it's about encouraging what is doable and while not being overwhelmed by the magnitude. We are encouraging all to do more.

CT: Christians are very passionate about the climate issue. Are you hopeful about promises from government leaders to cut their carbon emissions?

GT: Well, we can always hope. I think the good news is that the G8 have agreed to a process within the UN. The 2050 commitment from the EU, Canada and Japan is significant and we have to have something in place by Bali to replace Kyoto. So now that some of those pieces are in place, it is really incumbent on politicians to follow through and we need to remind them of what they committed themselves to do.

The danger is that we continue to lag in our discipline of responding and keeping our promises. Yet we don't have that much time to deal with the reality of what we are facing.

There are also minority evangelical perspectives that don't blame global warming on human activity, so we recognise that we don't have complete unity on the science. But as I travel the world there is a deep sense that we need to be caring for creation. So I think as Christians making the case for carbon reductions, I think most evangelicals are committed to that process.

CT: How is the focus on the MDGs going to tie in with your missional work?

GT: We are committed to seeing churches be God's instrument in transformation in local communities around the world. And transformation means spiritual transformation. So as part of our commitment to global evangelisation we are very pleased to be partnering with Lausanne III on the next major global conference on world evangelisation in 2010.

We are also committed to other areas of engaging our societies through promoting religious freedom, the freedom of choice. And then of course our social justice programmes are at work in places like Darfur, where we are supporting refugees.

In all of this there has to be a solid underpinning of theological and missiological reflection. As evangelicals we are committed to the word and I think we need to deepen our own theological and missiological reflections around the issues of the day.