Associated Baptist Press - 9/17/2008

Associated Baptist Press
September 17, 2008 · (08-88)

Greg Warner, Executive Editor
Robert Marus, News Editor/Washington Bureau Chief

In this issue
Houston school suffers from Ike; Baptists respond in Texas, La.
Missions in a Dangerous World
Missions in a Dangerous World: Tell the whole truth?
Missions in a Dangerous World: Don't deceive, expert says
Faith leaders to candidates: Stop neglecting Gulf Coast
Global Women founds endowment, sets priorities at board meeting
Opinion: On morality and our faltering economy

Houston school suffers from Ike; Baptists respond in Texas, La.
ABP staff

HOUSTON (ABP) -- Baptists continued Sept. 17 to send relief teams into hard-hit areas along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Ike, which battered the area five days earlier.

In the storm's path, Houston Baptist University suffered an estimated $8-10 million in wind, water and structural damage.

HBU's student center -- which houses admissions offices, the band hall, the bookstore, the university's television station, offices and food areas -- and the administrative complex were hardest hit, according to a statement on the HBU website.

HBU President Robert Sloan cancelled classes through at least Sept. 17 and other scheduled on-campus events through Sept. 18. The statement said students will not be allowed back on campus "until further notice."

Baptists continue to assess damage to churches and ministries. First Baptist Church of Galveston has reported a near-record amount of water in its facility. Ike's surge level fell between those of a record-setting 1900 storm and a 1915 hurricane as indicated by the congregation's outdoor sign marking the levels of storm surges the church has weathered.

The church will hold services off the island this weekend. Members have already begun to clean up the facility.

In many areas throughout nearby Houston the most pressing problems are lack of electricity to keep food from spoiling and no water.

Texas Baptist Men has sent chainsaw teams to communities around Houston, including Livingston, The Woodlands, Beaumont, Buna and Huntsville.

Texas Disaster Relief also has responded with feeding units, including a mega-feeding site at League City where volunteers are preparing 40,000 meals each day and transporting them to more than 20 locations. The relief group has set training sessions throughout the state to prepare additional volunteers to respond to needs in the Houston-Galveston area.

Assessment also continues in Louisiana, which has been affected by Ike as well as Hurricane Gustav in recent weeks. Some associational directors of missions are calling for churches in other parts of the nation to consider partnering with churches hit hard by the latest round of storm damage.

According to news reports, Louisiana Baptist Convention Executive Director David Hankins was to meet Sept. 17 with officials of the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board. The leaders would determine the level of assistance the national body might be able to provide to Louisiana.

During a Sept. 15 teleconference on hurricane recovery on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, Patty Whitney of Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing noted a 9-foot storm surge from Gustav hit Houma, La., damaging 13,000 buildings.

First Baptist Church there lost a new eight-building day school in its final construction phase.

Baptist volunteers continue to provide meals and assist with cleanup in Baton Rouge.

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-- John Hall contributed to this story.

Missions in a Dangerous World
By Vicki Brown

(ABP) -- Imagine being invited to go on a short-term mission trip to a country closed to mission personnel and bordering a closed nation torn by civil war. Participants cannot disclose the underlying reason for the trip -- ministry to refugees -- to the host country's government. Instead, they must go in on a tourist visa.

Is that ethical? Should a conscientious Christian participate?

Most missionaries, both career and short-term volunteers, must deal with ethical dilemmas as they strive to share God's love.

In making tough ethical decisions, leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board stress the importance of understanding culture and applying biblical principles. The IMB helps missionaries understand and apply two concepts -- to strip away Western culture and go to the Bible to avoid anything that might cause a brother to stumble, spokesperson Wendy Norvelle explained.

"Sometimes applying biblical principles is hard to do, because we encase our understanding of the Bible in our Western culture," she said.

Missionaries must understand the culture where they work to avoid causing problems for those to whom they minister, even when understanding may require them to adopt patterns from that culture.

For example, women in some societies are required to cover their heads when they go out in public.

"It's not our custom or belief, but it is in some cultures; or in some places, it's the law.... We teach missionaries to look at the culture and determine how to bridge the two," Norvelle said.

Still, missionaries face difficult choices. For instance, some cultures forbid educating women.

"What law are you breaking to teach a woman to read?" Norvelle asked.

Strategies for dealing with ethical issues are woven into the presentations and classes new appointees take during stateside orientation.

"We teach them how to live cross-culturally.... We teach them to seek answers, not give them answers," she said. "We give them the tools to teach them how to live and adapt."

The IMB also works hard during the candidate-screening process to make sure an appointee serves where his or her gifts are best suited. An individual gifted in street evangelism likely would be sent to an area that allows open religious activity, for example, rather than to a closed country.

Honesty and integrity are the bedrocks upon which ethical decisions -- both at home and abroad -- must be made, a longtime missionary and former top missions leader believes.

"The best course is to maintain integrity and honesty, to recognize that anything we do or say can become public knowledge," Keith Parks said. "The best defense is to say, 'I did what I thought was right.'"

Parks speaks from years of missions experience, including 42 years as a missions professional. He served 38 years with the Southern Baptist Convention's Foreign Mission Board, first as a missionary and then as a field administrator, with his final 13 years as the agency's chief executive.

He also served the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as coordinator of global missions for six years.

Missionaries -- whether career workers or short-term volunteers -- face ethical dilemmas, he acknowledged. Even a simple choice can present an ethical issue. For example, should a worker going into a country that does not allow mission volunteers declare that he or she is on vacation?

"I recognize that there are gray areas and that it is necessary to fudge a little at times," Parks said. "I have had to struggle with [the visa issue]. I would put down 'administrator' or 'teacher' rather than 'missionary' or 'preacher'" on visa applications, Parks said.

But outright lying never has been an option, he stressed. Sometimes, Parks added, staying within a country's legal system requires telling the truth without volunteering additional information.

Parks believes missionary-sending agencies and volunteer groups do not need to use clandestine methods for reaching people with the gospel. Should officials of the host nation discover such deception, he noted, that usually results in the end of missions work in that country. Such exposures also can lead to even tighter religious restrictions for the local residents and potential future missionaries.

Learning the culture and following the laws of the land can help minimize the ethical conflict, he said.

"I think the way we are able to function is to play by the rules of the country. I think [government officials] know -- or at least know most of -- what we're doing" in their country, Parks added. "If we try to flaunt their rules, they are going to do something about it. We're not 007 [the agent number of fictional spy James Bond]. We're not super secret."

Working within a country's laws can often lead to encounters to develop relationships or share the gospel. Parks believes sending workers into closed countries as professionals in non-religion-specific fields is ethically appropriate as long as the sending agency delivers what it promised.

"I think we had a problem early on of sending people in as a professional but who were not fully qualified," he said. "But I think we've transitioned from pretending to be proficient in business to actually being proficient and using that proficiency as an opportunity."

Sending professional people into closed countries has been a longstanding IMB strategy.

Medical professionals, teachers, agricultural specialists, business executives and others have been able to connect one-to-one with unreached people in restricted countries while fulfilling their secular roles.

Is that a clandestine approach? Norvelle acknowledged some would see it as such. But the IMB believes professional workers uphold the law and have opportunities to build personal relationships -- "the best way to mission effectiveness."

"Governments grant visas and welcome U.S. citizens to come for teaching, agriculture, medicine and others," she said. "As they go, they seek ways to build relationships and to share what they believe. They do what the Bible says: Build relationships where you are. ... Paul was a tentmaker. He ran a business."

Programs and workers tend to be accepted best when they deliver on the promises administrators make. And following the rules sets an example.

"There is such an expectation and a common reality of lying and cheating in many cultures. When people encounter those who don't [lie or cheat], it is more of a witness," Parks said.

"There is the sense of 'this guy is different'... and it gives the worker a chance to witness."

But problems in restricted countries may arise after missions workers -- whether short-term or long-term -- return to the United States or other open societies.

Instantaneous worldwide access to information through the Internet can create those problems. Articles, books, e-mails and blogs by returning missionary personnel can create risks for workers and nationals who remain in those high-security areas. Most mission-sending agencies use pseudonyms for individuals in those areas and do not disclose actual locations.

"It's a very uncomfortable situation when people are working incognito but then come home and write about their experiences," Parks said. "It's a real problem because it casts suspicion on others working in those countries."

"Play by the rules" and "do what's right" are the two maxims Parks tries to follow in any missions endeavor. And sometimes doing "what's right" may mean breaking the laws of a repressive country.

"The distinction is to do what's right. When the law says we can't witness, we break that law" when workers respond to opportunities to share as they develop relationships, he said.

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Missions in a Dangerous World: Tell the whole truth?
By Ken Camp

(ABP) -- Christian workers who serve in countries closed to traditional missions outreach should tell the truth -- but that doesn't necessarily mean full disclosure, some Christian ethicists and missiologists say.

"It is not correct to lie about the reason for being there," said Ebbie Smith, a missions and ethics distinguished fellow with the Texas-based B.H. Carroll Theological Institute. Still, he added, "We don't have to tell all."

When it comes to matters of truth-telling or deception, Christian ethicists generally fall into two camps, said Joe Trull, editor of Christian Ethics Today.

One group insists biblical ethics demands that people always tell the truth. The other group says the ethics of truth-telling or deception depends on the end result.

"This position says deception may be allowable, even if it is not the ideal, if there is some greater good to be served or some lesser evil to be avoided," said Trull, a former ethics professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

Biblical examples cited by Christian ethicists who espouse the latter position include the Hebrew midwives who lied to Pharaoh to prevent infanticide and Rahab, who lied to protect two Israelite spies in Jericho.

Christians who use a specialized skill -- such as medical professionals and agricultural development workers -- to enter a country where they can meet secular needs and share the gospel in the process are in a different category than another kind of clandestine missions worker, both Smith and Trull agreed. Some travel to restricted or dangerous countries and claim employment by a business that is nothing more than a front for missions activity.

"Certainly, there is a difference in giving needed services and simply having a cover," Smith said. "My view would be that, when in a country under some cover, that the cover should produce something beneficial to the people in the country. It should be more than a cover."

Practically speaking, missions activity may require "higher or lower ends of deception," Trull noted. For instance, some Latin American countries officially prohibit missionaries but turn a blind eye to missionary activity. But some Islamic nations strictly enforce bans on proselytizing.

Missions-sending agencies have a special responsibility to consider that violation of a law not only could lead to the imprisonment -- or even execution -- of missionaries on the field, but also could have a long-range negative impact on any gospel witness in a particular nation, Trull observed.

Christians who engage in illegal activities -- such as Bible smuggling or violating laws against proselytism -- claiming that their allegiance is to a higher law presents a special ethical problem, Smith acknowledged.

"I would be uncomfortable smuggling or actually violating the laws of a country. I might, however, feel that I should do some prohibited things if no other way exists to share the good news" of Christ, he said. "Eternity is too important a matter to fail to do all we can to bring people to faith."

Mission workers who subscribe to liberation theology -- who see part of their role as political involvement to free victims of oppression and advance social justice -- face particular dangers, Trull noted.

Likewise, other missionaries who may serve out of nationalistic motives -- to advance the interests of the United States and spread democracy around the world -- ironically may face some of the same kinds of risks, he added.

"The missionary has to ask: 'What is my basic calling? If I violate the law, am I willing to face the music? Will what I do help or harm the gospel?" Trull said.

Missions can be risky business -- particularly when mission workers skirt the law. And everyone involved should recognize that reality, Smith noted.

"Both the agency and the people deployed must accept the possibility of serious consequences," he said. "Part of the idea of defying laws for the sake of the gospel is that the one defying the law must accept the punishment of the action if punishment is given. The agency should not make promises of protection it cannot give."

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Missions in a Dangerous World: Don't deceive, expert says
By Robert Dilday

PLANO, Texas (ABP) -- Deception is never an appropriate stance for mission workers, a former employee of both the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the International Mission Board insists.

But that's not the same as telling everything one knows or does, said Kent Parks, who is now international director of Mission to Unreached Peoples.

"The standard I held to is that I'd never say something dishonest, but I did not tell everything I was doing," said Parks, who is based in the Dallas area, in offices provided by First Baptist Church of Plano, Texas.

As an IMB worker and later in a similar capacity with CBF, Parks lived in a country where his ties to the mission agencies were not publicly disclosed.

But, he added: "I never hid the fact that I am a follower of Jesus, though I did not lead with that in most situations. And the phrasing is important -- I didn't call myself 'Christian' because that is a political term in many parts of the world. ... And I never used the term 'missionary' because that's like saying, 'Hi, I'm a terrorist, and I've come to assassinate your culture.'"

But Parks said he found a way in every conversation to describe himself as a "follower of Jesus."

"The fact is, people in most parts of the world are followers of some religion," he said. "And if Americans don't describe themselves as followers of something, they assume we're atheists."

Ethical questions about mission strategy are important, but "it's a complex situation," said Parks. "The first ethical question to ask is, 'Is it fair that many people have no access to hearing and seeing the gospel?' Obviously, you know where I stand on that."

The second question: Do honesty and transparency require full disclosure? "American culture has a tendency to say, 'You have to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,' and if you don't, you're not being truthful," he said. "But, to use a poker analogy, I don't think we have to show our whole hand" to be above board.

Third, when a mission worker chooses a "platform" -- an open reason for living in a country -- he or she "needs to actually do enough of that occupation to make it legitimate," and not a "cover" for another motive.

The bottom line, said Parks, is that the decision to live as an undisclosed mission worker in a restricted-access country is "a civil-disobedience thing -- and you must be willing to pay the price if you get jammed up in that country."

Sometimes, he said, such mission workers who run into legal troubles will distribute "martyr" letters asking for help. Parks thinks an acceptance of such risks is a crucial part of the decision to serve in some parts of the world. "I knew the times when I was skirting the hedge, and I was willing to make the sacrifice."

Most importantly, mission workers in closed countries must make every effort to keep their actions from endangering local believers.

"If I get jammed up a country for being a witness and I get kicked out, that's inconvenient for me," he said. But it can be life-threatening for a Christian in that country. "It's not my right to jeopardize what [local Christians] are doing."

"I'm willing to pay the price and I chose to do so," but no one can make that choice for others, Parks added

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Faith leaders to candidates: Stop neglecting Gulf Coast
By Vicki Brown

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- A coalition of religious leaders are asking politicians in this election year to address what they say is a moral scandal: Three years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, much of the region is still far from recovery.

Several religious leaders -- representing a coalition of more than 100 -- held a teleconference Sept. 15 to urge passage of the Gulf Coast Civic Works Act (H.R. 4048). The Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign is a non-partisan group of community, faith, student, labor and human-rights organizations.

At the same time, faith leaders sent a letter to the major-party presidential nominees -- Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain -- and to members of Congress to urge their support of the recovery plan.

Co-sponsored by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) and Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), the bill seeks to establish the Gulf Coast Recovery Authority to implement and oversee a massive job-training and reconstruction project. Twenty additional representatives have since signed on as co-sponsors, including one Republican (Louisiana Rep. Rodney Alexander).

Proponents tout the measure as a means to provide job training-opportunities and increase employment while speeding recovery in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama devastated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Damage caused by hurricanes Gustav and Ike this season has compounded the problem, they said.

The recovery program would train displaced workers to rebuild destroyed infrastructure and restore the environment, they added.

"We are hoping this becomes nationwide to help repair infrastructure and public buildings in a way that is equitable to everyone," noted Stephen Bradbury, national campaign coordinator for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, during the teleconference.

Patty Whitney, representing Bayou Interfaith Shared Community Organizing in Thibodaux, La., emphasized that hurricanes destroyed more than oil production. The region's agricultural base -- especially the cotton, sugar and fishing industries -- suffered significant devastation as well.

More than 200,000 people in Louisiana's hard-hit parishes of Lafourche and Terrebonne have been left out of most of the recovery decision-making process, she said. While faith groups have been "efficient" in pulling together to assist those who are hurting, the federal government "miscalculated the need," Whitney said. "We need help finding ways to help those in need."

Julie Kulinski, director of Women in Construction for the Moore Community House in Biloxi, Miss., noted the United Methodist ministry helps create a climate for women to pursue careers in construction. With training, they are able to find jobs to support their families.

She said the area needs 150,000 workers to rebuild its infrastructure. "We see this as a way to provide those workers and to provide jobs," Kulinski said.

None of the presidential campaigns or major political parties is addressing the recovery problem, Gulf Coast Civic Works Campaign participants said.

Frederick Haynes, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas, said religious leaders "must lend our voices" to influence both presidential campaigns. He also said the public and media should "not be so obsessed with the Palin factor" -- referring to the media attention lavished on Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The Dallas church has served as a disaster-relief center for hurricane evacuees from the Gulf Coast as a result of Katrina and subsequent storms.

New Orleans and other Louisiana residents have been criticized for failure to leave their homes before hurricanes hit, Haynes said. Many rode out Katrina because they did not have the resources to leave, while others stayed put during hurricanes Gustav and Ike because they had no place to go. Communication must be improved before a hurricane hits, and those who need help must be assisted, he said.

"This crisis situation has gone on too long without local input," declared Simone Campbell, director of NETWORK, a Catholic social-justice lobby. "We call on Congress and the administration to enact this comprehensive, sane program ... and to use it as a model."

Christian leaders who have endorsed the recovery campaign include Rich Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals; Richard Stearns, president of World Vision; Michael Kinnamon, president of the National Council of Churches; David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World; and Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners.

Besides Haynes, Baptist leaders who have publicly thrown their support behind the campaign include sociologist and author Tony Campolo; Paul Corts, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities; Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance and worship pastor of Northminster Baptist Church in Monroe, La.; Central Baptist Theological Seminary President Molly Marshall; LeDayne McLeese Polaski, program coordinator for the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America; and Fuller Theological Seminary ethicist Glen Stassen.

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Global Women founds endowment, sets priorities at board meeting
By ABP staff

SAN ANTONIO (ABP) -- Global Women established its first endowment, created a funding plan for its projects and adopted next year's projects at a recent board meeting.

Gathering in San Antonio, board members established an endowment to ensure the future of an organization that seeks to minister to oppressed and marginalized women around the world. They also determined to earmark 40 percent of Global Women's undesignated receipts to fund several projects in 2009, and voted to support the United Nations Millennium Development Goals.

The ministry will focus on "creating global friendships among women for shared learning and service while meeting needs of women in Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), Central Asia, Iran, Moldova and Thailand, among refugees in the United States and through training for emerging Latina leaders," according to a press release.

Because directors recognized that the Millennium Development Goals parallel Global Women's core values and purpose, they voted to affirm them.

The eight U.N. goals include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and empowering women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a global development partnership by 2015.

"We stopped and looked and realized that this is what we do, this is who we are, this is what we stand for," noted Trudy Johnson, Global Women's director of development, by phone Sept. 17.

Also at the meeting, board members elected Lita Sample, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field representative in California, as president; Nell Lockhart of Kirkwood, Mo., as vice president; Ann Wilson of Maryville, Tenn., as secretary; and Martha Isom of Birmingham, Ala., as treasurer in 2009.

Sample will assume the president's post from current president Deniese Dillon, who has served on the board since 2003 and must rotate off in January.

In addition, Laura Savage-Rains, Nomie Derani and Melissa Ward were elected as directors.

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Opinion: On morality and our faltering economy
By Benjamin Cole

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- America faced an unprecedented challenge requiring military intervention halfway around the globe. Russia was recalcitrant in the face of international diplomatic pressure, and rogue South American dictators scoffed at democratic reforms. Africa suffered the stresses of modernization. The Middle East was unstable; Israel dealt with anti-Jewish regimes; and America faced a series of unanticipated economic challenges.

Sound familiar? Not only does it describe the current year, but one more than 40 years ago. It was 1962, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was president. He listed the world's woes in a speech during spring commencement at Yale University.

In that speech, Kennedy summoned every ounce of his soaring rhetorical skill to address challenges to the American economy -- wasteful spending, budget deficits and national debt, the falling value of the American dollar and rising anxieties about international confidence in the American markets.

Flash forward 46 years. Today, the American economy is tottering. Republicans know it. Democrats know it. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department know it. And most certainly, the American people know it. At the moment, however, it seems that nobody is to blame -- not the government that turned a blind eye to predatory lending; not usurers who eschewed every vestige of moral responsibility; not the covetous, debt-laden suburbanites who had to keep up with the Joneses down the street.

Out on the presidential stump, Barack Obama and John McCain point fingers in every direction. If it's not legislators who have failed to provide congressional oversight, then it's an administration that has failed to manage the economy. Everywhere you look, the current economic crisis is a reason to reject the other guy and empower whoever has the microphone for the moment.

I spent the greater part of last weekend trying to digest Obama and McCain's economic proposals. Both candidates want to fix the mortgage meltdown by helping sub-prime borrowers keep homes they couldn't afford in the first place. Both have endless acronyms -- the HOME plan for McCain, and the HOME score for Obama, to name two -- that offer grand and hopeful ideas without much in the way of nuts-and-bolts proposals.

As I sorted through the presidential rivals' economic plans, it seemed to me that the problems America faces are much more substantive and subtle than a few unrestrained executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The wrong questions are being asked; therefore, the wrong solutions are being offered.

Why must lowering taxes always be a plank in a winning political platform, for instance? Since the Great Depression, Americans have steadily increased the expectations they have from the federal government. Since the 1980s, however, Americans have grown accustomed to shouldering less and less of the burden to pay for the government programs they demand.

Take the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for example. Both McCain and Obama have called for more regulations and stricter governmental oversight. Missing from their solutions is the fine print. More regulations mean more regulators. More regulators mean more federal jobs. More federal jobs mean a larger federal budget. A larger federal budget means a need for more tax revenue.

Which leads me to the real reason I've been thinking about the moral and political foundation of the economic questions that America now faces.

In his 2005 "Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics," Harvard professor Michael Sandel explores the digression of American political concern from the noble pursuit of an economy of citizenship -- where the goal of democracy was the formation of self-governing citizens -- to the lesser end of economic growth at any cost. Rather than making citizens who are capable of working diligently and providing generously for the common good, America became a nation of nursing babes unable to wean themselves from Uncle Sam's bosom.

Americans, according to Sandel, are less able to govern themselves than they were a century ago. And a people incapable of self-government should be careful about blaming the federal government for failing to balance its own budget or audit its own expenditures. When "we the people" have gotten ourselves into an economic freefall, "we the people" should bear the burden of getting us out.

Sandel's book directed me to Kennedy's 1962 commencement address. Quite profoundly, he spoke to the very problems that Americans now face: an expanding federal government, a deepening federal debt and a growing federal deficit. Those economic dilemmas and the economic stresses they created were -- for Kennedy -- too important to be reduced to campaign slogans or political clichés. They demanded discipline, nuance and complex thinking.

They required moral reasoning -- the kind that preachers and philosophers and politicians had undertaken at the nation's founding. Looking across the Pacific to escalating military conflict in Indochina, looking at stresses of outdated domestic policies and looking at the Yale Class of 1962, Kennedy called the next generation of America's leaders to a higher level of political discourse. He urged them to face the challenges with courage and calm.

"You are part of the world and you must participate in these days of our years in the solution of the problems that pour upon us, requiring the most sophisticated and technical judgment; and as we work in consonance to meet the authentic problems of our times, we will generate a vision and an energy which will demonstrate anew to the world the superior vitality and strength of the free society," Kennedy told them.

Forty-six years later, it remains to be seen if Americans will find the solutions to our problems through the diligent work of moral and political reflection, or if we will simply watch the dog-and-pony show of presidential campaigns without demanding something more realistic than panacean economic proposals or partisan blame-shifting for today's fiscal ills.

The economic crisis is not a new problem. It's not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It's not a rich problem or a poor problem. The distractions and divisions that threaten the nation's resolve to tighten our own economic belts, to roll up our own economic sleeves and to do the tough work of seeing our country through another dark season of fiscal strain must be rejected. The partisan potshots that discourage collaborative solutions must cease.

Whether or not a leader will arise to summon the resolve of a nation to do something other than provide knee-jerk reactions to problems on Wall Street and Capitol Hill remains to be seen. For now, we watch as the rains of economic woe fall upon the just and the unjust.

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-- Benjamin Cole is a former Southern Baptist pastor who now works on public-policy issues in the nation's capital.