Churches need to go beyond apologies and confront underlying institutional evils, said the #WCCs North America president and National Indigenous Bishop of The Anglican Church of Canada Mark MacDonald, at a gathering of more than 250 delegates from the Eastern Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada part of an effort to build “right relationships” with indigenous people in Canada. The keynote speaker at the event was Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) member Marie Wilson, who explained that there was a correlation between residential schools history and the over-representation of indigenous people in the country’s child welfare system, emergency room wards, prisons and correctional system, and in graveyards. “We not only have important, but urgent work to do as a society,” she said, adding, “How long will we allow it to be acceptable for us as a country that we have one of our founding nations living in abject poverty?” “As institutions, we’ve acted like other institutions, maybe a little bit better. At times we’ve been courageous in our apologies, at times we’ve been sacrificial in some of the responses we’ve made,” said Bishop MacDonald. “But beyond saying that we’re not going to do it again, I don’t think we’ve really gone into the heart of our participation in these kinds of evils.”
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:58:23 +0000