WASHINGTON (UMNS) - As Bishop Sharon Zimmerman
Rader rode in a taxi from Reagan National Airport to the heart of the
nation's capital, she heard a story on the radio that was all too
familiar.
A 9-year-old child was killed in the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
"There should be no more of this killing," she said.
That
message was at the heart of a press conference Dec. 2, where 32
prominent interfaith leaders gathered at the National Press Club to
encourage President Bush to continue his efforts at building peace in
the Middle East.
Rader, bishop of the United Methodist Church's
Wisconsin Area and secretary of the denomination's Council of Bishops,
attended the meeting as a representative of the council.
"The
significant thing about this group is that it involves Jews and Muslims
and Christians together," Rader said after the press conference. "It
involves not only Protestant Christians but Roman Catholic Christians,
evangelical Christians as well as mainline, and that's very
significant."
The delegation urged Bush to immediately reactivate
the call in his "road map to peace" for ending all violence between
Israelis and Palestinians and to work to achieve a ceasefire agreement
between the two sides.
In a document titled "Twelve Urgent Steps
for Peace," the delegation also called for the return of the special
presidential envoy to the region, a determination of specific steps that
the two sides could take simultaneously towards peace, and benchmark
principles for mutually acceptable solutions.
"The first and
foremost step is to encourage the president to take up once again the
initiative that he established in the road map to peace," Rader said,
"and to begin to move that forward - most specifically, to call for an
end to the violence there."
The delegation is seeking to meet
with Bush, and it sent a letter Nov. 25 to the White House. According to
Bishop Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America, the delegation has yet to meet with the president,
but the members remain hopeful.
"We have a commonality with Bush on this issue," Hanson said. "We're with him on this issue."
Cardinal
Theodore McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, told reporters the
delegation is pushing process more than a particular program of any
administration.
"We rejoice in all the programs for peace," he said. "But the world is saying, 'Let us begin the process of peace.'"
Imam
Feisal Abdul Rauf, founder of the American Sufi Muslim Association, an
organization that seeks to build bridges between Muslim Americans and
society, admitted that getting together this many religious leaders -
and their firmly held beliefs - wasn't easy.
"We've come to
affirm the value of dialogue," he said. "We believe that 100 more years
of suicide bombings will never drive Israel into the sea. Most Muslims
believe that the path to peace runs through Washington. We affirm also
that Islamic teachings support our efforts for peace."
Rabbi Paul
Menitoff, executive vice president of the Central Conference of
American Rabbis, said the delegation represented an effort to mobilize
moderate voices for peace. "We ask, on the backs of how many more dead
Israelis and Palestinians will peace by achieved?"
Rader and
several other speakers were strong in their encouragement to the
president: the United States must take leadership on this issue and do
all it can to achieve peace.
"We must move this nation into taking leadership in response to what's going on in the Middle East," Rader said.
"The
United Methodist position is clear," she said. "One of the things we
say is that war is incompatible with the Christian faith. We have spoken
out clearly in our resolutions about our care for Palestinians to find
security where they live; we want security for the Israelis as well as
the Palestinians, and the violence must stop."
# # #
*Alsgaard
is managing editor of the UMConnection newspaper and co-director of
communications for the Baltimore-Washington Conference.
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