How could this have happened? How could we have stopped it? What did we miss? These three questions tormented me as I waited for Paul and Mary Kortenhoven to come through Senegalese customs that fall night in 1994. A few days ago I had received an emergency phone call from the US State Department telling me that several of our expatriate missionaries and CRWRC workers in Sierra Leone had barely escaped after the tribal area of the Kuranko, where they lived and worked in a joint CRWRC/CRWM church and community development program, when it was overrun by rebels. They were being evacuated to Dakar, Senegal – where the CRC had its regional offices and where I, CRWRC’s regional director for West Africa, lived.

These three questions tormented me as I waited for Paul and Mary Kortenhoven to come through Senegalese customs that fall night in 1994. A few days ago I had received an emergency phone call from the US State Department telling me that several of our expatriate missionaries and CRWRC workers in Sierra Leone had barely escaped after the tribal area of the Kuranko, where they lived and worked in a joint CRWRC/CRWM church and community development program, when it was overrun by rebels. They were being evacuated to Dakar, Senegal – where the CRC had its regional offices and where I, CRWRC’s regional director for West Africa, lived.

What had gone wrong? The integrated rural development plan we were following was state of the art. It was the latest thinking. We had everything covered – in theory and in practice. It was a model program and the Kuranko were making measurable progress in literacy, health, and food production. There was a growing church with local evangelists.

But in the short time of a week or two, huge damage had been done to the 15 years of work and millions of dollars in investment. Buildings were burned. Villagers killed, abused, fleeing for their lives. CRWRC and CRWM Sierra Leonian pastors and staff were scattered to the four winds – fled over the Ginuea border or gone to Freetown – away from rebel held areas.

This was not our first set back in the face of rebel activity. Several years earlier we had reluctantly closed a second program site in Sierra Leone in the region of the Krim people. Situated in a rich agricultural delta south and east of Freetown near the Liberia border, it had been one of the first areas to fall to the rebels when they decided to expand their influence out of the nearby diamond and gold mining areas they had controlled for some time. 

What had happened?  What or who had allowed them to, with nothing more than a rag-tag militia, terrorize increasingly large swaths of Sierra Leone and repeatedly defeat army attempts to rein them in?

In the ensuing days and weeks Paul and Mary Kortenhoven along with other CRWRC staff such as Jan Diselkoen would come back again and again to these questions:  What had we missed in our planning and strategizing?  What didn’t we see?  Why were we so helpless when it all came down on the people of the Krim and Kuranko areas?

Five years later

Five years later, near the end of 1999, I met Paul again in an airport.  The city was Washington DC, not Dakar, and two things were very different. First, Sierra Leone was in terrible shape with rebel troops engaged in a battle for Freetown with Nigerian ECOWAS troops. Terror, blood, and death reigned countrywide. And sheer survival, not development was the goal. There was a second change. We now knew what was really behind the carnage and death, knew what we might do about it, and had a new denominational tool to employ in the doing of it:  The Office of Social Justice and Hunger Action.

How and why did the CRC, a denomination highly averse to mixing politics and religion – at least in the US – end up with its name, logo, and denominational staff deeply enmeshed in a global political battle to change the way the world mined and marketed diamonds?

The answer was clear – at least to Paul and Mary Kortenhoven and myself as we met with our congressman, Vern Ehlers that day. We were still engaged in our mission to Sierra Leone; still trying to get our arms around that country in church planting and integrated rural development; still serving the Kuranko people. It was mission by advocacy. We were using our influence as citizens of the most powerful country in the world in concerted action with others of like intention to change a corrupt global diamond marketing system, a system that was fueling West African warlords’ greed for money and power. It was clear that without stopping the illicit trade in diamonds there would be no peace, no development, and no CRC church planting in Sierra Leone.

The office was born out of necessity. Out of the need for a truly holistic ministry that did not stop when the path took us into unfamiliar places

Over the two-and-a-half year campaign to bring our governments to agreement on what was called “The Kimberly Accords”, the CRC repeatedly used its small but strategic influence to help. Several small groups of church members visited their local diamond stores to simply ask: “Can you assure us that the diamonds you sell do not come from illicit sources? Are not “blood diamonds”? How can you be sure? Visits like this soon turned the diamond industry into allies. And our lone CRC congressman from West Michigan, Vern Ehlers, became a champion of the Kimberly Accords in the US House of Representatives.

In 2003 the Kimberly Accords were signed and what was called “The Kimberly Process” was finally implemented by the international community and some 35 diamond mining and consuming countries. It contributed to an end to violence and a return to peace for Sierra Leone and Liberia. Development programs were restarted, the church has grown by leaps and bounds, schools have been established, the government has increasing revenue to spend from taxes on legitimate diamond mining. More just international systems are prerequisites to sustainable local and national development.

The Office of Social Justice and Hunger Action – one person and a part-time administrative assistant – coordinated the planning and implementation of this first foray into the work of advocacy. It was the beginning of a slow but sure development of the CRC’s capacity to educate ourselves about and advocate on behalf of those who were the victims of unjust economic and political systems.

The office was born out of necessity. Out of the need for a truly holistic ministry that did not stop when the path took us into unfamiliar places (such as Congress, Parliament, or the UN) to say what we had seen, tell what we knew, and hold those with power accountable. It continues to provide the coordination for this ministry today.

CRWRC's role

Without the relief and development ministry of CRWRC, there would have been no need to create a capacity to be advocates for the poor and oppressed.  It would have been an academic exercise.  As it happened, the Office of Social Justice and Hunger Action grew out of a CRWRC board level decision to try to re-energize the ten year old world hunger effort that had brought the CRC (and many of its best and brightest) to see anti-hunger work as a serious new field of missions needing to be integrated with the work of planting churches and building the kingdom.

There was more than one stream of influence. Two important world hunger reports had been endorsed by synod in 1978 and 79 – one called “And He Had Compassion on Them," the other “For my Neighbor’s Good”.  The latter report in particular dug into systemic causes of hunger in the world and laid the theological underpinnings of our necessary involvement in resisting structural evil – the kind of systemic evil that kept people poor, kept them hungry, stoked conflict and created millions of refugees.

Wherever there is greed linked to ruthless demand there will human abuse and suffering.  To watch, report, and work to root out such abuse – that is the work of doing justice.

Then in 1991, field staff from Africa addressed CRWRC’s board. The topic was development – teaching people to fish – but what if they had no access to the pond? It was clear that a prerequisite for sustainable community was at least some basic level of social justice: the absence of conflict, freedom from fear, access to at least some means of production. It was also clear to staff and board that if we were serious about doing community development we would have to be serious about working on bringing about a more just world.

A year later an overture, initiated by CRWRC board members, induced synod to reexamine the CRC’s world hunger efforts, and in 1993 a new report was accepted: “Freedom to Serve; Meeting the Needs of  the World”.  In it were recommendations to work on “root causes” of poverty and hunger – and an afterthought – a suggestion to hire a staff person to implement these recommendations of.  In 1995 that staff person was hired – Peter Vander Meulen, the former CRWRC West Africa regional director.

And so began the slow but sure development of a specialized office to work with CRWRC, CRWM, and other CRC ministries to build our capacity for doing justice as an integral part of our ministries.  

The Office of Social Justice now works in education and advocacy on more than 10 significant issues. In addition to the Coordinator, It has a full time communications staffer and shares a fulltime staff person with World Renew working in CRC justice mobilizing.  It has a part time mobilizer in Canada and at any given time may engage up to three full and part-time young interns. Its resources are small by most standards but it supplies a vital education and advocacy service.

OSJ is one more good result of 50 years of CRWRC/World Renew faithfulness.

Postscript:  Justice demands  vigilance.  As of this writing, the Kimberly Process is falling apart due to lack of enforcement.  Still, the positive progress made because of this agreement cannot be undone.  Sierra Leone and other countries like it had the time to become strong enough to institute their own internal controls on diamond mining.  Much work must still be done on many more abused commodities – such as “coltan” in the Congo.  Wherever there is greed linked to ruthless demand there will human abuse and suffering.  To watch, report, and work to root out such abuse – that is the work of doing justice.