Practice of Advocacy

Advocacy is speaking to the rich and powerful on behalf of the poor in order to change the structures of oppression.

The biggest pastoral issue of our time! 1.4 billion slum-dwellers dispossessed of their land across the globe! Twice dispossessed!! In their village! In the city!

I remember the blood splattered on the walls, as marines and bulldozers destroyed our slum in Manila. People stood in front of their shacks, vainly putting up a barricade. Believers stood with them. Believers went with them as they loaded their timbers onto trucks. Believers rebuilt their houses with them in the midst of the dirt, the lack of water, the despair at the new "relocation area", nine miles from city jobs. The life of a slum pastor is to stand with the people in the midst of dispossession and as Christ's representative, to seek to bring justice on their behalf. Incarnation! Solidarity! Step one.

But I wondered, could the confrontation have been prevented? Jesus calls us to be both evangelists and peacemakers. The priest in the community before me had been wiser organizing the people prior to an earlier confrontation, so when President Marcos' bulldozers came, they lay in front of them! He called the newspapers! Then called the mayor, telling him the reporters and cameras were there! He advised the police chief to avoid bloodshed, "the mayor was coming!" Of course, the mayor, arriving and seeing the newscasters, spoke, "We must settle this peacefully though discussions"!! The people, in the end, got half the land. Step two. The wise leadership of a trained community organizer, with a theological foundation standing with the poor against injustice. It was clear who Jesus was, and where he stood!>>>more on steps to advocacy...