Actions and Campaigns

Challenging Empire: A Call to Community

At the 2006 General Council the report Living Faithfully in the Midst of Empire, created as one of the United Church's responses to globalization and increasing levels of global militarization, was accepted.

Further resources are now available to provide a variety of opportunities to learn more about the concept of empire, to see how it impacts our lives, explore our complicity, and to develop ways to both challenge it and create more just and joyful alternatives. Visit the Globalization page for in-depth information and further reading on empire.

Every two years, the United Church begins a new mission theme as a focus for study, prayer, and action, using diverse resources including the May editions of Mandate magazine. The United Church's mission theme from September 2007 to 2009 is "Challenging Empire: A Call to Community," inspired by the Empire Report.

The logo designed for "Challenging Empire" by Joyce Cosby represents this using the image of people working together to pull at a net that represents unjust systems that oppress people and creation. These include globalization, militarization, consumerism, environmental destruction, racism, and sexism. With this work, all of creation begins to burst free.

What Can I Do?

Focus on Empire in Worship

• Plan your Advent and Christmas services with Worshipping Faithfully in the Midst of Empire, available from UCRD.
• Integrate a focus on empire into other worship celebrations, using resources such as the Mandate worship service. [PDF: 3 pp/107 KB]

Learn Together

• Order the Challenging Empire: Spirit Connection DVD, available from UCRD and AVEL outlets. This four-part DVD, accompanied by a study guide, looks at ways of challenging empire today, both on a theological and practical level.
• Learn more about empire and engage with others in events that are taking place across the country. Let us know if you are planning an event of your own!
• Order the study kit Challenging Empire: Justice Seeking in Your Faith Community, available from UCRD. Two supplementary study sessions are available online that give additional options for adult groups using Challenging Empire: Stories and Activities to Transform Your Community.
• Use the workshop or either of the Bible studies (one on Ecclesiastes, one on Jesus' "give to Caesar what is Caesar's" teaching) from the Mandate mission theme special edition in a small group or committee.
• Check out the Journey from Empire [PDF: 4 pp/358 KB] board game for children ages 8–12, or order Seeds and Sowers, 2007.
• Use this brief guide to using the empire materials [PDF: 2 pp/81 KB] to find out which resources work best with different types of groups.

Take Action

Check out our Take Action page, and look at how you can speak out against globalization, ecological destruction, militarization, racism, and other kinds of oppression.

Policy

The report Living Faithfully in the Midst of Empire was presented to the United Church's 39th General Council in 2006, resulting in a call to everyone in the United Church to name our complicity in empire and to live faithfully in the midst of empire, and in a commitment to develop further resources for study and action. The report includes five appendices that provide theological reflection and a deepened understanding of the impacts of empire.

The Accra Confession*, Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth, is a powerful statement of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches that The United Church of Canada has committed to. Adopted in 2004, it states that God is sovereign over all creation and that the Alliance, therefore, rejects, “any claim of economic, political and military empire which subverts God’s sovereignty over life and acts contrary to God’s just rule.” This WARC pamphlet* presents the confession with additional context.

To Seek Justice and Resist Evil, a report focusing on global economic injustice based on stories from global partners, was recommended to congregations by the United Church's General Council in 2000. The report, additional worship and study materials, a poster, and a video series are available from UCRD.