By Tony Morrison, Freelance Writer
RELIGIOUS LEADERS generally agree that the role of religion in society is to provide moral and ethical leadership, to inspire hope with the end goal being the salvation of humanity.
But in a deliberate change in strategy, the Church has sought to influence more by deeds than by words, says the Rev. Oliver Daley of the United Church of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
The Church, he adds, has had to respond to the urgent economic concerns of the society, sacrificing its resources to get more deeply involved in community projects. It thereby reaches more people working outside its walls than by preaching vigorously within.
Despite the growing perception of the Church's silence in the face of a nation in torment, insiders say the Church is actually more active today than it was 20 years ago.
The Rev. Stanley Clarke, of the Moravian Church, and president of the Jamaica Council of Churches (JCC), notes that "the Church no longer concerns itself with speaking merely about spiritual matters, but almost every church now is very actively involved in social programmes like skills-training, and clinics. There is hardly a church now which does not have it's own school, at least a basic school, as well as other programmes and projects."
To those who accuse the Church of being dormant, he asks: "Imagine for a moment, that the Church were to pull out of everything it is or has been actively involved in, could we all handle the subsequent dislocation?"
The social role
In urban areas the Church is the backbone of organisations like the St. Patrick's Foundation, Cornerstone Ministries, Missionaries of the Poor, and Food for the Poor.
In most areas of the country health and legal clinics, day-care centres, orphanages, old-age homes, shelters for the homeless and skills-training programmes are administered and funded by churches.
The greatest blow however, notes the Rev. Mr. Clarke, would be felt in education.
Throughout its history, he reminds us, churches in Jamaica have been a major catalyst in upward social and economic mobility through education, especially among the rural poor.
Throughout the country, subtract the Church and you also subtract the foundations of many prominent secondary schools like Knox High School and Community College, Clarendon College, Mount Alvernia, Immaculate Conception High School, St. Andrew High School, Meadowbrook High School, Oberlin High School, Kingston College, St. George's College, and the list goes on.
At the primary level hundreds of preparatory, basic and all-age schools would also disappear.
At the tertiary level, Northern Caribbean University (NCU) -- formerly West Indies College -- the island's third university and run in Mandeville by the Seventh-Day Adventists, would not exist. In addition there would be no Church Teachers' College, Mandeville; or Bethlehem Moravian Teachers' College, Malvern, St. Elizabeth.
The Seventh-Day Adventist Church, one of the fastest-growing denominations in the island, is also one of the largest social organisations in the country. In addition to NCU, schools at various levels, clinics, hospitals (Andrews Memorial, Kingston, for example) the Adventists, along with the Red Cross, provide the most comprehensive emergency relief service in Jamaica.
The Rev. Mr. Clarke says there is also the general anarchy that might prevail if suddenly there were no longer those who hold on to at least some shred of a divine philosophy about right and wrong.
