The Stand Up Against Poverty is an annual event intended to draw attention to extreme global poverty and call for renewed commitment to achieving the Millennium Goals.

Last year, more than 23 million people in 87 countries stood up and took action to remind their national leaders of their promise to cut poverty in half by 2015. It was the largest single coordinated mobilization in the history of the Guinness World Records.

Join the BFJN on October 16, 2007 for a local Stand Up service, held in partnership with the Micah Challenge.

Help us spread the word! Download a flyer here.

Earlier this summer, Charles Marsh, professor of Religion at the University of Virginia wrote hopefully in the Boston Globe

Today, in the national debate on faith and politics, there are signs of hope as an emerging generation of Christian leaders holds out the promise of a more comprehensively just and moral account of faith than the narrow agendas of the Christian right.

For those of us who grew up amidst the culture wars of the 70s and 80s, this is an encouraging vision. But, it is a vision with no small measure of responsibility for us. Can we who are critics of decades of misguided Christian politics also become agents of renewal and redemption in God’s world? And, how can we pursue that mission with integrity?

I take at least one clue from Marsh’s op-ed. He cites as evidence of modern American evangelicalism’s limitations that 87 percent of white evangelicals favored the war in 2003; meanwhile, “almost every Christian leader in the world… voiced opposition to the war.” So how did we get so far out of sync with the rest of the world?

We all know how easy it as, as Americans, to disengage. Most of us grab news in small bites. In my household, the BBC comes on at 9:00am, a sign that I’m late for work and need to head out the door!

At the same time, it’s not so hard to engage. Friends from the Boston area have recently traveled to South Africa and Uganda. And the Micah Challenge provides some exciting updates about Christian action in the Sierra Leone and Zambia (Jubilee Case Study)

We need to continue to deepen these relationships so that we can change course with integrity and get to the heart of our Christian mission, what Bonhoeffer (quoted by Marsh) describes as “two things: prayer and righteous action.”

How have you engaged this summer? What are your stories?

Ruth Padilla DeBorst talks with Andy Crouch about mission, God and history, and the expression of the gospel in all of life in this month’s Christianity Today.