CREDO and Mission Enabling

The CREDO conferences, with which most clergy are familiar, are meant to help clergy and church leaders to hold a sometimes difficult life of mission and ministry together so that both the individual participant and the whole church benefit. There is a sense therefore in thinking of CREDO as a mission enabling activity. Still, that's not the way CREDO is generally described. 

In relation to the clergy and lay leaders of the Episcopal Church of Haiti, however, that is precisely what CREDO has done. CREDO's project in Haiti has been. 

From the CREDO website:

"... the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010 exposed a fragile fault line in the confidence of the Episcopal Church’s leaders in Haiti, some of whom were too traumatized to enter buildings for fear of them collapsing.

CREDO and the Church Pension Group (CPG), of which CREDO was an affiliate, stood in solidarity with the Haitian clergy and their families in 2010 as church leaders of the Diocese of Haiti attempted to cope with the aftershocks—both physical and psychological—of the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12 of that year. Soon after the earthquake, which took the lives of up to 300,000 people and left more than 2,000,000 survivors homeless, the Church Pension Group consulted with the Diocese of Southeast Florida, Episcopal Relief and Development, the Episcopal Church Center, and the Diocese of Haiti on a plan to care for the caretakers—the clergy and lay leaders who are confronting unfathomable grief, despair, and personal peril."

The program CREDO developed was called "Strength for the Journey." (SFJ).  A second iteration was a SFJ program in the Dioceses that were severely dislocated by leadership leaving The Episcopal Church.

In Haiti the CREDO gatherings have been a way of moving through and beyond the immediacy of the trauma of the earthquake and into a new sense of purpose - of standing and walking on into mission reborn.  In this sense CREDO has become a mission affirming program, helping people to articulate and build on deeply held faith. 

So here is to the CREDO team, people from Haiti and the US who together have worked on this CREDO conference. Pray for the clergy and lay leaders of the Episcopal Church of Haiti, and for the CREDO team itself. 

Here is a photo of the place of prayer at the conference.  I am very honored and pleased that a wood block print of mine is being used as a frontal and also as the image on the worship booklets being used.  All of which is because of The Rev. Canon Lee Allison Crawford, a priest engaged in mission here, there and everywhere.



CREDO held four conferences for leaders in Haiti, and now has returned this week to hold another conference