During an interview with Rev. Stanford Simons, Dickon Mitchell, the Prime Minister of Grenada, said he saw the church as a crucial component of humanizing politics. Simons asked Mitchell, How does the church help your government in what it has set out to accomplish? Mitchell answered that question.
I think the church is key because the church comes from a role of service. And I think one of the things that we have to galvanize in Grenada is making sure that our culture is that of service and we don’t simply wait for the government or feel the government has to do everything. The government also has to help in that regard.
Unfortunately, we’ve created a culture where we give people an impression that the government can solve everything and certainly it can’t. So I think the church as an institution that is of service and that is in the community, in my view, would be pivotal to helping what I would call humanized politics.
We have to get to the point where we can hold our politicians accountable, where the politicians are people of integrity and there isn’t rampant skepticism that they always steal and they always up to no good but the politicians themselves have to demonstrate that they have integrity and that they’re here to serve and that they’re in the community. So I really see it as a reciprocal partnership.
I think just making ourselves more accessible and just remaining in the community so that people know that we are real, that we are authentic, that we care about the challenges and that we are trying to find common solutions together, I think will truly help.
The other thing is the church itself, in my view, has to advocate for the right things, has to be open about calling out stuff that isn’t healthy for the nation and sometimes taking the flack, because, you see, if we just turn a blind eye and bury our heads in the sand and hope things will improve, It’s not.
So we have to be able to advocate for what is right, we have to be able to advocate for the values that are important to us and be able to see we are doing it because we part of the society. The church isn’t living on a different planet. The people who are members of the church are going to the same schools, they are working in the same environments as the rest of the persons who may not be involved in church. So at the end of the day, you’re going to be affected the same way.
If the roads are terrible, you know, there isn’t some divine intervention that says churchgoers will ride on the path without the pothole, we are all going to be riding on the same roads. If the cost of living is going up, you know, we’re all going to be affected by it. If our young people are on drugs or drinking alcohol excessively and so on, then again, they’re our children.
So to me, that is one of the things we have to recognize that the dialogue and the conversations must happen in order to ensure that we can get a clear sense of what it is we’re trying to achieve together.
