Editor’s note: This is the ninth installment of a series of columns by deacons of the diocese addressing the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals.

By Deacon Rick Leanillo

It was 40 years ago and I was a young adolescent airman serving “God and Country” with a naïve sense of pride. Both my parents were naturalized citizens equally proud of their sons serving in the Korean War and myself in Vietnam. As the once-popular lyrics to a song went, we were “…on the eve of destruction.”

Others of my generation were in an uproar about the dilemma in America. They were no longer tolerating the status quo maintained by our parents’ generation. They protested America’s wrongdoings and got arrested, protested again and were arrested over and over, again.
While our brothers were giving their lives for the “it’s-not-a-war” politics in Vietnam, our fellow brothers and sisters stateside were setting a cornerstone for what would be later known through the United Nations as the 2000 Millennium Development Goals.

That generation of youth was fighting for equality for the African American and subsequently all races. They were fighting for equality for women in the workplace, promoting education in medicine and other academics for a healthier society, advocating the provision of higher quality basic education for our children, and so on. We were all advocating for everyone to have the opportunity to make our world a better place.

From the ’60s to the early ’90s, people of rich and poor nations had realized and were becoming actively concerned about poverty and hunger. They were concerned about education, equality, child mortality and mortality in general; about epidemics and plagues, and diseases. Additionally, they were equally concerned about our water supply and how to recycle, and inevitably what to do with our technologies at hand to assist in international aid and relief.

Out of the eight goals established by the United Nations, “Goal 8 is probably the most complex but the most important of the eight goals,” wrote Ian T. Douglas to the House of Bishops in March of last year. “There are too many structural constraints for the poor countries to achieve the goals without any external help. This goal embodies all of the efforts that rich countries will have to make for the Millennium Development Goals to become possible.”

As with the support of our Episcopal Church, our presiding bishop and the House of Bishops, Douglas added, “…Needless to say, I am delighted by the focus of the MDGs because I believe the goals both challenge and empower the Church to new levels of participation in the missio Dei, the mission of God.”

That confirms what the Episcopal Church is committing to and what we are capable of affecting as God’s mission in our own diocese. In reflection, all of these goals and the 192 United Nations countries committed to them are just what my fellow deacons have been expressing in this series of MDG articles. The commitment is tough, and there are certain goals more challenging than others.

We are, however, a rich nation, and we are a purely capable community of faith here in this diocese. We are not without the resources to make assisted and increased international aid and assistance in debt relief for developing poorer countries a reality. We have, in fact, been helping out in micro-ministries and parish ministries to some degree, and it may or may not have met our global commitment of 0.7 percent anticipated by 2015.

Coming closer to home, I recall a dedicated friend who, just prior to retirement, decided to commit himself to a purely selfless giving ministry. He convinced his family for assistance, and he convinced a number of merchants and physicians in the local community to donate various supplies and samples of medicines, even engine parts, and he convinced church members to make clothes. He flew back and forth, sometimes weeks on end, to a tiny remote orphanage known as Tytoo Gardens in Haiti. He, along with others, helped care for nearly 30 children, and they fed up to 100 children from the extremely poor area surrounding the orphanage. He was truly doing God’s mission!

Another example of God’s glorifying mission is the help we are giving our brothers and sisters in another faraway orphanage community. Each year a small group of orphans from Watoto, Kampala, Uganda, tour around our country, sharing their culture and witnessing and asking to share commitments to support not only their orphanage, but to assist them in their lives becoming future leaders of their own homeland. Within the same parish we have a family dedicated to a commitment for helping children in the Dominican Republic. For the past few weeks they have been patiently and diligently collected food, clothing, dry goods, even textbooks written in Spanish. They are doing God’s mission!

Now, what about parishes throughout our own diocese who have been committed to similar ministries throughout the world or even here in our own communities? What about ministries for our migrant brothers and sisters in Ruskin and Immokolee?

Just as in our diocese, we are doing great and wonderful deeds helping our poorer brothers and sisters throughout the world … but is it enough? By baptism, we have been ordained as Christians, and by God’s mission we have been called as the “preferential option for the poor, the sick, the outcasts and those at the periphery of society.”

“As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them (you and I) into the world.” – John 17:18. Let us be glad in it.

— Deacon Rick Leanillo is currently assigned to Grace Episcopal Church in New Tampa. He is a high school art teacher in Pasco County and is an oblate of the Order of St. Benedict at St. Leo Abbey.