In Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, actor Will Smith called the Live 8 festivities a worldwide “declaration of interdependence.” He was borrowing a phrase from CivWorld Citizens Campaign for Democracy  that was launched in response to the September 11th disaster. Here is their statement of interdependence.

The Declaration of Interdependence

We the people of the world do herewith declare our interdependence as individuals and members of distinct communities and nations. We do pledge ourselves citizens of one CivWorld, civic, civil and civilized. Without prejudice to the goods and interests of our national and regional identities, we recognize our responsibilities to the common goods and liberties of humankind as a whole.

We do therefore pledge to work both directly and through the nations and communities of which we are also citizens:

To guarantee justice and equality for all by establishing on a firm basis the human rights of every person on the planet, ensuring that the least among us may enjoy the same liberties as the prominent and the powerful;

To forge a safe and sustainable global environment for all - which is the condition of human survival -- at a cost to peoples based on their current share in the world's wealth;

To offer children, our common human future, special attention and protection in distributing our common goods, above all those upon which health and education depend;

To establish democratic forms of global civil and legal governance through which our common rights can be secured and our common ends realized;

    and

To foster democratic policies and institutions expressing and protecting our human commonality;

    and at the same time,

To nurture free spaces in which our distinctive religious, ethnic and cultural identities may flourish and our equally worthy lives may be lived in dignity, protected from political, economic and cultural hegemony of every kind.

These are noble ideals for building the human community and worthy of the respect and co operation of the Christian Church. The original cultural mandate for God's regent of creation, Adam, was to keep the earth (Genesis 2:15) and to keep the people (Genesis 4:9) . The good news of Jesus Christ, is that in Christ, through his crucifixion and resurrection 1 Corinthians 15:3-4; God has made a way for that to happen.  

The problem is that the church often builds the community of faith by building walls to keep the human community out, thus neglecting its interdependence with the human community. The challenge for the church is to find the point of intersection between building the human community and building the community of faith.

The point of intersection is the marketplace. Most Christians at work spend most of their time involved in work that relates to building the human community. Rather than seeing work as a necessary evil that distracts them from their private spirituality or their Sunday morning public piety for building the community of faith, they need to see work as the place where God has called them to be stewards of His good creation. That is, people keepers and earth keepers, working alongside others for the common good of humanity and creation.

It is as they work alongside their fellow human beings, that they can share the reason for the hope within them. This is a hope that one day there will be a new humanity in a new creation, Revelation 21:1-3; A new humanity in which the ideals of interdependence that reflect the hope of organizations like CivWorld will be realized.