What did the bible say about the first being last and the last being first?
Well it's applicable tonight for this suite of interviews with the PM because the reason we were at the George Price Center to interview him in the first place was because he had a meeting with over 40 pastors from across country.
From all indications, the PM and the Evangelical Association of Churches were at a stand-off over the gender policy.
Today, he got an opportunity to meet and speak with these representatives, and after that discussion, we asked him about how it went.
Hon. Dean Barrow - Prime Minister of Belize
"This arose out of the first meeting I'd had with the Belmopan pastors, which as you know, was about the Gender Policy. So, that was, if not a contentious meeting, certainly a meeting that saw issues discussed where there were clear differences of opinion. As a consequence of that though, Pastor Richard Smith from My Refuge Radio suggested that in order to avoid misunderstandings in the future, it might be a good thing for me to meet with a country-wide sampling of pastors, and he offered to put that together. We fixed today as the date, and this is the result. It went extremely well; I was very pleased. I considered it a privilege to be able to talk to so many of them."
Richard Smith - Director, My Refuge Christian Radio
"I had selected 6 pastors representing the districts. If you know, we've been through some major hitting and lashing at one another, and it was at the point where you wanted to choke each other because the Church feels like Government is not doing what it's supposed to be doing, and the Government feels like the Church is not doing what it's supposed to be doing. This is our country; we can't continue to fight. We've got to find resolutions between both bodies. Both the Government and the Church are called for a specific ministerial rank in this nation, so I felt the need for a summit. If you are going to tackle difficult things, you must have a relationship, and if the Church does not have a working relationship with the Government, you'll forever be clashing. We're the conscience of this nation, and there is a role that nobody else can play but the Church. So, the Church has to come in line to start to sit at the table to disagree and agree under certain circumstances, without compromise. So, this meeting was basically that, and an ongoing commitment to start to play our role as the Church for the national development."
Barrow told us that he has agreed to meet with representatives of the church on a quarterly basis.
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