Following is a message from Brian Swarts, National Coordinator of Micah Challenge USA. It is also posted at God's Politics.

Tonight US presidential candidates will meet to debate foreign policy. Yesterday the United Nations met to discuss our progress towards cutting global poverty in half by 2015.

While most of us in America are focused on our financial mess in Wall Street, there is another major crisis taking place – one of life and death. Right now, the developing world faces a major hunger crisis that threatens to push an additional 70 million into extreme poverty. Just as the US government is taking bold action to stem financial troubles for wealthy banks, people of faith are calling on our leaders to remember their promises to the poor and to take bold actions to stem rising hunger and poverty.

In response to this need for Christians to speak out for the poor, Micah Challenge USA is launching Micah's Challenge to the Future President, an open letter calling on McCain and Obama to support a foreign policy that renews America's commitment to the pledge to dramatically reduce poverty, disease and inequality by 2015 (Sign your name to the challenge).

On Monday, I moderated a press conference panel of American and global evangelical leaders in calling on the UN and US presidential candidates to take bold steps to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This conference was in response to a prophetic Letter on poverty, written by senior evangelical Christian leaders in the Global South, representing four continents and hundreds of millions of Christians. The Letter calls on Christians in the United States to protest the lack of progress that has been made toward cutting global poverty. Yesterday, I attended a meeting of more than 70 national religious leaders to discuss how the faith community is going to respond to the global hunger crisis, which threatens to be overshadowed by our own financial challenges.

The clear consensus of both these events was that is the faith community’s role, more than any other group in the country, to remind Americans of our responsibility to those who are suffering most. Just as we need to urge Congress to remember families losing their homes as they bail out banks, we need challenge our political leaders to remember our promises to those living in extreme poverty around the world.

Micah Challenge USA, a coalition of US evangelical denominations and institutions dedicated to fighting global poverty. Visit www.micahchallenge.us to read the “Letter to the Church in the United States” and ‘Micah’s Challenge to the Future President”