Evening prayers for justice and peace

I wandered around the house in a rather desultory attempt to think about things I might need in Paris and ended up putting a mainly rather pretentious choice of books into my case - and also managed to leave behind the detective fiction book which might at least have had a chance of actually getting read!
Almost at the last minute I took this small book down from the shelves in my office in Ferney and this evening I have prayed in my hotel room according to the Monday evening order of prayer.
Each Day and Each Night by J. Philip Newell offers simple orders of prayer for the morning and evening of each day of the week. Each day has a theme and Monday's is justice and peace - you can get a taster here. It also has a lectionary of Bible readings for each day. Each day's morning and evening prayer begins with verses from the wonderful Psalm 139.
I know that in moving to Paris the one thing I shall miss most from my previous job is praying with others in the chapel on an almost daily basis. So I know that I need to find simple ways of encouraging myself in the discipline of prayer. I'm glad at the intuition that simply made me slip this into my bag, it spoke to me in all sorts of ways tonight to be praying for justice and peace, two of the key areas of work underpinning much of what the WCC does. It helped me look back to the Peace convocation this year and forwards to the WCC's assembly "God of life, lead us to justice and peace". It has been such a blessing to be able to pray with others so often in a very beautiful place, now I shall have to try and find different ways to frame my days with prayer. Much of what I feel at the moment has to do with a sense of very deep loss but also of profound thankfulness. The reflective Celtic but also quite Ignatian path through a simple office of prayer that Philip Newell sets out certainly helped me tonight to name that and stay with it a while. I'm sure the morning and evenign prayers will help me through these first few weeks of a very new existence.
It is going to be fun but it is also going to be chaotic and hard work at times. I will need discipline to make up in part for being less involved in preparing and leading public worship.

The opening prayer begins:
...O Christ of the lost
and betrayed
come close to me this night
that I maycome close to you

The closing prayer ends:
Who keeps watch
over us this night?
Who but the Christ of love.

Mao's Great Famine - the redundancy of courage or the arbitrary banality of evil?

On the last day of our holiday I read in almost a single sitting Frank Dikötter's brilliant account of Mao's so-called "great leap forward" between 1958-1961. Mao's Great Famine makes for fairly desperate reading and I am still shell-shocked from what I have learned from Dikötter's scholarship. The scale of the sheer wanton destruction of human beings and of the natural environment is beyond comprehension. Scholars disagree how many "additional" deaths occurred because of the famine and the violent terror that accompanied it, but it seems to be between 30 and 45 million people.
Part of me was fascinated to read Dikötter's disection of how power, politics and decision-making took place as the great leap forwards was implemented across the party. Part of me simply felt deeply, deeply sick.
Very occasionally individuals try to act against the system, to hide grain for their villages or their family, to question the irrationality of planting in a way that will kill the seed, to say no. Nearly always they encounter a brutal end. Towards the end of the book we hear about the speech of the one highly placed party official, Liu Shaoqui who actually questions and condemns the leadership - having seen the impact of famine on his home province. "History will judge you and me, even cannibalism will go into the books." We are told that Mao is present for the speech. We are made to understand that the leader will bide his time to have his revenge and this comrade will be purged in the cultural revolution. The famine proved to Mao that the party, and he as its leader, exercised almost total control over the most populous nation on earth. His detached political pleasure at the destruction is frightening.
Reading it I was reminded of the title of Timothy Mo's novel about East Timor "the Redundancy of Courage". The hopelessness of resistance in such a system - the hopelessness of even being able to find out what forms resistance might have taken when destruction is so massive and access to information is managed - the only photos of the time of the great famine are propaganda photos. Sometimes even the story cannot survive yet Dikötter uses the detailed information he finds in the archives he has been allowed access to, to try and tell the story of individuals and communities. He gives people, and the tiny shards of information he finds out about them, a story and a name. It is very moving.
However, you cannot read history like this as a theologian without feeling deeply challenged. There is a passing reference to hope about two-thirds into the book. How destructive hope was for people, giving them energy to struggle on. People hoped that "if only the great leader knew" then things could change for the better, for a more rational future. In the face of this level of destruction of human beings and of humanity how do you preach about God's care for each individual, counting the hairs on each of our heads?
After reading a book like this - I have no answers just questions.

Memories of Berlin - 2 - the underbelly of a city

In September this year it will be 30 years since I came to live and work in Berlin - just for a year. I came to work at the Evangelisches Johannsstift which is a large Protestant diaconal institution based in Spandau. I worked in a children's home as a volunteer worker. I was just 18 years old. The five "children" I was working with were aged 12-17. Until half way through the year when we started to talk about birthdays they all assumed I was about 30 ...
The children were a family, they had the same mother but different fathers. Being in care saved all of their lives. The two youngest who had been in care and a stable home the longest were coping well with their education. The others were struggling.
Being a tourist in a city there is lots that we choose to turn a blind eye to, hidden and obvious poverty, clear sexual and other forms of exploitation, old people pushed to the margins, people begging ... homeless people.
Thinking about the five young people I shared a year with, about the couple who lived with them day in day out and their three year old daughter, I feel a bit guilty. I know nothing of their current lives. I was just another carer moving through. Was I part of the continuity of care or the discontinuity of care? Did I show them they were loved and important and worthy of better lives, or were they just part of the well-meaning CV of a privileged young woman. Quite probably I got more out of my year than I was really able to put in. Thirty years on I recognise much more clearly how much they needed continuity of love, relationship and care. But they were in a system and systems only rarely offer any of that. Caring for and living with disturbed youngsters takes its toll on the adults, the professionals being paid to do the job. Often the system ends up dealing with their needs as much as with the needs of the youngsters.
Big cities are wonderful vibrant cultural places. They are also places with many cracks for people to fall between. All of our societies need to be measured on how well we are looking after and tranforming the lives of the most disadvantaged.
Being a tourist today I still remember that one of the first sides to this city which I discovered was a side not in many guide books.

Word of the day - métier à tisser - the loom of peace could also be the ministry of peace

It's difficult with a rather flaky mobile internet connection on my way through Eastern Germany to do the etymological research I need for some passing thoughts about the word "métier à tisser" which is French for a loom. In German it's a Webstuhl - literally a weaving chair. Given how at the Peace Convocation we have thought a great deal about weaving, weaving stories, weaving history, weaving the future ... it is not surprising that I should begin to think about the French word for loom. The French word métier is used today to mean profession. But looking at these etymological defintions I was surprised to see that the word has its origins in the sense of service or ministry. I suppose for the loom this means that that the métier ministers to the tissage, it "serves" the weaving, making it possible for cloth and textile to be woven.
So this set me thinking about how we have been talking about the Convocation, perhaps one of its roles was to be of service to the weaving together of just peace from many diverse contexts. It was a loom, being that loom was part of the WCC's ministry of peace with justice.

Where next for peace? How do we take the #IEPC forwards

The Peace Convocation here in Jamaica will draw to a close tomorrow and already people are beginning to think about what they will take back with them and how this experience can help motivate and drive forwards the peace work in our churches and well beyond our church landscapes.

Dr B has written a commentary piece for Protestantnews.eu which he begins by saying:

The International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in Jamaica symbolizes the emergence of a remarkable consensus among Christian churches on issues of war, peace and justice. Yet the task facing the ecumenical movement in the 21st century is now to work for a consensus on justice and peace that transcends cultural and religious boundaries.

The WCC's general secretary Olav Fykse Tveit is also setting out the way forwards more in terms of the Christian values of justice and peace being the core and truly fundamental values of Christian faith:

“I hope that from here we will have an understanding that we have some Christian values together that can be described in terms of justice and peace, and that these values unite us.”
Many churches are interested in clarifying the concept of how we as churches are peacemakers. I hope that we all can take back a renewed understanding of how the call to work for peace and justice is a Christian calling. This is actually what Christ has called us to do – to be peacemakers.”
The IEPC has been about gathering new ideas and a new sense of hope that is strong enough to help participants realize it is possible to make justice and peace a reality, not just a dream and a wish.

One of the things that I observe here is that the peace-making churches and groups undertake is on the one hand very grassroots based and orientated towards deep reconciliation between former enemies. As soon as we start working for peace we begin to see the inter-relatedness of all things, even local work for peace has to be global in its consciousness. Perhaps it is this renewed global consciousness and local rootedness which is in some ways renewing peace movements across the world.
On the other hand, though, at an international gathering there are also expectations and questions to the institutions, to the churches, the United Nations and the World Council of Churches itself. In the age of post modernity we often hear that this is not the time of institutions. Yet I sense a new breeze blowing, coming in part from the grassroots, from the way international institutions are using local information networks, twitter and crowd-sourcing information. This by-passes the national level sometimes and shows how the local and the global can mutually inspire and inform one another. The challenge then for any institution is how to be at the same time strong and organised but also open to the breath and energy coming from the grassroots. Bureaucracy meeting activism is always a bit of a challenge. However, here at the IEPC it does seem to be working rather well.

Stephen puts this rather differently and sets out the challenge for the WCC particularly in taking peace and justice issues forwards:
It is no longer enough to forge and to promote a consensus on justice and peace within Christian churches. Nor can issues of interfaith dialogue and cooperation be matters only for a few specialists, important as such expertise is. Neither is it question of simply seeking areas of common ground on which members of various faiths can already agree. Taking seriously the search for “just peace” in the 21st century means promoting authentic dialogue, one that may be marked as much by debate and disagreement as was the emergence of the ecumenical convergence seen now in Jamaica. In this process, alongside others, the World Council of Churches has a major role to play.

Meanwhile, at the back of the plenary tent in Jamaica there is a piece of net which people are encouraged to weave threads and fabrics through - weaving peace with justice. It will be taken back to Britain as a tapestry of our commitment and involvement. I've heard it said that the age of post-modernity will be followed and has to be followed by the age of creativity. As Margot Kässmann says in her opening essay in Ecumenical Review, peacemaking needs creativity. So perhaps each of us brought both our set ideas and stories to Jamaica, now the creative challenge is to take away some of our own story woven together with the story of many others. In the age of Twitter and Facebook perhaps this is easier than ever before as our walls are ways of weaving other people's stories into our own and ours into theirs.
So let's get weaving our take home souvenirs.

IEPC photo galleries

IEPC videos

Bread not stone, stone not bread ... the Bible speaks to itself and challenges us

Yesterday morning Peter Prove preached a thought provoking sermon. I suggested two texts from Matthew's gospel as we were preparing the service - Christ's first temptation in Matthew 4 to turn stone into bread and then the passage later in Matthew 7 where Christ says which of you would give your child a stone when asked for bread?
What fascinated me about the way that Peter reflected on these passages is how brilliantly the Bible speaks to itself, and how challenging it is to have as inspiration a book of life which says seemingly contradictory things. What was particularly strange for me is that I had chosen these passages because they seemed to me to be part of the same continuum and ongoing discussion. I had never really thought about the passages as opposing one another. In his sermon Peter linked the two sayings:

In the first reading, Jesus – famished after 40 days and 40 nights of fasting – is tempted by the devil: "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But even in the extremity of his physical hunger, Jesus rebuffs this temptation with the words from Scripture: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." But of course Jesus’ point is not – and cannot be – that food is not necessary.
His words in the second reading strike a different note. “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
Bread and fish. Not stones or snakes…

The Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance ,which Peter is director of, is running a Lenten campaign on food justice as part of its Fast for Life and Food for Life campaigns. I was struck by the idea about where is it in our world today, in our individual lives that we are trying to turn stones into bread? Treating people and the earth in a way that does not listen to God's word of life, that does not proceed from God's lips? Yesterday morning Peter posed the question like this:

In what ways are we today tempted to unlearn this lesson, and to try to turn stones into bread? Could it be that our artificial fertilizers, nutritional supplements, genetically-modified organisms and other technological fixes all in some way represent our prideful response to the tempter’s ruse? And that in our headlong rush towards agrofuel at the expense of food production, we are succumbing to the opposite but equal temptation – to turn bread into stone?

Sixteen years ago I preached with a view in the Temple in Divonne les Bains. I turned up with a stone in my hand to begin my sermon (on the woman taken in adultery ...), later I placed the stone on communion table next to the bread and wine. "Bread not stone" has long, long been one of my favourite refrains - even before I had read Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza - yet thinking once more about these texts makes me wonder whether my focus on bread not stone made me less able to see where sometimes the most life-giving thing is to trust in the word rather than break your teeth on stone.
I'll post a link to Peter's sermon once it goes online, you can find EAA's daily devotions for Lent here, and for now I'll end with his words:

In this Lenten season, what fast shall we choose? And what shall we offer the hungry
children: bread, or stones?

Bitter sweet with Seven Weeks for Water

This week's Seven Weeks for Water has just been posted and includes a trailer from the documentary film "Sweet Crude" by Sandy Cioffi. The focus is water and oil, specifically in relation to the Niger Delta.

Rev. Canon Dr. Ezekiel Olusegun Babatunde, from Immanuel College of Theology and director of the Institute of Church and Society of the Christian Council of Nigeria, has written this week's biblical reflection on Transforming the bitter water waters of Marah. Remembering the Exodus story of Moses making the bitter water sweet, Babatunde looks at the desperate need for transformation in the Niger Delta where oil spills are common place and water is turned bitter with pollution. Here's a taster:

Today, in the Niger Delta area people are also thirsty, searching for clean water in order to survive, similar to the Israelites in Exodus. Their situation is “bitter” – despite an abundance of water around them, they have no water to drink. Searching for clean and drinkable water is a herculean task particularly for women and children who often walk more than three kilometers to get water for their families. Like many other blessed nations situated in sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria has abundant natural resources, particularly oil, which has made it attractive to multinationals scrambling for its resources. Three decades of oil exploitation have caused ecological devastation in the region. Water provided by various rivers in the area has been polluted, making it undrinkable. ... The Niger delta seems to be indeed a place of bitterness. Yet its inhabitants have not lost their hope and faith. ... The Nigerian people need such leaders, leaders who can liberate them, who can bring justice to the innocent men, women and children who have been mistreated, and to those to whom access to good drinkable water and a good life have been denied. Leaders who will, like Moses, not only purify water but heal the people and restore their trust.

You can find further background to the situation in the Niger Delta here and an article on the dilemma of restorative justice in that situation.
Meanwhile to be part of transforming bitterness to sweetness you can join the oil fast, or sign Operation Noah’s oil resolution asking for the world’s biggest oil producers Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum to be removed from the Stoxx Europe Christian Index. You can also pray for "Just Water" and use the EWN-WSCF prayer resource “Just Water” for the Universal Day of Prayer for Students (21 March) and World Water Day (22 March) to pray for justice and peace for all people.It's just one week away.

Photo: Daniel Zimmel

In praise of Mariella Frostrup freshening up the feminist agenda

Sometimes I get bored with calling myself a feminist. It seems sort of tired and old fashioned, yet it is very much part of who I am and what makes me tick. I admit I have sort of given up smiling every time I get comments such as "when are we going to have an international men's day". It is not in fashion to be seen to be championing women's issues or rights. It is interesting that people are quick to moan about what is termed "political correctness"and slow to be challeneged by the clear inequality so many women have to live with day in day out, year in year out, generation in generation out.
So today I felt energised and encouraged when reading Mariella Frostrup's excellent essay in the Observer.
Encouraged because this is a woman who puts the case erruditely and passionately:

In the western world the greatest triumph of spin in the last century is reflected in attitudes to feminism. Our struggle for emancipation and equality has been surreptitiously rewritten as a harpy bra-burning contest while elsewhere, in less affluent parts of the world, the response is altogether different. From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families. At female gatherings all over sub-Saharan Africa you'll find enthusiasm and eager signatories to the cause.

...

I visited Internally Displaced Peoples camps in Chad where women refugees from Darfur were being raped daily when they ventured out to gather firewood so they could cook for their children. In Mozambique I cried frustrated tears as the 12 women farmers gathered around me raised their hands in shame and in unison to indicate that every one of them was a victim of domestic violence, a crime they were campaigning to have outlawed. And yes, this was only last year.

Frostup has also transformed her anger and sense of helplessness by founding GREAT the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust

this is not a women's issue any longer; this is a human issue. There's a new wave of support sweeping from the developed to the developing world through women joining forces and rolling up their sleeves to lend a hand. Weareequals.org is a coalition of NGOs large and small, which have joined forces to pursue gender equality as a tool for economic empowerment. Countries where girls are educated and women play their part in government are places where peace reigns and economies begin to flourish, and women are more interested in ending wars than starting them – there are endless statistics that prove this to be the reality.

Some of the statistics in Frostrup's article about the reality of women's lives globally even shocked me. Frostrup was born in Norway but has spent much of her life in the UK and what I like abotu her essay is the way she links the global statistics to local statistics in the UK and other affluent countries:

Two-thirds of children denied school are girls, 64% of the world's illiterate adults are women, 41m girls are still denied a primary education, 75% of civilians killed in war are women and children, causing Major-General Patrick Cammaert, the former UN peacekeeping commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to declare in 2008: "It is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict."
These are staggering statistics, and yet not powerful enough to make arguing for women's rights a respectable pursuit, rather than the aggressive histrionics of popular perception. International Women's Day, the one day a year when we're encouraged to celebrate what we've achieved and highlight what still needs to be done, conjures less bile than the F word, but also more apathy. When women are allowed to vote, work, choose when to have babies and dress in whatever fashion pleases them, what on earth do they need their own day for as well?
The fact that 700,000 people will experience domestic violence in the UK, and 90% of them are white British females, that there are sex slaves imported daily to this country who live lives of abject terror, that equal pay is still not a reality nearly four decades after the act enshrining it was passed, that the conviction rate in rape cases still hovers around 6.5%, that only 12% of the UK's boardroom seats (as compared to Norway's 32%) are occupied by women, are just a small smattering of reasons why women's rights should remain a priority

So on March 8 this year, which will mark the 100th anniversary of international women's day, how will you be celebrating women's achievements? How will you be contributing to helping women and men lift themselves out of violence, poverty and powerlessness? Time to feel encouraged to feel that we can make a difference. Thank you Mariella for finding words, passion and commitment. Thank you for making me feel less tired and old fashioned when I say I'm a feminist and for renewing my energy, just what I needed to start this week which I shall enjoy celebrating with my sisters.

Swords into Ploughshares on World Aids Day

Today is World Aids Day.

Here on the Franco-Swiss border the world has turned not red but white as the heaviest snowfall in decades hits this part of the world. Many of the local campaigning plans for the day have had to be rescheduled, that's weather for you.

Colleagues at the Ecumencical Advocacy Alliance in Geneva launched their Advent Calendar today. It's a thoughtful and beautiful resource with contributions from around the world. It lasts for the whole of Advent - right up until January 6th which is Christmas Eve in many Orthodox countries and churches. So you get to wait and reflect for quite a bit longer.

Today's opening reflection comes from Canon Gideon Byamugisha, Christian Aid's HIV AIDS goodwill ambassador:
"Our faith insists we develop a prophetic imagination that works towards safer, healthier and more peaceful, equitable and fulfilling living that makes war history."

Week after week I talk to visitors groups about sowrds into ploughshares - the key text from Isaiah and Micah which begins this year's Advent readings. It was a surprise to see the text through this different lens of health and peace. Making war history also means working for just health for all.

Reconciled diversity begins at home as we try to pick up crumbs ...

This morning the World YWCA and YMCA led the service in the chapel as they began their international week of prayer.

The service was drawn up by Terry MacArthur and Luzmarina Campos Garcia, you can find it at the end of the Week of Prayer booklets after the daily meditations. The service was a simple liturgical reflection on women building a safer world and used the encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman to focus our thoughts and prayers. She who says to Jesus but even the crumbs you might give to the puppies would be ok for me ... was it Chutzpah or humility?

Ana Vilanueva from the World YWCA danced both for mercy and with joy as we listened to music and readings from the gospel story. We received small pieces of brioche - as it came into my hand I realised I had not eaten breakfast - and we reflected on our lives in fragments, in crumbs - the bits and pieces nature of things. Later as we ate the bread we recognised the responsibility to transform even the tiniest crumb into hope.
And as I thought about the fragments and pieces of my life I realised that reconciled diversity - something we talk about so much in the ecumenical movement - it begins with me. With my ability to live with the inconsistent and jarring and lovely and loving and petty and good and laughing and weeping and clever and stupid and preachy and gentle parts of myself - and with all those pieces others are busy reconciling in their own lives...

Here is part of the text on crumbs from this morning:

Crumbs. We have so many in our lives. A crumb is a fragment of bread. A dispensable small thing that we easily throw to the dogs or in the garbage.
Have you ever felt like a crumb? Have your people felt like a crumb?
Despised, betrayed, dispensable? Have you ever treated somebody else like a crumb?

(The woman holding the crumb, takes it with the other hand and eats it) But we are not crumbs. We fight, shout, pray, get educated, hold together in the face of pain and suffering.
And we want more than crumbs. At this moment, while the crumbs come to you, you are invited to name the ways you have been overcoming fear, despair, exclusion, oppression, pain. Hold the crumb in your hands.

(after people get the crumbs)
Crumb, a dispensable small thing that in the mouth of a wise woman became an irrefutable argument changing Jesus’ way of thinking and acting. We continue being called to transform crumbs into bread, pain into company, exclusion into inclusion, oppression into liberation, despair into hope.
We are invited to eat the crumb we have in our hands as an affirmation of faith that our crumbs are being transformed into bread.

The Churches Week of Action on Food - what will you be doing?

Our friend Colin Williams recently moved to the beautiful historic town of Ludlow. We have yet to visit him there but one of the things he particularly mentions is Ludlow's annual food festival and the question of how to link the life of the church in to that.
It's an interesting challenge - churches are places where lots of eating take place, lots of common meals - the Bible is a book with lots of stories of meals, stories too of food scarcity and also of the promise of plenty. By focusing on food justice do Christians sometimes come across as killjoys, holier than thou? Perhaps. How can we find creative ways to hold the call for justice and the real joy and pleasure of food together. With the eucharist as our founding meal we should surely find it easier than we seem to.
Human beings need food and water to even begin to be able to live. Surely, we do not live by bread alone. Certainly however folk cannot live without bread or maize or rice or some real food.
Today news comes in that the UN is warning of a major new food crisis - the situation is likely to become even more acute for many of the world's poorest.
Today I also received the information posted below from my colleagues at the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance on the churches week of action on food where they seek to highlight women and food security.

And yet even as I post this I know guilt and have once more to recognise my own very complex relationship with food - as a fat female Christian from the over-privileged north. Today I am on holiday, travelling. By midnight tonight I shall have eaten two meals in restaurants - I'm in France, these are good meals, delicious food. Sometimes holding justice and joy together is more than hard work, it makes me feel like a sinner and a hypocrite. A sinner and hypocrite who is of course nevertheless invited to the wedding feast of forgiveness and responsibility.
It would not be better if my personal sense of guilt and shame also made me silent.

So do check out some of the resources below - the sermon writing competition sounds fun. Maybe I should give that a try.

Highlight women and food security during Churches Week of Action on Food

The Churches Week of Action on Food will take place 10-17 October 2010. The focus this year is on the vital importance of smallscale food producers, particularly women, in ensuring food security particularly for the almost 1 billion people experiencing chronic hunger.

An action guide and liturgy are available in English, French and Spanish. Join with thousands of others during the week to raise awareness about the root causes of hunger in this world and what we can do to help improve food security around the world.

The resources mentioned below are available at: http://www.e-alliance.ch/en/s/food/2010-churches-week-of-action-on-food/resources-for-churches-week-of-action/

What can I do?

1. Hold a worship service focused on food and gender on the Sunday at the beginning or end of the Week of Action. Use or adapt the liturgy available in English, French and Spanish.
2. Use the resource guide in English, French and Spanish to plan actions for the week, use as a study guide, and share with others to raise awareness of the issues of smallscale food producers, women and food security.
3. Print and distribute the prayer card to members of your church to use at home as the prayer before meals during the week.
4. Encourage a national letter writing campaign calling national governments to safeguard communal land against land grabbing using the EAA Model Letter. Adopt, adapt, collect signatures and send to the same people/institutions on the same day.
5. Enter the EAA Food for Life competition by writing and submitting sermons on food and gender for promotion in 2011. Details of the competition will be available online during the Week of Action or you can write to sermons@e-alliance.ch.
6. Use the information in the resource guide to write a letter to your local paper for World Food Day, 16 October, letting more people know about the issues of food and gender.
7. Share the research and analysis in the 2010 Right to Food and Nutrition Watch, with community organizations, study groups and media. The Executive Summary is available now, and the full report will be available from 7 October.
8. Tell us what you are doing! Inspire others and share your ideas by sending information on your events and actions to foodweek@e-alliance.ch.

Standing up against poverty

While I've been away remembering the Bible, colleagues at the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva were joining the world wide stand up against poverty.

A new inter-religious partnership for health will be kick-started at the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Review Summit in New York, 20-22 September. A small delegation of six faith-based leaders representing a wide spectrum of religious practice and public health experience will convey their collective concern for the well-being of society and their support for the UN-sponsored Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health.

You can see photos here and find the liturgy here.

Pondering corruption in the churches

"Corruption in religious instituions is specifically disturbing because these institutions and their representatives are worldwide seen as moral authorities, even in secualr societies. If even pastors and bishops are corrupt, who else can set benchmarks of truth and transparency?"

Christophe Stückelberger of Globethics.net

One of the privileges of being a proof reader is that you get to read books before they are published sometimes. Currently I'm going through an interesting upcoming publication called "Corruption free Churches are possible". It's going to be an excellent resource on issues of transparency, governance and corruption and I'll post a link once it's published.

It has set me thinking though. As a pastor, as an ordained minister, I am keen never to pretend that I am any different from others - neither holier, nor less prone to sin, nor closer to God, nor less vain ... of course we should be shocked when Christians and bishops and pastors lie, or line their pockets ... but I wonder about setting up the religious as supposed paragons of rectitude. Like other Christians I'm just a human being trying imperfectly to follow Jesus. As a pastor I've never felt myself to be a "moral authority" (even tho' I know I can be moralistic on oaccasions) though I have often keenly felt moral responsibility.
Perhaps that's the way forwards - Stückelberger's previous publications have been on responsible leadership - a corruption free church is possible if we all take our moral responsibilities more seriously. One of the things I find particularly heartening in the line that is set out in the book is the multi-disciplinary, systemic and networked approach to tackling corruption that is proposed - linking gender issues (the more women organizations have in leadership the less corruption there tends to be - churches take note!) with structural issues (obsession with hierarchy can encourage corruption).
A friend who recently retired as a church leader with responsibility for congregations and clergy said that one thing he had learned was how bad at managing finance many clergy were. How "responsible" is it of the churches to pay clergy low wages and expect long hours alongside moral rectitude?
Then I think of the time I lived through in the GDR after the fall of the wall and how everyone was obsessed with which pastor or church official had been an (IM) unofficial worker for the Stasi (secret police). A person who knew the GDR churches well remarked at the time that there was actually a much bigger scandal around how money, Western money and state money, had been used by the churches in the GDR yet no one was very committed to writing that story - interstingly noone seems to have done much research in that area.
So I suppose I am left with the thought that although I am not perfect I am still called to exercise leadership both responsibly and accountably.

There were these three friends ...

Rogate Mshana preached on justice and greed this morning, inspired in part by the harsh words of Psalm 12 and the hopeful but judging words of Habakkuk.

The faithful are people who show faith, are loyal, show awareness of the truth and are trustworthy. They keep their promises and “walk the talk”. The faithful are those who uphold the truth and stand for the accuracy of facts. Of course the term “faithful” also refers to those who believe in God. In short they are believers in a given religion. The text we have said together from Psalm 12 offers us a combination of these definitions of who the faithful are. As faithful believers, we should also seek to embrace the first meaning, by which I mean that as believers in God we need also to be people who show faith, loyalty, keep promises and are trustworthy. What is interesting is that there are many who are not believers but are faithful in the sense that they embrace the values just described.

Rogate always adds a story from the oral tradition when he speaks and this morning was no different. He challenged us to think about whether as Christians we accommodate the world or try to stay true to the gospel.
There were three Christian friends who set out on a long journey together in an African country which was a majority Muslim country, we'll call them John, Andrew and Peter. They walked far through quite desolate country and were tired and hungry as they approached civilisation. John and Peter realised though that the house they were going in to in the village they were approaching would be a Muslin household and they decided to change their names and become Abdullah and Saheed. Andrew decided to keep his name and remain Andrew. They were welcomed into the household early in the afternoon, tired and hungry. However, as it was Ramadan only Andrew was offered food to eat. The two friends who had changed their names to fit in had to wait until sundown for food ...
Rogate told his story with a smile and didn't try to get any moralistic message out of it - it spoke volumes about hospitality, and challenged us to think in many ways about what part of ourselves we change in order to "adapt" the values of the gospel to society.

Rogate ended by saying:

This is where the ecumenical movement has to stand firm, to take on itself the mandate given by God through the prophets such as Habbakuk, to rekindle the faithful to do the right thing. The ecumenical movement cannot be vague – the prophets were not! The ecumenical movement cannot be double hearted when it speaks about eradicating poverty and working for justice – the prophets were not. The ecumenical movements must not stop calling evil and greed by their name – the prophets did not. Simply put, the ecumenical movement has to be faithful to the mandate that comes down to us as Christians from the prophets and the psalmists and most of all through the life and message of Jesus Christ, the liberator.

Full text of the sermon here, liturgy here.

Identity and the rule of law ...

For the past couple of years I have been travelling with an electronic passport. I don't like it.
Every time it goes into one of those machines that reads it I think of the salvific possibilities of human error and creativity. today, unless you really know how to falsify chips etc then all of those folk saved by forged papers during the 2nd World War wouldn't stand a hope ...
The local passport and identity service is housed on the street where we are staying in Liverpool and rather surprisingly it has a street art installation of these small portholes of pictures of British citizens of very diverse origins, their names, places and years of birth are given. At night time the portholes are lit up in blue. Given some of the terrible rhetoric around "foreigners" and "immigrants", given how terribly difficult it is to get a visa to this country I found this artwork surprisingly counter-cultural - perhaps it is an attempt to foster multi-culturalism (now often much despised). Anyway these small blue portholes do give me some hope that all is not lost, that humanity still values decency and inclusivity - even when the terrible forms people have to fill in and the rhetoric that is all too often heard seems to give a very different message. Long live the blue portholes of a different story of British identity.

The assurance of things hoped for ...

Peter Prove who last month took over as the director of the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance,
preached about hope and faith at Monday prayers. He began:

... and we affirm again with the author of the book of Hebrews that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”.
This classic definition of the irreducible essence of faith was originally offered to an early Christian community struggling with persecution, marginalization and fear; a community in need of support; a community - like so many of us still today - yearning for concrete reassurance that the madness and lostness we see all around us and within us are not the last truth about the world, but only the next to last truth.

Taking examples from recent events in Australia and New Zealand Peter asked:

It's confusing. In which direction is the better country? ...
It's confusing. By what path may we approach the land of God's promise?

I felt particularly challenged by this phrase in Peter's sermon

Are we willing to be strangers and exiles on the earth, and to die in faith, not having received what was promised but having seen it and greeted it from afar?

Spiritual capital and educational blessing

This morning the Ecumenical Church Loan Fund led our worship in the person of their general secretary Irene Mutalima.
Our reflection was led by two people who collaborate in teh field of education Dr. Sam Rima from the Bethel Seminary in the USA who spoke about - Spiritual Capital, integral economics and sustainable development: The Path to Blessing! Sam director of the doctor of ministry programme and staff of the Center for Transformational Leadership. He's promised to send his reflection on in full to me and I'll post more about it when I've had a chance to re-read it. What was particularly interesting in both relfections this morning was the focus on blessing, how sharing power, sharing cpaital, sharing resources rather than accumulating things, objects or money can be the path to true blessing.
The second person to speak this morning introduced us to the TRANS4M Four World Center for Social Innovation, which is based here in Geneva. Education that Brings Blessing was the theme for Dr. Alexander Scheifer

When we talk about “blessing” then we suggest, however, to not only focus on the burning needs of a particular society, but also on the gifts (the “blessings”) that each society, each culture has received. Research and education, as we understand it, needs to build on and activate these particular gifts. In other words, the often isolated emphasis on “poverty”, to our mind, dramatically overshadows the existing wealth in a particular context, be it in form of local knowledge, wisdom, values or relationships.

Later over coffee it was interesting to hear colleagues talking about their own work in health, HIV or economic justice in similar terms. If we learn to value local experience, local knowledge and listen to people and not think that what "we" bring is the most important thing. Bringing out the value in others is where blessing begins.
Read more here.

Do we have the courage to take the lead on HIVAIDS?

Dr B has interviewed Dr Nyambura Njoroge in Vienna at the UN AIDS conference,

“Many of the issues we are addressing today, the key drivers of HIV such as violence, the cultural aspects, the misinterpretation of Scriptures have all been part of the discussions of African women theologians,” said Nyambura Njoroge, coordinator of the Ecumenical HIV and AIDS Initiative in Africa (EHAIA).

You can read the full interview here: African theologian on responding to HIV, gender and men who have sex with men.

It was just a tweet ... but it made me think

So far I've written over 600 tweets for this Uniting General Council but one from near the beginning still sticks with me - as I don't know how to search the tweets so I can't actually find the tweet any longer - but it went something like this:
"Zimbabwe: theology faculty meeting 15 minutes spent on theology; the rest of the time is spent on survival issues."

Then I heard later in the week about a student from Zimbabwe whose visa to the USA was refused for the Global Institute of theology, supposedly because he didn't have enough money in his bank account.

I realised how privileged I am. It is so easy as an (albeit humble) church bureaucrat to get blasé about international meetings, to not always realize what a fabulous and unique opportunity each one of them represents, to get worn out by work, to sometimes even get cynical. Then typing 140 keystrokes for a twitter update brings me back down to earth with a bump and that bumpy feeling has remained much of the week as we look in the plenary hall at the "remember the 73" poster at the front.

Earlier in the week I put on my personal blog a sentence from John O'Donohue
"The duty of privilege is absolute intregity"

I know that I bear the duty of privilege yet I am very aware that I am a long way away from that absolute integrity ...
All that remains is to pray and ask for God's grace, it's not the answer to everything but it might be the beginning.

It was just a tweet ... but it made me think is a cross post from World Communion of Reformed Churches blog where I've been writing some bits and pieces over the past week.
Photo by Erick Coll from Cuba - more to be found here.

Terrible news from Congo

A few months ago I was asked rather at the last minute to interpret into French for a fascinating planning meeting for human rights campaigners. The person I interpreted for was the director of a human rights organisation in Congo called La Voix des sans Voix. His name Floribert Chebeya Bahizire. A delightful committed man who knew he was working in desperately difficult circumstances but who seemed calm in the face of the undoubted difficulties. I spent most of an afternoon and day whispering interpretation for him into French. He was very gracious.
Today I discovered he is dead.
Meanwhile I am attending a conference with the theme witnessing to Christ today.
The price of doing what is right can be very high.
So I ask what did I do for justice today? Where did I speak truth? How did I witness to the costly gospel?