Prophets of credit crunch and climate crisis

For the past few weeks in the notices we've been advertising a conference in Oxford, held today, on Food and Faith: Making the Connections. I know Ali planned to be there and hoped to bring back inspiration for church services. For last night we had invited some friends round to dinner and they asked to bring along an additional guest, Elizabeth Perry, who was staying over - it turned out that one of our friends, Maranda, and Elizabeth were both leading workshops at today's conference.

Inevitably we got to discussing global matters - Elizabeth asked how prepared we felt churches are for 5th December, to which most of replied 'what's happening then?'. The answer is a demonstration on climate change organised by the stop climate chaos coalition in the run up to the Copenhagen summit. Since most of us were unaware of this I commented on the similar sense I had felt that Operation Noah's 'ark campaign' doesn't seem to be getting much coverage.

Someone commented that nonetheless ON's Ann Pettifor and Mark Dowd are particularly good campaigners. Moreover, while commentators on the radio may be exclaiming that no one had predicted a credit crisis as bad as this, actually Ann Pettifor did exactly that in the clearly titled The Coming First World Debt Crisis in 2006 (having searched a bit on the internet since I find that she first predicted it in The Real World Economic Outlook: The Legacy of Globalization - Debt and Deflation, back in 2003 - also she has an interesting blog on the subject). I find myself thinking of other prophets ignored in our heritage.

[Coincidentally four days later I have been bombarded with e-mails about Operation Noah's four minte U-tube video - do take a look.]

More interesting information emerging in the evening is that Elizabeth runs a wonderfully useful looking online resource for Sunday teaching - Development matters: linked lectionary - which has ways of linking in the lectionary readings to development issues for every week including up to date facts and figures on the issues at stake. I've got files full of development literature I'm never sure about using because I don't know how accurate it is any more, so when we finally get round to linking Exclaimers lessons to the lectionary I'm sure I'll be using this for them too.