Lenten Challenges - Engaging the Powers

As we arrived at church yesterday we were each given a copy of the St John's and St Stephen's Creation Care Challenge for Lent 2019. Adapted by Richard C from a challenge used at St Aldate's in Oxford, it is a mixture of daily challenges, meditations, prayers and talking points to help us tread more lightly on the earth. This week's tasks are a gentle preparation - I think week three is when I'm going to start really struggling: when we get to avoiding plastic wrappings on our food.

After the service, and before the monthly church lunch (in aid of Bed for the Night this month) Hamish P shared some of his wisdom on another challenging topic - engaging the powers that keep people across our world in poverty. He began with Desmond Tutu's point:

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

Then he explained the importance of educating ourselves on how the system works that keeps the poor poor and enables a tiny minority to be phenomenally rich, drawing especially on Walter Wink and Joseph Stiglitz. He'd brought a number of briefing papers, summarising key books on topics of globalisation, inequality and the economy. There is lots more to read and inspire action at www.engagingthepowers.org.