Christian Aid Week

We started our preparations for Christian Aid Week early this year. Sunday 5th May was our Christian Aid service led by the children with Richard and Abi, picking up on what they'd been doing in Children's Praise the week before and sharing the story of the Good Samaritan. This was followed by a delicious vegetarian lunch and profits from the donations for this will, of course, be added to our contribution to Christian Aid this year.

More Lenten challenges

The church meal on the first Sunday of April, because it falls during Lent is always a bread and soup lunch (always billed as 'simple' but with sumptuous soups and lovely homemade bread). On this occasion we filled the time between the service and the meal with a lighthearted quiz about what we've done as an EcoChurch, and why, and answers were given before the grace so everyone knew the facts by the end of it - the winners were Jeremy and Don. We also challenged people to suggest some next steps, including action on the tiny open space between the school and the church which most of us had always assumed was the school's land - lots of suggestions were forthcoming, including some ambitious designs from some of the children, pictured:

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.

Harvest

Harvest was a long time ago now, but I forgot to put up these pictures at the time - the EcoGroup took over the service, choosing liturgy and songs to celebrate Creation, using homemade bread, an additional offertory prayer over the water, and collecting  produce for Readifood food bank. Mark's sermon drew on the readings, Joel 2:21-7 and Matthew 6:25-33, suggesting that harvest festivals matter today as a response to urbanisation, social isolation and the desire to slow down and reconnect with the natural world, acquring additional meaning now in our environmental crisis, highlighted by the IPCC's latest stark report. He invited us to understand Jesus's instruction 'Do not worry' as something very different from 'Do not care' - it means not allowing anxiety to consume us to the point of paralysis but instead to live hopefully and act accordingly. He concluded by inviting us to introduce new traditions to our harvest involving reducing our energy and meat consumption.