FLAMIN’ STROOF!

Last night was a whopper at Broadway Baptist Church.
Elaine Storkey, president of Tear Fund gave the first presentation in the Lent Lectures series. The series is put on By Churches Together for Chesham, a big group of lots of churches, in Chesham. The clue is in the name people!



The evening was really something. It was probably the most well argued, convincing and disturbing presentation I’ve seen. Forget that Inconvient Truth movie!
Elaine spoke about a lot of things including climate change, fair trade, arms dealing, third world debt and how they are all connected. It’s hard to sum up all that she said, but here’s the best I can do:

“ If you live in the UK,
buy things in shops and ride in a car or plane ever - CONGRATULATIONS!
You are making an active contribution to global poverty.
So unless you truly believe that your life is worth the same as 10 poor people's
WAKE UP AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.”

Like I said, it was disturbing.



Here's my top 3 biggest shocks – I like to think of this as the “Wake up and smell the coffee list”:

1. Elaine said she had been on a trip to Congo. There’s been a war there, torture, rape, boy soldiers, hell-on-earth-type stuff. She was at a meeting with representatives from 50 Christian denominations (Catholics, Anglicans , etc) and they wanted to know why their ‘brothers and sisters’ in the UK church had forgotten about them. One of the group had been to the UK recently to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and had watched our TV news with interest. He wanted to know why all the news stories were about Iraq and the Beckhams.

OK, so in the UK we’re really into this one war and celebrity trivia, but why is the UK Church no different? Why are we preoccupied with those things too?

2. At the same meeting a rep’ said “Congo isn’t a poor nation, we have a lot of natural mineral resources. One thing we don’t have, and you won’t find anywhere in Africa, is munitions factories (places to make guns, bombs and bullets). Why does your country sell weapons to our tortures?”.

I’m stuffed if I know a morally upright answer to that. Do you?

3. Poor people in the UK are more likely to be malnourished then poor people in many developing nations.



Here’s what I want YOU to do with this information:

Pick something that you think is wrong, e.g. climate change.

You’re on the internet right now, so go to Google.

Type in a few key words and “Christians against” (e.g. Christians against Climate Change).

Check out some of the web sites. Find an organisation that sounds good to you then get involved with it.

Email our local MP.
Sign online petitions on Tony Blair’s very own web page.
Write a letter to Nike saying “Your trainers are officially uncool until you start paying a fair wage to the people who make them. So don’t expect to sell anything to me or any of my friends until then”.
Write to Tesco and say “I’d rather food cost a bit more and you valued farmers as much as you value me as a customer. Sort it out!”.

Or come up with your own ideas – but do something today.

(check out the next post for a very specific suggestion)