Just one step at a time

Jim Wallis was over here in the UK, and I’m very grateful a friend let me know he would be talking a church.co.uk about his new book Seven Ways to Change the World.

A few nuggets. He didn’t tell us the 7 ways, and although I bought the book, I’ve not got that far, having found a bunch of friends there too, so went to the pub after.

• When asked what had been the things that had got him most into trouble: Going the places you’re not supposed to go, particularly as a white, middle class Christian. Walking past those invisible ‘No Trespassing!’ signs.
• The 2 big hungers in this world are for spirituality and social action. And the movement that combines both of this will set the world on fire.
• People will get excited about this different kind of faith.
• We’re not to just ignore bad news. Revival is the good news for bad news.
• Politics is broken.
• The most effective social movements - Great Awakenings - have happened when politics has failed to address a major social injustice, and have always had a spiritual foundation.
• Faith is what moves the mountains that are the seemingly impossible social injustices: poverty, trafficking, climate change, racial injustice, and so on.
• Social change requires commitment from each one of us. We need to start in our own lives, lead in our communities and that will make a difference on a bigger scale.
• It takes time. Wilberforce put his first Bill forward 9 times, and it took another 30 years before the slave trade itself was made illegal.
• Charles Finney ‘invented’ the altar call; and got each new Christian to sign up to the anti-slavery movement there and then.
• God needs to be real and personal to sustain the commitment and faith that moves mountains.
• Hope is a choice. Cynicism comes from unsuccessful attempts to bring about a change, but instead of persisting, cynicism gives up and declares nothing can ever change.
• Hope means believing in spite of the evidence. Then watching the evidence change.
• Bad religion calls out of us our bad stuff. We’ve seen a lot of bad religion. We want to see more good religion, which calls out of us our good stuff: compassion, action and so on..

Oh, and I didn’t realise he was married to the REAL Vicar of Dibley, one of the first women to be ordained in the UK, who went on to advise Richard Curtis and Dawn French on the show.

Apparently we in Britain are all miserable. Or so says Oliver James in his new book The Selfish Capitalist. Mark Greene (from LICC), has a Christian view on the book. I myself haven’t read it, but would like to (must go to the library and order it).

One of my non-New Year resolutions was to spend less. And avoid M&S, which is where most of my money seems to go! I have plenty of stuff, plenty of clothes, and if I plan my meals in advance I can spend less on groceries. ‘Stuff’ doesn’t make me happy.

We hear a lot nowadays about spending less, consuming less, having less. James calls it Affluenza - we’re unhappy with our stuff. Money doesn’t make us happy (though not having enough and being unable to afford the basics doesn’t make us happy either). So though society is calling us to have, to buy, to own, to update, we’re being encouraged to mend, repair, share, borrow (stuff that is, not loans to go on fancy holidays), be responsible.

But things like Fair Trade require us to purchase in order to help others. I know very little about economics, but I’m sure that if we all stopped buying things then the Economy would crash and we would all be in very difficult situations (I’m talking about us in our Western, capitalist countries. I am aware that many countries already have an economy crash - if of course they’ve not already been bombed to the point of almost oblivion). Money does make the world go round. But at the moment it seems to be spinning on debt.

But I’ve digressed a little. Our purchases enable others to have a better life, is the theory of Fair Trade. But does that mean we make sure we’re buying fair trade groceries, or should be we buying more stuff for ourselves, our homes, to make us look and feel better by owning them?

How do we counter the call to be less of a consumer with encouraging Fair Trade? It’s almost a Catch-22 situation. I guess we can only resolve this by buying responsibly when we do buy. And hope that in buying less, but giving more through our choices, we can regains not necessarily happiness (because happiness is subjective), but joy.

Hmm… not sure if I’ve captured everything I wanted to in this post, but the basics are there.