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Hello
Hi I'm Joe.
Um...
I think we've got some stuff to talk about.
So lets do that.
J
July 4, 2005 - 5:17pm
(for information, this was first on my blog, but thought it might stimulate discussion)
The MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign is a bizarre juxtaposition of the church and the radical.
To illusrate this, two stories from yesterday.
Apparently, it is said that there were some last minute jitters from the organisers of the activities in Edinburgh. Nobody was quite sure how many people would turn up. Despite support from campaign groups, trade unions, radicals, anarchists and other assorted groups, in themselves these groups were only sending 50-100,000 people. This is not an insignificant number, but hardly what was hoped.
In the event, hundreds of thousands of church people dwarfed representatives of all the other groups put together.
Now to the G8 concerts. One memory for me is the number of times we heard the singers using the f-word.
How have we got to the world where such polar opposites share the same stage?
For the record, I think we need each other. A radicalised church represents an unstoppable moral community. A church which does more than sing hymns and hold prayer meetings represents a danger to any status quo.
I've been involved on-and-off in this campaigning since 1996. We've marched, we've written endless letters and postcards, we've challenged MPs. And we have refused to be stonewalled.
My part in that is minute. The other day I heard about church-based world poverty campaigns stretching back to the 1950s.
But it has taken the musician, the rock star, the radical, the media mogul to hit the general public consciousness. We may not look like natural comrades, but by golly, when they organise something the world jumps.
So, if - and this is a big if - we have finally done enough to change the world, if we have convinced the most powerful men in the world to change their minds, it will be the combined efforts of the Megastar and Everyman and his Granny. The ultimate combination of guts and brawn, mouth and muscle, professional and amateur.
The church has shown the radical the power and the stamina of the ordinary christian.
The radicals have given us a voice. And if nothing else, we have learned the phrase which we have been looking for all these years.
Poverty really is f-ing awful.
July 7, 2005 - 7:56pm
Thanks for your post, Joe. Great to see your input on the site.
I have a couple of friends and aquintances who went to Edinburgh for the protest walk. They also said that it was astonishing the proportion of walkers from some manner of Christian setting - the ratio of Christian Aid and World Vision placards to others was incredible, apparently.
I wonder whether it had something to do with the rest of the country focussing on Hyde Park, 'cause Christians couldn't dig the rock and roll...? ;-)
Yeah, I think you've got something interesting there - the co-location of Christian social action (which of course has a very long pedigree (world poverty campaigns may have been born in the '50s, but Christian anti-poverty campaiging stretches way back before then - that's what gave birth to the Salvation Army, the Shaftsbury Society, etc. etc.).
In modern times, though, with the post-Christendom dissenchantment, the Church has seen it's pedigree of care for the poor and the marginalised overshadowed by a conservative fundamentalist agenda and 'louder' issues like abortion, homosexuality and the like. As you say, those clusters of Christians who still recognise the call to care haven't dissappeared, and we've been given a fresh voice through the public voices of Geldof, Bono and the like - and found that our connection to the rest of humanity is fundamental to whether or not we're 'saved'. As Elias Chacour, the Palestinian peace and reconcilliation activist said, 'You don't go to heaven without me - we both go together, or none at all!'
Curious that we've been taught an almost heretical reworking of that famous verse, John 3:16 - 'For God so loved the world...' has too frequently been enactioned as 'For God so condemned the world that he sent his only begotten son, that the church might be saved.'
Geldof et al are declaring to the church (in general) that, like the emperor, it has no clothes.
Thank God there are still Christian people who believe that poverty is fucking awful and that salvation is all about bringing heaven to earth, here and now, and liberating the oppressed, the poor and the margninalised, not about pie in the sky when you die.
July 7, 2005 - 9:57pm
Hey Joe.
But you see I don't think it is just the fault of the conservative evangelicals. The problem lies in the fact that any large organisation gets to the point where the original aim/purpose gets subsumed by keeping the thing going. We find any excuse to give ourselves the fix that yes - actually I am special and yes God loves and applauds my efforts, whilst come to think of it - you're going to hell.
In the charismatic churches, thousands of people every year go to get their spiritual fix. In the liberal churches, thousands go to hang out and be cool. We all find these excuses which paralyse us to actually do anything.
This is the bottom line - this stuff either means something in the here and now or it means nothing. This stuff has something to say to the bomb victim in london or madrid or new york, the poor man in nairobi or bangalore, the factory worker in the chinese sweatshop - something that recognises the pain of their condition and commits it to doing something about it rather than talking in abstract spiritual terms, or it is entirely worthless.
This is the true gospel - that the oppressed go free. This is the true incarnation - that God comes and gives us the oomph and strength to make a difference in this dark and lonely world.
At present I confess it just seems like a pile of bollocks.
J
July 10, 2006 - 1:48am
I suspect that this post is a little late.
That perhaps that the moment of your passion or your post was and is no more.
The G8 protests showed that we are irrelevant to what a stink and a storm, was made by 'make poverty history' ( we make sense of history from a stance of looking back). We were suckered and slow to realize, and yes bollock-naked and useless.
Where did we go wrong - we were to polite and we planned on using protest and petition too much - and people in poverty carried on dying in the process of our brainwashing ourselves.
I was there with the anarchists and the road blockers, I was sickened by the churchy walkers and the paper droppers of leaflets, and yet Im no differant really I now realise.
Will the church wake up and smell the coffee and stop sucking up to government and start being responsible?
October 27, 2006 - 8:40pm
yo!
it's great to have sum marff here!
oops pardon my ps and qs... the stuff in silence that's about peace.. that tranquility.. that sense of GOD somewhere somehow infinite
and being with GOD in Creation amidst this mess we call the rest of our lives the rest of everyone's lives makin a mess messin up and somehow sumpink about nobody has to clear anyone's up cos it's all going to happen somehow someday just like that....
dunno how it is ah've started like that... just want to share a project a one of those GOD's Projected moments where there's me buzzin abahrt... it's doin my head in surely peace and love values are at the heart of Christian life surely this thing about GOD that actually takes us into this changed way of being pondering things in a new way of contemplation surely this is what everyone does and surely we all get to the same space.. until we get to church that is and folks starts to telling you what you should do... but they's not doin' it not in the radical ways that it affects my heart to ... I see the imprint of radicalism on my heart and something on the Spirit (Holy Spirit) from the Spirit ... I say that but I'm nowhere near living that...seems to go someplace with it and I looks around and finds everyone's the same? no yes well really yes everyone's the same but they ain't donnin their clothes off and standing naked in truth as far as I can see and I look on scared and waiting to see if everyone the first will.... not that I can say GOD inn't there ..cos that's not so ..but everyone's waiting to be told what to do... an then they don't do it ... and no-one's telling them what they should do... and that's right innit cos they should be responding to GOD ..asking GOD foirst
GOD's got me buzzin 'round diffren churches giving out the Tear Fund Campaign literature on the Climate Chaos issue..
why the Tear Fund why cos... well they the folks see Tear Fund and oh that's a good organisation they say... but sometimes there's a jarring with Climate Chaos... an' it didn't make sense cos GOD Created this Earth so why aren't we honouring GOD? and healing our place on earth... tell the folks what to do? I tell them to give the issue to GOD.. I want them to honour GOD.. give GOD the honour of Creation..
I take other literature too to do with the March on Novemer the 4th in London....
apparently there's two Christian events Operation Noah and the Tear Fund event... so you get a choice:
www.christian-ecology.org.uk/scc.htm
www.tearfund.org
is it that we are not responding to the sounds of moans of GOD's Created Earth GOD's Created people
do we say where is GOD in this ? do we comfort ourselves with the sign of the end times theory? (has there ever been a generation for whom this was not somehow a theme) do we expect the rapture to happen? and I am asking where am I with GOD..
I hate this stuff I feel so helpless
and am doin things I absolutely hate like doin my duty so I got an invite from my MP to come and watch Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth a must see for the Climate Science.... at the end of the showing a miscellaneous audience left silently... I've ever been to a show that left folks so churned up inside with nothing to say but silence it wasn a movie it was a documentary
so by a bizarre forray of coincidences I find myself in yet another Climate change talk and for the first time I get to hear a public speaker go on about how bad it is... along with the slick presented WWF speaker counting planets ...... ecological footprinting... I see one of the graphs it is the measure of humanity's ecological footprint through time since the 1960's and I go nearly hysterical...
I stand up and ask a question and that is this: " I'm not an IT person and I'm not a conceptual artist, but I am a biologist... (...just about)
"in civil engineering.. (an engineer had asked a previous question) "you factor in risk... in biology you have to factor in 1000 times if not a million times risk..."
I am saying..?. it gets reinterpreted for me (you can see I'm really good at this) you're saying the response is not enough right?
...explitive right that's what I'm saying...
the technocrat says: well the wwf has worked this all out, and no doubt if they feel they need to make an adjustment they will make one... I say what difference does it make whether you take as measure 5planets of crisis to one (as an order of magnitude differential to the 3+1/2 to one they are) I plucked 5 out of the air... afterwards I adjusted it to 7 to one... the point I am making is that you cannot predict the response of nature not like a computer programme and not like a building project ...(not that nature is the biggest carbon sink factor by far)... but I am also and because of this querying the point in the graph that they are setting goals to ... the point from the graph they are going back to -this is the humanity's ecological footprint since the sixties.... they have settled for the one planet impact ie that would be everything is in stasis ie all our impact is being absorbed... how unbiological to think this way I mean as a projected resolution!!!!!!!???
I need to say something about this I'm aware I'm goingonabit... the graph shows one planet impact in the 1980's the 1980's so since then we have been overburdenning the planet with debt we are not accounting for.. and a debt we cannot write off... the 1980's is also the time the political process became a global political process... and not by accident but because suddenly there was a sheering of consciousness that there was a multiple crisis between the sum of what we are doin (ie development... if you can call it that puh!! and the environment)
everything we have done since then for all the rhetoric -or lack of it has exacerbated the situation... in otherwords it's like there's been absolutely no political and effective response to that there is a crisis that's recognised as a crisis cos they keeps sayin there's one ... (finally!!!!) it's not a technofix we need now BUT a logistical one a visit to logic and wisdom those lost commodities from education that fits us up to fit in with a statusquo that's got the 'promised land' in it's sights of deluded dreamworld of imaginations that cover the truth of everything except that of the actualisation of the ego
why was I so hysterical????? cosss the graph year by year through from the 60's to the 80's showed a steady increase .... and after the political process that line continues by pretty much the same incline!!! so political process education and awareness has made not the slightestdifference... and the place we want to go back to according to their calculations is the point they are already increasingly no, exponentially worried cos we've reached a climate crisis....
they have not given any margin of error we should be aiming at least now for the 60's when we were utilising according to their figures 1/2 the planet's capacity to right itself... now that surely is a better place to aim for?
everyone's compromising..
what they are doing is the cosy cosy softly softly response ... yes there is a crisis but it's all under control if you just adjust your numbers
save the animals? get me out of here...
basically I don't go for the measure of the theory of planets that we have to get it on with one planet living... explitives from me
sooo... now I'm giving out the secular literature too..
this is one thing one place where we have to go we HAVE to journey together somehow cos we ARE all in this together
back to needing calm time with GOD and a need for direction and peace but not the peace that says everything is allright when I can see it's not ...but the peace of loving GOD and being loved by GOD and the needing to love GOD's Creation to show a right response for all the loving His Creation has showed me too
ooh it's turned out a long one
an' a bitova hysterical one
sorry for somethin an not sorry at all about we need to get things right and it should be that peace within that gets us there
GOD BLESS!
Peace and Love,
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