Prayers for Day 32 of Lent

Prayer l March 16, 2013

Pray for St Philip’s Centre, which is administering the Near Neighbours programme in Leicester, and also offers training to churches and civic bodies throughout England in inter-faith engagement and dialogue.

St Philip’s also works with CTC to deliver the Catalyst training programme for young people in east London. Pray for young people who met recently at the Royal Foundation of St Katharine (home of CTC), and for the relationships and activities which are flowing from that encounter.

Pray also for the other training partners involved in Near Neighbours – the Christian Muslim Forum, Hindu Forum, Council for Christians and Jews, The Feast, and the Nehemiah Foundation, which employs and trains community workers as part of the programme. Pray in particular for Beti and Rukshana, the Nehemiah workers in eastern London.

Prayers for Day 31 of Lent

Prayer l March 15, 2013

Please pray for Bradford Churches for Dialogue and Diversity, which is administering the Near Neighbours programme in Bradford and another of neighbouring towns – and in particular for Carlo Schroder, the centre’s Near Neighbours Co-ordinator.

In East London, pray for Waltham Forest Asian Seniors. For many years, this organisation has provided lunch and fellowship to elders in the Asian community in the area. With support from Near Neighbours, the lunch club has reached out to neighbours at Shern Hall Methodist Church – a simple development which is now building long-term friendships.

Prayers for Day 30 of Lent

Prayer l March 14, 2013

As we continue to pray for Near Neighbours, please remember the work of the Faithful Neighbourhoods Centre in Birmingham, and in particular Jessica Foster’s work as Near Neighbours Co-ordinator for Birmingham. Pray also for The Feast, a Birmingham- based project which is supported by Near Neighbours, and is bringing together young Christians and Muslims to build friendship and to share with one another something of what their faith means to them.

Pray also for the East End Trades Guild, a project supported by Near Neighbours in eastern London which is bringing together shops and businesses run by people of diverse cultures and faiths, and for Guild Organiser Krissie Nicholson.

Some facts about the Trades Guild…

Its 200 members employ 1200 people
In total we have a turnover of £77 million
Members put £17 million people’s pockets through wages last year, and £26 million of our supply chain supports other businesses in London
Members pay £1.3 million in business rates, and £5 million in VAT and £2.3 million in National Insurance contributions, every year.

Of particular significance for Near Neighbours…

We are the “face of the community” for international visitors and locals, serving 520,000 people per month. Our businesses know an average of 80 customers by name.
We have intimate local knowledge – we guide people to resources and other businesses, supporting each other.
Our relationships with local people help address social isolation and child safety, and our relationships with the police supports greater public safety and crime prevention.
We offer a quality of service based on in-depth product knowledge, and we build a loyal customer following.

Prayers for Day 29 of Lent

Prayer l March 13, 2013

This week, one of the focuses of our prayers is the Near Neighbours programme – working to build and deepen relationships across religions and cultures. The overall programme is run by the Church Urban Fund and the Church of England. Pray for its Director, Liz Carnelley and Grants Officer Andy Mathews.

CTC administers the programme in eastern London. Pray for Basic Sports and Fitness, a Near Neighbours supported project in Manor Park run by Olympic boxer John Bosco, which is bringing together young people of different faiths to get to know each other, develop healthier lifestyles, and work on other local projects together (including the CitySafe campaign, to reduce street crime and create ‘havens’ for young people in immediate fear of violence).

CTC resource endorsed by leading campaigner Ann Pettifor

Just Money l and tagged Ann Pettifor, debt, economics, Jubilee 2000, Just Money, Lent, Usury l March 12, 2013

Economist, campaigner and founder of Jubilee 2000 Ann Pettifor blogs on why she’s supporting the ‘Seeing Change’ course CTC has developed to help churches talk about money issues. (This course can be used in Lent, or at any time of year).

“We read the gospel as if we had no money,” laments Jesuit theologian John Haughey, “and we spend our money as if we know nothing of the gospel.”

It continues to puzzle me that the Church – in the broadest sense of the word – finds it so hard to talk about money and economics. The Jubilee 2000 campaign revealed how much the British people valued and wanted to participate in a public conversation about the global financial system and the structural injustice of third world debt. It also highlighted the relevance of Christian and other faith organisations to that conversation. Christian values – particularly the Judaeo- Christian and Islamic abhorrence of debt bondage or usury – proved highly relevant to the injustice of the global financial system.

Today the Church focuses much energy on matters like gay marriage and sex, and very seldom intervenes in debates about money and economics. But money and economics are big public, political and social justice issues – addressed throughout the gospel, which the Church is pre-eminently suited to talk about. This is particularly the case today, when money and economic systems, designed by our politicians and central bankers in the interests of wealthy elites, impose grave suffering, unemployment, debt bondage, homelessness, hunger and poverty on our loved ones and communities. They also embed the structural injustice of inequality within and between individuals, families and communities – local, national or global.

As American theologian Ched Myers* argued: “Any theology that refuses to reckon with these realities is both cruel and irrelevant. We Christians must talk about economics, and talk about it in light of the gospel.” Throughout the Old and New Testaments we are instructed to dismantle what Myers calls “patterns and structures of stratified wealth and power, so that there is “enough for everyone. The Bible understands that dominant civilizations exert centripetal force, drawing labor, resources, and wealth into greater and greater concentrations of idolatrous power (the archetypal biblical description of this is found in the story of the Tower of Babel, Genesis 11:1-9). So Israel is enjoined to keep wealth circulating through strategies of redistribution, not concentrating through strategies of accumulation.”

That is why I welcome this Lenten course. Christians are going to be talking about money – and also I hope, economics – and drawing on the many references to money and economic injustice in the Bible. I hope this will help us all think more clearly about what is happening all around us – so that we can act upon the principles of the gospel.

———————-

Churches who’ve been taking part in the Seeing Change course will be partaking in the 6pm Eucharist at St Paul’s Cathedral this Sunday, 17th March. Everyone is welcome to come and take part in the service where we will pray for the success of this initiative and the wider work of the Church in economic justice.

*CHED MYERS is a writer, teacher, and activist based in Los Angeles, and author of The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics.

Gospel Reflections for Sunday 10 March

The Centre for Theology & Community l March 12, 2013

The lectionary readings in the Church of England and Roman Catholic church diverge this Sunday. The Missal gives us John 8.1-11

A preacher gave a sermon against gossip in his church one week. He preached exactly the same sermon the next week…

…and the next! This time, some of his congregation asked him why he was doing this. He said, ‘I’ll go on to the next sermon once you’ve taken this one to heart!’

Just like that preacher, today’s Gospel underlines the message of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which many churches read last week. We are given the same message again and again, because we need to absorb it in our hearts as well as our heads.

As we were reminded two weeks ago (when we reflected on the Parable of the Fig Tree), there is a world of difference between the free grace offered in Jesus Christ and ‘cheap grace’, which allows us to continue complacently in our sin.

The point of guilt is to change our ways so we ‘go and sin no more’. We are reminded of this every time we look at the cross: God’s response in Christ to sin is not vengeance, but love. How many times do each of us need to hear that, before we take it to heart?

The Church of England reading for this Sunday is John 12.1-8. This speaks to us of one woman’s response once she had taken the message of the cross to heart – for she anoints him prophetically, for burial. This is how grace transforms us: we only come to such overwhelming generosity in our worship of God and our relationship with neighbour and stranger when we have begun to grasp his overwhelming generosity. “We love because he loved us first.”

Almighty God, as we stand at the foot of the cross of your Son, teach us to see and know his love for us, that in humility, love and joy we may place at his feet all that we have and all that we are, through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Prayers for Day 28 of Lent

Prayer l March 12, 2013

Pray for St Aubyn’s Church, Devonport, which is being supported by the Church Urban Fund to establish a pilot work club in the local library for one day a week, working with local community organisations. The parish is the most deprived in Exeter and there is a history of long-term unemployment. Volunteers will be recruited to help, and the aim is to set up other work clubs nearby.

Pray also for the Near Neighbours programme in East London, which will be the focus of this week’s prayer requests for the Contextual Theology Centre. Today, please remember its Co-ordinator, Tim Clapton, who works across nine boroughs in London, Southwark and Chelmsford Diocese to encourage projects which bring people of different faiths and cultures into relationship for the first time – or which deepen those relationships.

Prayers for Day 27 of Lent

Prayer l March 11, 2013

Pray for Gateway Church in Barnsley, which has set up a Debt Counselling service in Barnsley. They have been approached by another local church in Kendray to see if they could run a one-day a week initiative in their premises. The Church Urban Fund is supporting this 12-month pilot.

Pray also for CTC’s work in Manor Park and Forest Gate – and for discussions with local leaders on how to build on the exciting range of existing projects which churches are involved in which seek both to tackle gang violence and poverty, and to deepen relationships with other faiths in one of the world’s most religiously and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. Pray especially for CTC’s Assistant Director Fr Sean Connolly, Parish Priest at the Catholic Parish of Manor Park, and Daniel Stone (Church Based Community Organiser in the Parish and in ARC Pentecostal Church, Forest Gate)

Prayers for Day 26 of Lent

Prayer l March 10, 2013

Today is Mothering Sunday. Pray for the Contextual Theology Centre’s partnership with the Children’s Society – which is both generating materials for use in preparing Sunday liturgies (on Epiphany on the issue of refugees, and today on the issue of family life) and other forms of theological reflection.

Pray also for the wide range of Church Urban Fund projects which support children and families. For more specific information, click on this link.

Action and Passion

Prayer l March 9, 2013

Continuing our Lenten series on Contemplation and Action, the Rt Revd Adrian Newman, Bishop of Stepney, commends the writings of Henri Nouwen – as an antidote to the temptations of an activism which relies solely on human power and human initiative:

I’ve just finished re-reading Henri Nouwen’s classic ‘Compassion’. It was first published in 1982, but is still every bit as relevant today. Towards the end of the book, in a section on the ‘temptation of activism’, he talks about the importance of remaining critical of our activist tendencies, which can too often be driven by our own needs rather than the needs of others. As a brief Lenten reflection I thought I would reproduce what he says at this point. I take it as a corrective to my own implicit tendencies; only you will know whether or not it applies to you as well:

The most important resource for counteracting the constant temptation to slip into activism is the knowledge that in Christ everything has been accomplished. This knowledge should be understood not as an intellectual insight, but as an understanding in faith. As long as we continue to act as if the salvation of the world depends on us, we lack the faith by which mountains can be moved. In Christ, human suffering and pain have already been accepted and suffered; in him our broken humanity has been reconciled and led into the intimacy of the relationship within the Trinity. Our action, therefore, must be understood as a discipline by which we make visible what has already been accomplished. Such action is based on the faith that we walk on solid ground even when we are surrounded by chaos, confusion, violence and hatred.

A phrase from this passage has stayed with me: Our action must be understood as a discipline by which we make visible what has already been accomplished. All around us there is so much to be done to make the world a better, fairer place – it’s easy to swing between desperation at how much there is to be put right, and demoralisation at how little ever seems to change. I value the reminder that we are called to join in with what God is already doing, and to make visible what he has already done.

Let me conclude with some more of Nouwen’s words, which underline this message – that our action is a response to, and a participation in, the victory of our crucified and risen Lord. They seem particularly fitting, as we journey towards Holy Week and Easter:

In the new city, God will live among us, but each time two or three gather in the name of Jesus he is already in our midst. In the new city, all tears will be wiped away, but each time people eat bread and drink wine in his memory, smiles appear on strained faces. In the new city, the whole creation will be made new, but each time prison walls are broken down, poverty is dispelled, and wounds are carefully attended, the old earth is already giving way to the new. Through compassionate action, the old is not just old any more and pain not just pain any longer. Although we are still waiting in expectation, the first signs of the new earth and new heaven, which have been promised to us and for which we hope, are already visible in the community of faith where the compassionate God is revealed to us. This is the foundation of our faith, the basis of our hope, and the source of our love.

Amen to that!

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