Church and agency leaders joined with 1500 Christians in an ecumenical service that formed part of the “Put People First” event on Saturday. Entitled “Standing for Justice, United in Hope,” the service took place at Central Hall in Westminster.

Keynote speakers were Christine Allen, Executive Director of Progressio; Fr. Joe Komakoma, Secretary General of the Zambia Episcopal Conference; The Rt Revd Dr Richard Chartres, Bishop of London; and the Revd. Joel Edwards, International Director of Micah Challenge and former General Director of the Evangelical Alliance.

Asked to reflect on “the mess we’re in,” Christine Allen began with statistics that showed the global impact of the current financial crisis. An estimated fifty-one million people, she noted, would be made redundant, and the World Bank has suggested that 2.8 million more children may die by 2015 if the crisis persists.

“Lent,” she said, was an appropriate time for an event that sought to respond to this crisis, as it “is a journey of reflection on wrongs, of self-discovery, of turning, turning away form what is wrong and broken towards God.” For “so many people around the world, the system was broken before” the current financial crisis, she added. The crisis offered “an opportunity to think differently and to repent.”

Allen offered three “signposts” for considering a new path: accepting the poor as partners beloved by God, recognising our interconnectedness, and taking on our role as stewards of God’s creation. “Our God is a God of life and love who has a particular concern for the poor,” she said, and “poor people are our partners in the shared task of building a more just world.” Jesus asks us “to see our interconnectedness with and mutual responsibility towards one another . . . to love one another – to put the good of all over our individual wants and to cherish our common humanity.” And he asks us to recall that “the earth is the Lord’s and all within it. . . . When someone who loves us gives us a gift, do we trample on it?”

“Today,” she said, “is a sign and symbol of our desire to heal those broken relationships. We turn, we turn to God.”

Father Joe Komakoma spoke of the Zambian perspective on what was happening. The current crisis, he said, “highlighted to the whole world the scale of global poverty and inequality” Countries like Zambia, he noted, were “hit hardest” at present, as “Whereas rich countries can afford to come up with stimulus packages worth billions of pounds, poor countries have limited opportunities to cope with the current crisis. This is because we from the poor countries are still struggling with providing the basic needs for our people such as food, clean water, sanitation and decent housing.”

In the Copper Belt in Zambia, he explained, 3,000 mineworkers had lost their jobs in the last 3 months. This had in turn led to job losses in other sectors. At the same time, key prices in the cost of living were rising, and the fall in copper exports also meant that government had less revenue to put into the social sectors. The combination hit hard in a country where “more than half of the population is classified as living in abject poverty,” and, for example, 59% of the people already had no access to safe drinking water.

“The situation of entrenched global poverty and injustice now made worse by the current economic crisis is not acceptable,” Komakoma said, “as it goes against God’s vision for humanity. It violates the God-given dignity of human being.” To solve it, “all nations and institutions [need] to put people first” and pursue “right relationships for proper human development.” This needed to be done in a genuine partnership of rich and poor countries: “There should be room for everyone, even including the poor, even at the table of the G20.”

The Bishop of London spoke on the need to respond not only to the financial crisis, but also to the environmental crisis that threatens the planet.

Emphasising the interconnected nature of the world, he commented: “If we take more than our fair share of the Earth’s resources, and if we contribute to climate change, then it is going to be the most vulnerable and poorest people of the world who suffer first.”

“Loving God,” the bishop noted, “is expressed and tested in our love of our neighbour and in an interconnected world the people of Bangladesh are our neighbours.” The bishop also called for justice for future generations, noting that our current lifestyle is mortgaging “our children’s tomorrow to fund our today.”

He continued with a request to Christians to set the context in which political action on climate change was possible. “As the financial turbulence continues with its grievous toll of redundancies and broken dreams in the midst of efforts to re-invigorate the world economy,” he said, “there is obviously a danger that we shall be tempted to put off facing climate change. We can help sympathetic politicians and enlarge their room for manoeuvre by showing that there is a passion for justice among Christians which will not forget poor countries and the poorest people in the world who are the most exposed to the effects of climate change.”

“In particular at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen later this year we must press for agreement on substantial domestic cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gases in an effort to keep global average temperature increases below 2 degrees centigrade. We also need to support the efforts to help poorer countries adapt and develop in a sustainable way.”

The Revd. Joel Edwards took as the basis of his talk one of the stories Jesus tells to encourage his disciples to prayer, the story of the man who knocks at his friend’s door at midnight to request bread for an unexpected guest. (Luke 11:5-10). Several elements of the story particularly resonated, Edwards said. The first was the concept of “midnight,” which can represent the point at which one goes into complete darkness, or the dawn of a new day. “For the first time in human history we have reached the place where we are potentially irreversibly damaging our environment,” he stated, and we face key choices about our present status and potential future.

The concept of binding agreements was also significant. In the Biblical context, Edwards noted, “hospitality is a cardinal virtue,” and agreement on that cardinal virtue underlies the actions of all the people in the story. Edwards pointed out that in the Millennium Development Goals “our world has agreements, which we are in danger of reneging on.” We need, he told those assembled, to “remind our world of an agreement we made to be hospitable and just to everyone on our planet.”

Edwards noted that the “door shut, gone to bed” initial response of the friend would also be familiar to any who had struggled against red tape and other forms of opposition in the search for justice. He closed by emphasising, however, that the whole point of the story was the “power of persistence.” Many of the people in Central Hall had been present for the Jubilee rally in Birmingham and for the Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh. People of faith were involved “not just for today, but for the long haul.” Christians, he said, were called to be “persistent people for justice.”

March 31st, 2009 Put People First