abbotsford.org.uk

Back on with Fair Trade

For every cup of coffee sold by coffee chain stores, poor farmers in coffee-growing countries like Ethiopia only earn about 3 cents. Yet the coffee industry makes billions of dollars ? Starbucks alone has already made more than $5.8 billion in net revenue this year.

To give its 15 million farmers a better cut of the profit, more than a year ago, the Ethiopian government approached Starbucks global HQ in Seattle and asked the company to recognise Ethiopia’s legal ownership of the names of its coffees. By owning the rights to its fine coffee names, Ethiopia can help its farmers negotiate a better price, potentially increasing income for the country’s coffee industry by an estimated $88 million a year. This would help lift millions of farmers and their families out of poverty, helping them to send their children to school and access healthcare.

Despite its much-publicised commitments to farming communities, Starbucks has not taken the Ethiopian request seriously. It’s time for Starbucks to take a lead and recognise Ethiopia’s right to the legal ownership of its own coffee names.

Please take action by sending a fax to Starbucks CEO, Mr Jim Donald.

Go here (Oxfam) or here (Make Trade Fair) to do just that.

Chocolate Teapots for Nov 5

Entering a story. Thats what comes to mind initially reading Ruth with we'll be looking at for the next couple of weeks. If you haven't read the book, read it now but do it all in one go. It's only four pages llong, or something like that. It's a good story. One that is quite alive.

As we've really hit the timing so well with the environment and eco-congregation stuff, this month it is more the ongoing story of displacees and refugees. Even human traffiking comes into the story. Naiomi and Ruth chose to travel to countries other than their own and live the consequences. It just seems another texty from the Bible that speaks of an age-old situation but is ever new in our contemporary world.

Read it and then imagine what song God's people could sing that would speak to the world.

A PS to our environmental month

This month there has been a lot in the news about the environment. Most of is scary. Just as a post script to the whole month go read this. It's kind of sobering. I'm scared because I can't see Bush doing a single thing about it. And because the delay between doing something and seeing the effect is about 30-50 years then it's downhill for the next couple of generations before we see a better future, that's if we do something now.

We've got a gospel task to do here.

Today's Service

Nice.

Seemed to work in my mind anyway. Even the Gap liked it. One said it was good that it was shorter. But it wasn't shorter. In fact it was longer. And another said they didn't need to text once during the service. Praise indeed.

Posting stuff on the blog later.

A wee taste

It is all-age communion tomorrow. Here's the smallest part of the institution:

One night… Jesus was sitting at a table… and around him were all his friends… He loved eating with his friends… He often did… and they were telling stories… and they were laughing… and they were listening to each other… and Jesus was smiling at them all…

But then Jesus took a loaf of bread that was sitting on the table… No one had really noticed it before among all the other food… Bread seemed boring compared to what they has just eaten… But Jesus took the bread… and listed it… stared at it… and all his friends fell silent…

You could hear a pin drop…

or a leaf flutter…

or a crumb fall…

In fact… there were lots of crumbs… because in the very middle of that silence… Jesus tore the bread in two… and crumbs went everywhere… inside his cup… down his sleeves… all over the floor… But it didn’t matter…

And then at night, a labyrinth on time and it's changing.

Little Angels

I've just spent the day with the moderator and had a good time. I don't konw about him but we all did. A couple of times he gave wee presents away to various different groups he met and they were wee angels made from recycl;ed glass from some of the destruction in Bethlehem during the second intefada. A church was hit by an Isreali shell and the minister asked young folk to gather up all the glass which they did, around the streets of Bethlehem and they melted it all down and made it into angels and other ornaments. They are here and click on gift shop to buy them for gifts or ornaments or decorations. It's a fabulous thing and they look fabulous. So if you want to make a real difference to people, be part of a story about resurrection and renewal, and light coming into darkness, then go purchase, support and be part of the jusice that is so rarely seen in Palestine.

Living the Questions

Had two different Living The Questions today. We did creation in the afternoon after the mid week service, and the evening edition concluded tonight with "Progressive Christianity". Both were good.

The new evening version of LtQ begins next Tuesday: hallowe'en with the introductory session in the Manse at 7.30. And will meet thereafter every fortnight. If you'd like to be part of a more questioning faith, that lives the questions rather than trusts in dusty truths, that grants permission not to accept everything but use our brains a little more, that doesn't presume eeverything you've been told or your granny held dear is necessarily appropriate in today's very different world and world view, then come along.

It's what you brain and faith were both made for.

Paradigm Shifts

Just had a CAOS steering group meeting and we have a conversation about Paradigm shifts. Anyone know anything about these?

David Bosch, a South African Missiologist, who very sadly died in a car crash a few years back, identified that the chruch was miving through a change in world views (a paradigm) from the Modern Era to the Post Modern Era. We were moving from a culture who did everything en masse to doing things individually, from all going to the one screen cinema together to going to much smaller multiplex cinemas, from all going to church en masse to choosing our spirituality.

However, not everyone is convinced that we are yet in a new paradigm but may be in the buffer zone between the old paradigm (moder era, Victorian era) and a new one which cannot yet be identified. Everything is in flux.

I go with that latter view. Nothing is settled or familiar. We don't know what we are moving into. The church is uncomfortable at the moment because it doesn't know the worldview that we are all moving into. There are wars and rumours of wars, there is much more unsettled thought about environment, trade, aid, justice etc because the cards are all up in the air and no one knows how they are going to settle.

Which, for me, makes it a very exciting place to be as much as a petrifying place. We have the singularly unique opportunity to shape things but we don't know how. We have a unique chance to be player in the recreating of the world as people of faith, but don't haave the language or the knowhow, or, dare I say it, the faith factor.

Maybe we are paying our part in a small way in Abbotsford with the styles of worship we have. Maybe we need a bigger role with our Community Arts Project or something like that. I'm not sure. But does anyone else recognise that description of things at the moment, or have other examples of being between paradigms?

Labyrinth

We have a Labyrinth on Sunday. 9pm. The clocks change and so we'll be travelling with time. No idea how yet but it will be on in the hall (even if the heating isn't getting through to that hall yet).

I'm thinking about changing time and looking through time and entering the darkness. It's as if we're entering the least stable part of the year, the most frightening and so we'll probably toy with that a little. So a mixture of darkness and time and the shift of these things and the darkness of God and the thinness of time. It's going to be great. Deep. Slow.

I know it is also the first night of Holy City which I forgot about but we may have some special guests with us on Sunday. So 9pm in the evening. You're allowed out late on the first night os GMT.

Chocolate Teapots for October 29th

Everything comes together this coming weekend with and environmental all-age communion. The passage is the same as todays: Job 38:1-7 (maybe extended a little more) and we bring together a month of environmental stuff by breaking the grain of the earth and the fruit of the soil.

There is a bit of a blank canvas for next week and so it would be good to put into practice some of the many ideas we've had through all our communion discussions and thing about bread and wine in an environmental context. This means I'm keen to talk about everything from hymns to the words over the bread and wine, from the worship space to how we distribute it, from music to sanctus.

Hopefully from the discussion we can take what will work in this particular context at this particular time and save up the rest.

So, as a starter for ten, how do the bread and wine link with the environment? Where is the sacrament of the earth? How do Jesus words of sacrifice speak to us about ecology and the way we live in the world? What does communion call us to do? How is our salvation seen and tasted in a "Bio-mass"? What colour should the communion cloth be? Should we use the communion table or a different shaped table? How shall we serve each other bread and wine?