#summerofjustice

[nudesmokingjazz]

⏸ A still from @armie_strong 's Summer of Justice film. #summerofjustice #summerofjusticetrailerishere #film

[ornoperationsaveamerica-blog]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH5BjiBISaw)

[justloveoxford]

fighting for a broken-hearted generation

Tom Christmas

I’ve been praying this summer that we would be a broken-hearted generation.

Three years ago I spent a chunk of my summer in South Africa. We spent a lot of time with kids who were living on the streets; searching for a missing girl who we thought might be a victim of trafficking; talking to people who were homeless and, they told us, close to death as a result of severe addiction to a deadly new drug, whoonga – while the wealthy dealers crawled past in their expensive BMWs; hearing about how the police would beat the ‘street kids’, put them in vans, and dump them outside the city so that the streets would be ‘clean’ for the western tourists who brought in money.

This summer has been quite different. Strategic ‘vision days’ with boards and new staff teams; partnership meetings with various charities; conversations with students at new universities; encouraging people to give to Just Love; writing up resources ranging from theology to leadership to impact assessment; planning and running training days for Just Love committees.

This year doesn’t quite have the same front-line, highly-emotionally-charged, staring-injustice-in-the-face kind of vibe that South Africa three years ago had. Having said that, I am so excited about what I’ve been doing this summer, and what the year ahead holds. Because I believe that this behind-the-scenes, justice-facilitation work will one day turn into the front-line change I have longed to see more of since I went to South Africa.

Just Love is really starting to grow and spread across the country – new groups in Exeter and St Andrews are in the process of starting up, and in 5 years we want to have 50 groups, with at least 50 students involved in each. We believe that this will lead to thousands of events being run; tens of thousands of volunteer hours being mobilised for the local community; hundreds of thousands of pounds being raised for other charities. We believe that this will lead to a culture shift among Christian students towards a greater prioritisation of social justice and sacrificial love - an immensely powerful and biblical witness. We believe that this will help to inspire and release a generation of Christian leaders and innovators in the charity sector; a generation of Christians bringing integrity and change to politics; a generation of Christians setting up ethical businesses and giving their profits away.

‘Social justice’ is not a phase we are going through as students. This is a lifelong fight. It will never be ok that people are victims of violence, that people are going hungry, that people have nowhere to live – and we want God to break our hearts for this. Psalm 97 tells us that ‘righteousness and justice are the foundations of His throne’, and we want them to be foundations of our lives. We want every Christian student to be committed to social justice and doing something about it, but not just while they’re at uni – as a national team we’re developing some things that will help you take the next step into a lifelong pursuit of justice. Watch this space!

We will be a brokenhearted generation.

[justloveoxford]

“An experience I will not be able to forget.”

Josh is a third year lawyer at Coventry University, and led the Christian Union there for a year. This summer he embarked on a holiday to South East Asia with four friends. It was meant to be a ‘lads’ adventure but something he discovered opened his eyes in a whole new way to one big injustice problem.

Jack Wakefield caught up with him over a pint after the trip to find out more about that experience. Here’s what he had to say:“We flew to Bangkok to begin our summer’s adventure and it was here that we witnessed something that I have not been able to shake from my mind; despite occurring over three months ago, it still affects me. One evening we ventured out in search of a bar, we crossed onto a street parallel to the very ordinary street we had been staying on and it immediately became very clear that we were no longer on an ordinary street. There were women (clearly sex workers) lining the fronts of every bar, calling out and beckoning to us, taking great interest in us as European tourists. I expected to see this kind of thing, but nothing could have prepared us for the sheer scale of it. Every bar on this street was a brothel and we must have seen over 500 sex workers in the ten minutes we spent walking down the road to find a bar.”

One experience, which particularly affected him, was slightly further down the same street. As they continued to walk in search of a bar not surrounded by sex workers, they came across a place they could not have prepared themselves for. As they looked inside, they saw a mixture of two groups: the first, middle aged white men; and the second, very young women – perhaps even children – dressed in a way that accentuated their immaturity. It was yet another brothel, but one with a difference. One where age did not seem to be a limiting factor, and one with a very clear cultural split – the white western men and the Asian girls.

Their natural reaction to such a sight was anger. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing, and were absolutely furious. It’s one thing to read about trafficking, or watch a video, but it’s a whole different thing to witness it with your own eyes.

“I know the facts on human trafficking as it is something that deeply concerns me, but seeing it before my face left me horrified and was an experience I will not be able to forget,” Josh said.

Borders with Thailand are some of the worst places for trafficking; from Lao and Cambodia, children and adults in poverty are offered the hope of a future, in the form of jobs, education or marriage. As they enter the country, they’re under the impression that a new, better life is round the corner but the reality is one of coercion, violence and manipulation. Girls will often be ‘trained’ by the traffickers by being regularly raped, and drugged into obedience. The high demand for younger and younger prostitutes means that girls as young as can be sexually abused over and over again in the cause of a day. Based on the International Labour Organization’s 2012 statistics, it’s thought that today there are roughly 8 million women and girls trapped in forced sexual exploitation and, according to the FBI, the average age at which girls first become victims is 12 to 14, but many victims are much younger.

The problem is massive. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, people trafficking is the fastest growing means by which people are enslaved, the fastest growing international crime, and one of the largest sources of income for organized crime; and UNICEF estimate that 1.2 million children are trafficked every single year. The US Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report in 2007 estimated that around 800,000 men, women and children are trafficked across international borders each year, whilst millions more are trafficked within their own nation. Of the victims, 80% are women and girls, whilst 50% are minors.  

When faced with such a horrific and massive problem. What can we do?

1. One thing we must not do is to stay silent.

Lets take the anger, pain and tears to God in prayer. His heart is broken for the state of our world and the harm we’re causing on one another far more than we will ever be. Lets ask God to share more of his pain for the world and to empower us to see significant change.

As well as talking to God, we must also talk to the people in authority. Write to your MP, to David Cameron, to leaders of nations around the world demanding action. We’ve seen with the refugee crisis that when a society finds its voice, politicians begin to speak and act in a very different way. This guide from IJM is a helpful place to start http://www.ijmuk.org/learn-about-advocacy

2. Open our eyes

Human trafficking happens globally and closer to home- it’s a wise idea to acquaint yourself with warning signs of trafficking now. As many of us travel abroad in the summer, several anti-trafficking organisations produced this guide to warning signs of trafficking to be aware of at airports. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/30/travel/human-trafficking-at-airports/ . Closer to home this guide from our friends at OXCAT on telltale signs is really helpful. http://oxcat.org.uk/open-your-eyes/

3.  Change comes at a cost, so we must be willing to sacrifice.

Sexual exploitation accounts for about 20% of trafficking victims, whilst 68% are in forced labour, in activities such as agriculture, construction, domestic work and manufacturing. Many of our goods will have passed through the hands of a slave, but it doesn’t have to be that way. When we spend our money, we’re voting for the kind of world we want – so lets begin buying ethically certified goods, campaigning for businesses to change their practices and refusing unnecessary items which were made in unacceptable conditions. For example, do you really need that next phone upgrade or could your current model last a few more years?

Charities and NGOs are doing amazing work, taking preventative measures in vulnerable communities, to rescuing victims and prosecuting those responsible. All of this costs money, and many rely on their supporters alongside various grants to ensure their work continues to make a difference. You can contribute to this by signing up to give regularly to an effective campaign.

One example would be Tearfund’s No Child Taken campaign. They’re asking people to fund education, training and support for vulnerable communities to break the current cycle of poverty, trafficking and exploitation. For £6 a month – which is the price of two coffees (I spend that at Combibos without a seconds thought) – you can protect two children from being trafficked.

Find out more, here: http://www.tearfund.org/en/nochildtaken/

[justloveoxford]

the desert and the garden #1 : an introduction

Naomi Grant | 01.09.15

For the most part deliberately, my summer hasn’t been jam-packed with activity for the first time in several years. I envisaged (and desperately needed) rest and reflection. What was unexpected was that my understanding and experience of solitude and prayer, especially in relation to justice, was to be profoundly transformed.

You don’t need to look far to see that the world today is full of injustice, sadness and evil. And you don’t need to read dispiriting hyperbolic thinkpieces on How the Youth Are Doomed Because Of The Internet to know that our world can be busy, shallow and incessantly wordy; and our existence in it often scheduled, calendared and restless.

Even now as I write this, I’m distracted. I reckon Henri Nouwen puts it best in The Way of the Heart:

‘it seems the darkness is thicker than ever, that the powers of evil are more blatantly visible than ever, and that the children of God are being tested more severely than ever…our calendars are filled with appointments, our days and weeks filled with engagements, and our years filled with plans and projects… we simply go along with the many ‘musts’ and ‘oughts’ that have been handed on to us, and we live with them as if they were authentic translations of the Gospel of our Lord…over the last few decades we have been inundated by a torrent of words… Words, words, words! They form the floor, the walls, and the ceiling of our existence.’

(I have refrained from quoting the whole book, but if you have the time read it all- in it Nouwen reflects on solitude, silence and prayer from writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers and scripture. It’s like healing balm to the soul.)

When faced with this world, it’s tempting to go to one of two extremes.  On the one hand, we can retreat into a bubbled isolation focused on personal religion. Here we can easily close our eyes to the communities we exist in and the injustices of the world around us and settle into a comfortable, unholy self-centredness. Or, the opposite, we channel all our mental and physical energies into striving for justice; determined to right the wrongs of this world. If we are not rooted and established in God we do it all in our own name, with the danger we become burned out, compassionless, prone to despair. I’m exaggerating but I’ve been in both places, and in the church we sometimes over-emphasise either action or contemplation.

But I’ve gradually been recognising that we don’t have to go to either extreme and that the contemplative/activist dichotomy that we can set up is a false one. In reality, we can hold contemplation and solitude and prayer in balance with active work and justice-seeking; and actually that’s how it’s meant to be: in relationship with God people of prayer become people of action with clarified motivations and attitudes.

We see Jesus withdrawing to lonely places to pray, sometimes for long periods (see Luke 5:16, Luke 6:12, Mark 1:35) especially before significant events in his life. When Jesus went into the wilderness and was confronted by the devil, it was a time of great struggle, but also emergence. In Luke this is followed by Jesus going into the synagogue to proclaim his mission from those words from Isaiah:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’

In Matthew what follows the desert is the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus proclaims ‘blessed are the peacemakers’. And of course, it was in the Garden of Gethsemane where he withdrew into prayerful solitude and submitted to his father’s will before the cross- the ultimate, eternal expression of justice, mercy and grace. The connection between solitude and prayer, and action and justice is deeply biblical.

[justloveoxford]

the desert and the garden #2 : solitude and action

Naomi Grant | 01.09.15

This connection between solitude and action has been lived out throughout Christian history. Many of the greatest people we might describe as ‘activists’ spent much time in contemplative prayer. Many of the people we might describe as ‘contemplatives’ were in prayerful solitude for months or even years, in the desert (as with the 4th and 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers) or alone in their homes, before they emerged with compassion anew; directly fighting for justice, or inspiring others locally and globally to do so. In the 14th century Catherine of Siena spent three years in solitude in her home before living out ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, visiting the poor and sick in Siena, giving alms so freely that more than once she totally emptied the family larder! Later in life she worked tirelessly for the reform of the church, addressing corruptions and injustices within it. Or Thomas Merton of the 20th century, who spent times in silence, solitude and prayer in a monastery, but transitioned in his later writings to writing powerfully and at times provocatively about peace, non-violence and nuclear policy at a time of heightened world tensions. He drew a helpful distinction between false and true solitude:

‘True solitude is selfless. Therefore, it is rich in silence and charity and peace. It finds in itself seemingly inexhaustible resources of good to bestow on other people. False solitude is self-centred. And because it finds nothing in its own centre, it seeks to draw all things into itself. But everything it touches becomes infected with its own nothingness, and falls apart. True solitude cleans the soul, lays it open to the four winds of generosity. False solitude locks the door against all men and pores over its own private accumulation of rubbish.’

I was immensely struck by this photograph of the Dubai desert. [1] But these deserts we’re talking about aren’t romanticised - they’re often a struggle, we are challenged about who we are and what we’re feeling and what we’re doing, about our relationship with God; but it’s in the emergence we are often able to find great strength to act. 

Retreating for weeks, months or years is impractical for most of us; but solitude and prayer can still be an important part of our ‘everyday, ordinary life—our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life’. Do we know what it is to be truly alone? Ordinarily, when I think about solitude, I think about removing myself from the world, privacy, ‘me-time’, recharging of batteries.  Now, don’t get me wrong; speaking as an introvert, those things are good and needed.

But what if solitude within the life-transforming relationship with Jesus can be about more, deeper. It is the place our scaffolding and distractions- our friends, books, phones, food, the internet- are removed and it is just us and God, where God has to be sufficient. Where there is space for all that we are and all that we are not and we can truly face ourselves and our brokenness. Solitude becomes less about moving away from the world and more about moving towards something; a transformational encounter with God and onto compassion. Where within the struggle we affirm God at the centre of our identity, we become transformed into the new self of Jesus Christ, and in emergence, become released for action. As Nouwen writes, ‘solitude is the furnace of transformation… and compassion is the fruit of solitude and the basis of all ministry’.

Solitude isn’t a silver bullet. It isn’t going to at once transform us into compassionate justice-seekers for whom every action is motivated by love. It’s isn’t all transformational mountaintop experiences of prayer - although sometimes it is. And it’s really hard –because we’re not used to being truly alone, yes, but especially because it means bringing to light what we would rather leave in darkness, untouched. So let’s be careful to avoid travelling into the depths of our sin and brokenness without journeying towards hope and Jesus, and let’s emerge to seek justice from that place of compassion and love and grace- because God first loved us- rather than wretchedness and guilt and despair.

Let’s not slip into that all-too-familiar quiet-time-guilt. Be released, not guilty. This isn’t about self-improvement or ticking boxes; it’s an abiding in God’s presence. It is solitude as a furnace for transformation, so that we can better do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. And let’s always remember the importance of community in this; working out the relationship between solitude and prayer, and action together. What exactly does a contemplative activism look like? What practically helps you pray faced with the injustices of this world? Where do you find your gardens and your deserts? What are your struggles and joys? Let’s chat.

[justloveoxford]

the desert and the garden #3 : moving forward

Naomi Grant | 01.09.15

Let’s be creative and realistic- solitude will look different for everyone. Maybe it means a day or two not speaking or without technology, or reflecting on a short piece of scripture in prayer in a local park or meadow or by a lake. There’s something about the physicality and removedness of an Actual Garden that helps me get away from my scaffolding and distractions and seek this holy solitude. I’ve returned several times this summer to the garden of the tiny St Julian of Norwich church near to where I live, where in the midst of flats and offices is a somewhat overgrown, largely unremarkable, but nonetheless peaceful little green space. Where here at the heart is Jesus, on the tree.

Of course our garden and deserts don’t have to be literal- I liked this from Alessandro Pronzato;

‘the crowded bus, the long queue, the railway platform, the traffic jam, the neighbour’s television sets, the heavy-footed people on the floor above you, the person who still keeps getting the wrong number on your phone. These are the real conditions of your desert. Do not allow yourself to be irritated. Do not try to escape. Do not postpone your prayer. Kneel down. Enter that disturbed solitude. Let your silence be spoiled by those sounds. It is the beginning of your desert.’

The examen, an ancient form of prayer which Freya taught us in Just Lunch earlier this year, is immensely helpful in doing this; of examining ourselves and our time and our relationship to other people (there’s a good video series on this from 24/7 Prayer here http://www.24-7prayer.com/theartofexamen, including one with a specific justice focus.) Shane Claiborne and friends’ Common Prayer encourages and equips in giving God ourselves to answer our prayers for justice- and there’s a good introduction to contemplative prayer in the month of September. Richard Rohr’s Centre for Contemplation and Action’s daily/weekly meditations also look useful https://cac.org/sign-up  (thanks for the link, Josh).

This time in solitude and prayer might be a key part of a journey towards a more contemplative activism and activist contemplation that’s both richly historical and profoundly forward-looking, which we perhaps neglect too often. This is a part of what is means to live out Romans 12, a practical, workable response to that call to present ourselves to God, to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. It is a part of what it means to dwell and to rest in God’s presence and nature, a part of learning the unforced rhythms of grace. It is a part of impressing upon us the life and character of Jesus; in becoming who God wants us to be and getting us to do what God wants us to do.

Rooting our activism and active service in prayer and time alone with God is key to avoiding social justice burnout, and key to not slipping all-too-easily into the false always-trying-harder, being-more mindset. In solitude we truly abide in God, we remind ourselves of his grace, and can be transformed to partner with him in living justly in our world, manifesting God rather than our false self. In contemplation and solitude we can find the impetus to act and can emerge with more compassion-filled hearts, more conscious of the needs around us, so that more and more we can ‘become the answer to our prayers’.

To finish, from yesterday’s Common Prayer: ‘Lord, help us not to conform to the patterns of this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Give us a new imagination so that we might live in ways that do not compute to the logic of materialism and militarism. Make us into holy nonconformists so that we might see the kingdoms of this world transformed into your glorious kingdom.’

[justloveoxford]

Community Organising: helping others to help themselves

Josh Parkih

Since a bunch of Just Lovers have done the Jellicoe internship this summer we got in contact to hear what they got up to, the wonderful Josh Parikh has headed our request by the form of self interview, what else would you expect!

Hey there!

I hear you’ve been on a month long internship Josh?

That’s right- I’ve been on the Jellicoe internship with the Centre for Theology and Community, along with a load of other great Just Lovers: David Lawrence, Abby Taylor-Baptie and Hannah Coates. Jellicoe sees a group of students who come to London to learn the skills of community organising, and to use those skills to practically benefit churches in East London.

What is community organising, then?

That’s a great question, I’m glad you asked. Community organising is, in my imperfect definition, where people help others to help themselves (rather than speaking on behalf of others) by empowering them to pursue their self-interests for the common good.

Power? Self-interest? They don’t sound very Christian…. 

Well, by power here, we mean the ability to act, and self-interest is appealing to our desires. These are really morally neutral concepts- and while power can be enormously destructive, it can also be used for enormous good. Similarly, I think self-interest is morally neutral- what is wrong is selfishness. People are also corrupted by powerlessness, just as by power, and by duty just as by self-interest. I’m convinced that the problem is the human heart and our sinful desires, not power and self-interest themselves.

OK, that seems fair. So what did you get up to, and how did you find it?

Speaking for me- I was with a church called St John’s Hoxton, which is truly one of my favourite churches that I’ve ever been to. It’s a really exciting place; it’s grown from about 30 to around 150-200 over the last 5 years, aiming to be “a beacon of hope for Hoxton”, and the people there were just such amazing and beautiful human beings. Hoxton itself is a weird place of contrasts; you’ll walk down past an art gallery which has hosted Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst to John Newton’s (slave trader turned priest) old house to an estate where there was a shooting last week. In this weird and wonderful context, St John’s does a marvellous job.

Me and Jeancy (the other intern in Hoxton) had two big projects; one was a road safety project and another was to organise a big garden party for the church. The road safety project was about zebra crossing on a local commuter route, where there have been problems between speedy cyclists and schoolchildren; so for a morning, we helped some school mums to give out lollipops to cyclists who waited for children and red-carded cyclists who didn’t. The garden party was a church-wide party to help to develop relationships across generations and in generations, in a fast-growing church. Both were great successes, with great feedback from all. In terms of positive results: we had a great time and hopefully planted some seeds for future community organising among church members and school mums, and the actual events were an amazing success. A really top month.

Here are some thoughts from fellow interns...

David Lawrence: I worked in St Mary's, Primrose Hill, where I looked specifically at issues of personal debt, mental health and credit unions, built links with the congregation in preparation for the Buxton Leadership Programme, and where I will be doing congregational development in that church while working in Parliament.

How did I find it? Perhaps the main theme that I found in my work was that the church is unique in being a place where rich meet poor. A stone's throw away from the mansions of Elsworthy Road are tower blocks of social housing. St Mary's is situated at the centre of these two worlds, so it is the only place in Primrose Hill where the rich and poor come together. This means that there is huge potential for the church's mission - as stories are shared, a common ground is developed between people different economic backgrounds, and hopefully this will lead to practical outcomes.

Abby Taylor Baptie: I spent the month at St Peter’s Bethnal Green building on the work done by previous interns regarding road safety, and also looking at ways to build communication between the church and the congregation and wider community. St Peter’s was a brilliant place to be working, partially because of the friendliness and enthusiasm of the congregation, and also because of the amount of change currently occurring in the community – it was fascinating to hear about the positives and negatives of these changes. The internship was unlike anything I have done before, and I found the concept of community organising really interesting. I really like the concept of people in a community coming together and speaking for themselves rather than a person, who hasn’t had their experiences, speaking for them. Furthermore, I was really inspired by the amount that the people I spoke to care about their community. Bethnal Green is changing very quickly, and the change has left some people feeling like they no longer have a place in the community, and this was really difficult to hear and led to me focusing on practical ways of making people feel more involved, for example ways of improving communication. The church is a place where people from all walks of life come together, and where everyone belongs, and it was exciting to see members of the church and community engaging with and rising to the challenge of helping everyone see that they have a place in Bethnal Green.

Overall, we had an amazing time, learning and living justice.