OCTOBER MESSAGE

OCTOBER MESSAGE

“Harvest Festivals”

This month our churches will all be celebrating HARVEST with five Harvest services altogether, three on Sun 6 OCT and another two on Sun 13 OCT. Two of these services will be Harvest Holy Communion services and the other three will be less formal Harvest services.

“Come, ye thankful people, come,

Raise the song of harvest home!”

These Harvest services will be an opportunity for us to come together to thank God for his faithfulness and goodness but also to think a bit about the responsibilities we all have to help care for this wonderful world that live in and to see that the resources of this world are shared out fairly so that no one goes without.

It is increasingly clear that our use of oil and gas in the West is driving rapid climate change in the whole world. It may not have so much effect on us in the UK, but the effects of more extreme weather events will fall disproportionately on the very young and very old, on the poor and the marginalised in places such as sub-Saharan Africa.

One quarter of the planet's population lives in poverty and is extremely vulnerable to changes caused by drought or flooding, to the failure of agricultural crops or to rising sea levels. If we take caring for our global neighbour seriously, we need to consider the impact of our lifestyles on them.

Many of us live quite comfortable lives but do we care for people elsewhere in the world, marginalised by global climate change? Our decisions about what sort of car we drive, how often we fly or turning up the heating rather than putting on a sweater could have a direct impact on someone already living on the edge. Once we are aware of that, how can we ignore it ?

Brian Turner … Churchwarden St Mary’s Knockin.