Last week, 'Tent City University' outside St Paul's Cathedral invited a CMS-sponsored think tank to give a seminar. John Martin reports on the experience
If you haven’t visited the St Paul’s tent city, think about it. I did.
The views of the protesters are hardly coherent and some are downright wacky.
So what should mission-minded Christians do?
We could criticise from a distance as some are.
Or like Paul in Athens (Acts 13) we can look for an angle so we can engage.
Serious questions
Occupy Wall Street and movements similar to the camp around St Paul’s are shifting the focus of public discourse in the Western media.
Media research is already tracking signs of a shift from preoccupation with deficit to wider issues of justice, fairness and sustainability.
Last Thursday I visited the Occupy London camp at St. Paul's Cathedral with my colleague Christopher Jones MBE on behalf of the Agriculture and Theology Project.
ATP is a think tank sponsored by the Agricultural Christian Fellowship, CMS and the John Ray Initiative.
It seeks to bring biblical perspectives to problems besetting world agriculture: land degradation, unfair trade arrangements and ineffective policy making.
Thoughtful questions: seminar participants included protestors and visitors
(Photo: © ATP)
We were there by invitation. The encampment has created its own self-styled ‘university’.
Tent City University organisers are casting their net widely to link up with networks which can address their concerns.
The 30 so people attending our seminar, a combination of occupiers, curious visitors and city types, had serious questions about unfair trade systems, speculation in food futures, ecology, commodification of food staples, and the challenge to feed an exploding world population in future decades.
Common ground
People wanted to know if GM or hydroponic cultivation can feed the world. They asked when it was ethically legitimate to eat meat. What about factory farming?
Should a multinational company be allowed to patent Basmati rice then insert a non-repeater gene, so farmers are compelled to buy seed from them?
When does farming hurt the environment and what can be done about it?
Christopher, a CMS member and former mission partner, and I met thoughtful people who in common with a lot of church folk share the view that our economic system isn’t working and most of all is failing people who are the poorest and weakest.
John Martin is CMS media consultant.