Mission Awareness Day will take place on Sunday 8th May at Adelaide Place. The purpose of the day is to use and extend our main time of meeting on Sunday morning, when we gather for united worship, to discover and stimulate the ‘mission’ awareness of our congregation.

For an average sized congregation I suspect we have a more than considerable interest in mission in all its forms, but we want more than inclinations to guide our mission planning and support.

Our hope is to gather information about individual interest and involvement, to discover how much our church wants to be aware of mission enterprise and to highlight the mission activities that we are already engaged in by using personal reports, Skype contacts with members actually involved in other parts of the world.

Therefore through multi-media, personal stories, Scripture, worship and Communion, as well as a shared meal together we want to really get to grips with this issue in a meaningful and relevant way.

Find out more about our global perspective on things.

Picture credit: Ian Rankin at Christian Engineers in Development (see original set on Flickr)

This year we’re doing something different. We’re going to buy a brick-making machine for Reuben N’gwala, a Tanzanian pastor who worshipped with us while studying in Glasgow for three years.

Reuben N'gwala

The brick-making machine will help Reuben to build accommodation at a Bible College in rural Tanzania, upgrading the living conditions for the students. The machine presses bricks from a mixture of earth and cement, reducing the amount of cement needed (ratios of around 1 part cement to 14-18 parts earth), enabling the bricks to be made on-site, reducing the energy needed to manufacture the bricks (they are cured, not fired), and enabling the buildings to use less mortar as the bricks are shaped to be interlocking. Overall the machine should reduce building costs by over 20%. The machine can continue to be used by Reuben’s team for other building projects in the area, generating much-needed income.

Making interlocking bricks

We’ll post here how we get on!

So today (using Jack’s credit card) we bought £150 worth of:

• 2 pigs
• 2 ducks
• 2 turkeys
• 2 cans of worms

Brilliant gifts!

This summer, Christian Aid is asking people to walk the walk on climate change by joining the longest ever protest march in UK history.

The Cut the Carbon march started in Bangor, Northern Ireland yesterday (14 July), will last 80 days, cover 1,000 miles, and see marchers from rich countries and poor spread Christian Aid’s cut the carbon message to companies and politicians. The march ends at the London Stock Exchange on 2 October.

The march passes through Glasgow this Tuesday, 17 July, and there are a number of events planned, all in the Southside:

• 2-3pm, Newton Mearns Parish Church. Meet the marchers, listen to their stories.
• 5 pm onwards, Queen’s Park duck pond. Meet the marchers as they arrive at Queen’s Park. Join the marchers for a walk around Queen’s Park duck pond in the Glasgow “Put Your Best Foot Forward” event.
• 6pm Queen’s Park glass houses. Meet the marchers, listen to their stories.
• 10pm St Ninians Church, Glasgow. Reflection with the marchers.

Further information is on the Pressureworks site, and on the Cut the Carbon Facebook site (registration needed).

Update 21/07/2007: Read the BBC interview with Angela Rowe of Renfield St Stephens Church (just one block down Bath Street), who is one of the Cut the Carbon marchers.

This Sunday, 25th March 2007, marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by the United Kingdom, the result of decades of campaigning by that had been started by Quakers in the 1780s. It would be a further 31 years until the existing slaves in the British Empire were freed, and slavery was not abolished in the USA until 1865 and Brazil until 1888.

It is easy for us to identify with Wilberforce, Clarkson and other Christian abolitionists. But it is also worth reflecting that many Christians, including Baptists, also fully supported and benefited from the trading of Africans as slaves. Much of Glasgow’s early wealth was a direct result of the slave trade.

Today’s globalised world is more unequal than ever, and 27 million human beings are still in conditions of slavery, for example women from eastern Europe are bonded into prostitution, children are trafficked between West African countries and men are forced to work as slaves on Brazilian agricultural estates. Contemporary slavery takes various forms and affects people of all ages, sex and race.

We encourage you to sign the Amazing Change Petition which calls on governments to act to combat 21st century slavery. A copy is at the back of the church.

Further information is at the following sites:
One Scotland – No place for racism
Breaking the Chains
Amazing Grace Sunday

We decided recently to not send each other individual cards, but instead to make one big Christmas card and make a donation to help people in the developing world.

The children made the giant card for us, and everyone signed it. We raised well over £360. Well done everyone!

So, in church today, we visited Christian Aid’s www.presentaid.org and bought (with Jack’s credit card – but we’ll give him the money!):

• 16 Ducks for people in Bangladesh.
• Guinea Fowl for families in Mozambique (Cindy wanted chickens, this was the nearest thing!)
• Composting worms to help produce fertiliser for people in the Bolivian highlands.
• Goats loaned to families in Bolivia (they get to keep the offspring).
• Pigs for Nicaragua.
• Community Tapstand to provide clean water for communities in Nicaragua.
• and a Cow for Kyrgyzstan – and we got a free ringtone!

These gifts will help poor people in developing countries to be more self-sufficient, and will allow them to make more choices in life.

Are these gifts sustainable?

In the media (including a Radio 4 programme this afternoon), some people have expressed concern about the sustainability and ethical basis of buying animals for people in the developing world.

We chose to support Christian Aid because they work in partnership with local organisations, including NGOs, churches and poor communities. They therefore make local decisions to ensure that the animals are supplied to communities who can make best use of them. More information on this issue is found at Christian Aid’s FAQs and the Present Aid website.

The small print: we are aware that Christian Aid will not necessarily buy the number of livestock that we have “purchased” on the website, but we know that our money will be used to support farming projects in poor countries.

Since the genocide the church has gathered groups of children and formed a couple of settlements of around 30 houses, each with a social worker to support the children, many of whom are still traumatised. We plan to work with the older children to build tanks to catch rainwater from their roofs.

The project should help build their confidence as they learn new skills and should save a significant amount of the time they spend each day collecting water from puddles.

I’ll expect to get a blog going at http://www.rankin6.blogspot.com/.

The next stage is for the Deacons to try to draw together all the comments, ideas and the suggestions into a draft action plan, which should be ready early in the New Year. The whole church will then discuss and consider and we will move forward from there.

Linked to this of course is the suggestion that we develop the work of Business in Glasgow by releasing me to work on that part-time. If that happens we will need to invite someone to assist with the church part-time. This idea depends on the Baptist Union releasing core funding for 3 years and I will be presenting our proposal to the BU on Thursday 9th November. I would value your prayers that we may sense the leading of God in this matter.

These are challenging times but we pray that as we open ourselves up to the leading of God he will both supply the financial and the spiritual resources to complete the task. Continue to pray for the consultancy process so that we may be confident in our core mission in the future.

Ian Rankin is back in Rwanda, doing some work for Christian Engineers in Development (CED). Ian is their Publicity Director.

• Ian will be visiting spring improvements and shallow wells in southern Rwanda and seeing how CED can better support the local techician in charge. That church has funding from Canada plus some for a CED partner church in England.
• The Episcopal church asked CED to look at rainwater catchment in a couple of settlements for genocide orphans. This has increased to three settlements as Signpost International, a Dundee based organisation, is about to start a third village with the church this summer. Ian has been working with them to put together a funding application to enable them to train the older children to build tanks out of cement.
• CED works with another charity called RHEPI (Rwandese Health Project Initiative) which is building schools. The idea is that if a community can provide a building the government will provide teachers. Ian is hoping to visit a school CED are building in northern Rwanda.
• Ian met another group last summer that supports orphans on the Tanzania border. He hopes to link them up with RHEPI.
• Ian will also be meeting up with African Community Initiative Services in Kenya. CED is currently seeking funding to help them build an earth dam at Kyalui.

Ian says:

“All these groups are Christians working in their communities, driven by God’s love. I get a real buzz out of being part of the “global community” that is Christ’s kingdom, demonstrating Jesus’ all-encompassing love in practical ways.”

You can follow Ian’s adventures on his travel blog.