adelaide place baptist church

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.

After the disappointment of failing to get funding from a Foundation, Signpost International and CED have scraped funds together themselves and I am off to Rwanda on 14th November to run a workshop to make cement tanks.

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 series of evenings we have had over the last month were a useful stepping stone in the process of developing our response to the Consultancy lead by Neil Young.

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.