Hymn of the Big Wheel - Week 1

The Hymn of the Big Wheel had its début last week; and it worked!

The Hymn of the Big Wheel is a 1 hour contemplative service with a social justice theme. It's focus is a reading of a list of statistics concerning the magnitude and issue surrounding world poverty. It's a list that can't be rationally absorbed when heard; it's more of an emotional thing. Then we contemplate the hope that Jesus brings.

Elements of the service include sitting in silence, listening to music (mostly contemporary), lighting candles, praying together and a few random elements.

Stu and me wrote it to give us a really different contemplative experience. It's great for Lent, but we hope we can put it on any time of the year.

The first week went well, though I was nervous! We noticed that there was a lot of silence, so we've made some changes to allow people to recite prayers together earlier and to make a personal response earlier. We tried a bit of drumming, but it was too much to ask, so we're replacing that with some candle lighting instead. Week 2 should be even better.

One of my favourite moments is when we pray Wesley's prayer, and then the prayer supporting the Millennium Development goals. One prayer is from the start of the industrial revolution and is in archaic language, the other is at the end of the industrial revolution. The prayers have similar sentiments; but are coming from really different contexts. Both ask that we commit ourselves to something different from the pursuit of our own prosperity whilst ignoring the plight of others.

8pm Wednesday nights in Lent, Fairfield SPACE, 88 Station St Fairfield.

The Household Covenant

The Household Covenant is a new thing to help people engage with big issues of social justice and sustainability in an accessible way.

The idea is to make a committment within your household to make changes to patterns of money and other resource use. Each household is completely free to make their own committments. The Housegold Covenant is promoted in Australia by Jon and Kim Cornford from Manna Gum, they've based it on one from the US (Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries www.bcm-net.org).

Jon and Kim came to Solace Sunday Stuff on Feb 22, 2009 and introduced the Household Covenant. Jon explained some of his ideas behind Christians getting involved in economic issues and Kim very generously shared some points from their own Household Covenant. We thought that Solace households could certainly have a go at the covenant and provide each other with a bit of support. I'll be looking at the covenant further over Lent.

The covenant has seven topics, making it easy to review your household economics and make some definite goals. The seven topics are:

1. Savings and Investment
2. Debt
3. Giving
4. Environment and Green Living
5. Consumption
6. Poverty and Marginalisation
7. Work and Sabbath

Each topic has specific questions about whether your activity is sustainable, fair and life-giving.

It's challenging, but very approachable. I'm excited to give it a go!