Community
Making a drama out of the water crisis
THINK ABOUT IT: How far has your food travelled?
What will it take to end child poverty?
The Ryder Cup – and the faith of Bernhard Langer…
New Christian radio stations
New Christian TV station
Beachwatch 2006
Making a drama out of the water crisis
Water is the subject of a new play to be taken on tour this autumn by the Riding Lights Theatre Company. Pipe Dreams, described as a ‘whodunnit about what’s happening to our water’ is being staged in churches around the UK to mark the 25th anniversary of WaterAid, a UK charity dedicated to providing safe water and sanitation to the poorest countries. For details of the tour, please visit www.ridinglights.org/whatson/future
Many of the venues hosting performances of PIPE DREAMS are churches concerned with an ongoing commitment to justice, tying the show in to harvest events and fair-trade work. The tour will equip the communities of each venue to make a practical contribution to the international work of WaterAid.
THINK ABOUT IT: How far has your food travelled?
If someone asked you how far you travelled to buy the ingredients of your dinner for today, you might reasonably answer with the distance between your home and your nearest supermarket. But environmental campaigners, concerned about climate change, now use the term ‘food miles’ in a much broader way.
Cars, lorries and planes are emitting a record 18 million tons of carbon dioxide a year transporting food to British stores, according to Government estimates.
Statistics for 2004 (the latest available) reveal that the distance covered in transporting food around towns and cities rose to more than eleven billion kilometres in that year. Car journeys dropped by two per cent, which suggests that people may be limiting journeys to the supermarket or shopping more locally. But heavy goods vehicles and vans travelled more. Lorries did 5.5 billion food miles in 2004, while cars covered 4.2 billion.
Air freight clocked up 17 million miles, increasing by 3l per cent between 2002 and 2004.
The figures increase concern about the damage done by supermarkets flying in things like prawns from Ecuador, sweetcorn from Thailand or apples from New Zealand. Yet the aim of the Government’s Food Industry Sustainability Strategy is to cut the social and environmental costs of food miles (on 1990 levels) by 20 per cent by 2012.
According to another official report, food miles cost the country £9 billion a year: £5bn from road congestion, £2bn from road accidents, £1bn from pollution and another £1bn from other factors.
One good sign is that at least some of the store chains are taking steps to reduce their food miles. Friends of the Earth wants to see the introduction of a tax on aircraft fuel. They say that making flying more expensive would make the air-freighted products involved more expensive, giving people an incentive to buy locally grown produce instead.
But “people have come to take it for granted that you can get all kinds of food all the year round in supermarkets. They don’t make the link between their behaviour and climate change,” said a spokesman.
What will it take to end child poverty?
It may come as a shock to some of our readers to learn that child poverty in the United Kingdom remains worse than in most other European countries; and that a child here still has nearly twice as much chance of living in a household with relatively low income than a generation ago.
Yet these are among the findings of a recent study carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Since the late 1990s, child poverty has begun to fall, helped by rising parental employment and by large increases in tax credits and benefits paid to low-income families. But, say the researchers, present policies are unlikely to produce further substantial improvement.
Increasing benefits alone will not be enough to meet the Government’s targets of halving child poverty by 2010 and abolishing it by 2020 (because some families will remain outside paid work and under present plans their incomes would fall well behind rising living standards). In addition, ways must be found to enable parents to fare better in the workplace, with improved pay and opportunities. This will require better education and training for disadvantaged groups, improved childcare and the promotion of equal pay for women.
‘Welfare to work’ measures are important but they will have a diminishing effect over time, as the families remaining unemployed face greater barriers to work (a growing proportion will be either parents with disabilities or those with very young children).
Lord Richard Best, Director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, says: “All political parties agree in principle that a continuation of child poverty in our affluent country is unacceptable. Now we need a long-term vision of how to end it. Just as with pensions, this requires a commitment to ensure that the incomes of those who depend on state help do not fall behind as we grow more prosperous as a nation. The amount of extra public spending needed may seem large but in fact would be only a small fraction of future economic growth.”
The Ryder Cup
Stuart Weir considers the faith of Bernhard Langer…
The Ryder Cup is one of the most exciting sports events of the year. It is a contest between the men professional golfers of Europe and their counterparts from America. It takes place this year at the K Club near Dublin, 22-24 September.
The Ryder Cup has played a big part in Bernhard Langer’s life. He has played in 10 Ryder Cups, 42 games in all with 21 wins, 6 halves and 15 defeats.
In 1991 the destiny of the Ryder Cup was settled by Bernhard’s match with Hale Irwin. It went to the 18th hole and Bernhard had a 6 footer to ensure that Europe retained the Ryder Cup. The putt missed by a whisker. There are photographs of Bernhard just after the putt has missed with a very pained expression on his face.
Bernhard recalls: “It wasn’t just because we had lost the Ryder Cup, though that was bad enough. Part of it was just that the putt had not gone in, after it had felt so good.
There has been so much speculation about why I missed the putt, the pressure of the occasion and so on. In fact I struck it well. I suppose it was a slight misread, possibly because of the spike marks on the line. It was a chance a golfer only gets once in a lifetime, to hole a putt for the Ryder Cup. I did my best but in the end it was not good enough.
“Of course, I was very disappointed – for the team, all my colleagues, the captain, for the whole tour, the continent, that I had let them down. I had missed a putt. On the other hand, I knew I had tried my best and had done everything I possibly could.
“My relationship with God, with Jesus Christ, put it all in perspective. When I look back now I realise that there are far more important things in life than winning a tournament, or losing a tournament, or making or not making a putt. I know I did my best and I can live with it and go on. I don’t live in the past. I live in the future. I am amazed that fifteen years later, people still want to talk about the putt.
“When a journalist asked me about it the following week, I said, ‘Looking at the Ryder Cup from a Christian point of view, there has only ever been one perfect man, the Lord Jesus, and we killed him. I only missed a putt.’
Europe are holders having beaten USA 18.5 to 9.5 in 2004. Bernhard Langer was the European team captain on that occasion. “One tribute said of his captaincy, “Langer was ice cool throughout as he plotted his team's path to victory, and no amount of impassioned storm and thunder speeches from his opposite number and friend Hal Sutton could disturb Langer's focus.
Langer did everything right - his picks (Donald and Montgomerie) were inspired; his tactics of getting the team to befriend the crowds on practice days lessoned the home sides partisan support; his pairings gave him a 5 point lead going into the singles; and his low key course management (especially evident on the par 3's where he advised each player which shot to hit) helped his side to manage Oakland’s unforgiving greens.” (www.bernhardlanger.net).
There is tougher competitor than Bernhard Langer on the golf course yet he still manages to keep golf in perspective. When asked ‘What would you like to have as your epitaph?’, he replied, ‘It doesn’t make any difference what’s written on your gravestone. It’s only important that your soul’s going to heaven.’ It was just after a big win - the US Masters in 1985 - that Bernhard realized that there had to be more to live than golf.
He had fulfilled his ambitions and was world Number 1. “I had all the money I needed and a beautiful young wife – I had everything! And yet it wasn’t enough. It was like, ‘Well, where do we go now?’ It wasn’t what I thought it would be and there was still something missing, a feeling of emptiness. There must be more to life than this.
“I figured I had it all together; I believed in God. I always thought just being a good person and keeping the commandments would hopefully get me to heaven. I didn’t steal or kill and I tried not to hurt anyone on purpose. But as I got more and more successful, I thought I could do it all myself. I also wanted to know more. As an altar boy in the Catholic Church, I had seen the priest with the Bible but I had never had my own.
He went to a meeting where the preached spoke from John, chapter 3 in the Bible. “Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born again. I had never heard this before, but it was exactly the message I needed to hear. Larry went on to explain what it meant in practical terms. I was amazed to realise that the only way to have eternal life was through Jesus Christ – that he died for our sins. And that it was not through worthy deeds or good behaviour that one received eternal life, because we can never live up to God’s standard. We will always fall short.
“I had a lot of questions. I got my own Bible and read sections of it. After a period of time I began to realise that I had to make a choice. As I understood that God loved me so much that he sent his only Son to die for my sins, it was natural for me to ask the Lord into my life. Basically I just had to trust in him to forgive my sins. I had to make him the number one priority in my life, do everything to please him and not try to do it all myself.
“When I realised that Jesus had died on the cross for my sins, for everybody’s sins and I had to give over my life to him, I just recognised that this is the most important step or most important decision that I would ever have to take”.
New Christian radio stations
Two new internet-based Christian radio stations have been launched in the UK. G-Force Radio and I Praise U, which can be found via the gforcenetwork.com website, provide 24-hour Christian teaching and worship alongside contemporary Christian music, news, competitions, a discussion forum and online polls.
New Christian TV station
Christian radio station Premier has launched an internet television channel. Premier.tv will feature programmes of news, current affairs and Christian teaching. Visit www.premier.tv
Beachwatch 2006
Beachwatch, the nation-wide beach clean-up and litter survey organised by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), takes place 16th- 17th September.
If you have time to do just one beach clean and survey this year, this is the time to do it!
Come and join thousands of volunteers from around the UK. Spend just a few hours of the Beachwatch weekend helping to clean up and survey our coastline.
Beachwatch supports MCS's campaign to reduce litter on our beaches and at sea. Visit:
http://www.adoptabeach.org.uk/