The Methodist Justice Lecture
On Sunday 13th June at 7pm, the Rt Hon Gordon Brown gave a lecture entitled Justice and Hope to mark the launch of the Walking With Micah project. In the face of Covid-19, the climate emergency and global inequality, where are justice and hope to be found? Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown argued that change is possible and that people of faith have a role to play.
Over 3,000 people have so far watched the first Methodist Justice Lecture with Gordon Brown. Could you watch it with your housegroup, friends, bookclub, people inside or outside your church? The following are offered as possible discussion starters:
- “Why in the year 2021 we can’t come together to prevent economic crises, halt climate change, stop the new nuclear arms race, deliver the sustainable development goals…that would end illiteracy, extreme poverty, avoidable infant and maternal mortality, and how we failed also to pay for this by making the tax avoiders pay up the billions they syphon off into the ungoverned spaces we call tax havens?” Gordon Brown identified some areas that need justice in the world. What for you are the biggest challenges our world and our society face today?
- “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” Gordon spoke about the need to frame our vision of the future in terms of our hope. What does your dream look like?
- “We don’t just cooperate out of need: we have a human need to cooperate.” – Have you experienced this “human need to co-operate”? What was the fruit of this?
- Gordon spoke about some of the inspirations for justice to be found within Methodism, including John Wesley’s commitment to social reform and the abolition of the slave trade, participation in Make Poverty History and All We Can. Where have you found inspiration and hope? What’s your story?
- Gordon describe hope as being “more than the absence of despair. It is hope that provides us, as human beings, not just with the energy to get things done, but with purpose and a sense of direction. It’s a bridge between what we are and what we have in ourselves to become.” Where do you find hope? Where can our world find hope?
- Did listening to this lecture inspire you to do anything or find out any more? Can you share this with your group?
Articles for your newsletter or website
Tell others about the Walking With Micah project by including an article in your church newsletter or website. A short and long article can be accessed here and used wherever you like.
How political should our sermons be?
That is the question asked by Canon Lucy Winkett in her recent lecture to the Festival of Preaching. She suggests that preachers are more comfortable in the universal (the ways in which all creatures are the same) and the personal (how we are all unique). Yet preachers less often deal with the ways in which the universal and personal meet, in the political. As a political beings we have affinities, can exercise choice or power, build community, or experience injustice. She says that whenever she realises her sermon has pivoted solely to the universal or the personal, she re-examines what she is saying as otherwise she may be ducking key themes of the gospel. The film of Lucy’s lecture – Poetic Politics – has kindly been made available to Walking with Micah.
Film courtesy of the Festival of Preaching.
Lucy Winkett’s new book Reading the Bible with your Feet is out now.
'Crowdsourced' Walking with Micah resources
You can find resources created by people around the Connexion here.