Fair Trade Chocolate

Why did he have to pick on chocolate? I wanted to make a difference. I was ready to put in a lot of time and effort. But the only thing he asked me to do was to make sure the chocolate I buy is Fair Trade chocolate. That would make the most impact, he said.

He was Steve Chalk. Steve is the Baptist Minister who heads up the Oasis charity which sponsors two of the Secondary Schools in North East Lincolnshire. He is also into a remarkable other range of things as a Christian activist. One of them is being a United Nations special advisor for community action against human trafficking.

He had been invited to Grimsby by a church based Justice and Peace Group. This is a group of Christians in North East Lincolnshire who want to think and act seriously about the way they live out their faith responsibly in the world. At the beginning of July, Churches Together in North East Lincolnshire promoted a Week Against Human Trafficking partly around Steve’s visit to this group.

So there I was sitting in St Pius’ Church listening to him. He revealed the extent to which human beings are bought and sold across the world for sexual exploitation and forced labour. It was quite a harrowing account.

I had then been asked to chair a time when people could ask questions. During a short break one person came up to me. ‘I don’t want to speak’, she said, ‘but I do want to know the answer to one question’. It was a profound question, so I began the next session by asking it for her. ‘Is my lifestyle the problem?’ she asked. ‘In what way would living my life differently make a difference?’.

And the example Steve used was chocolate. A huge amount of the raw material for the chocolate on sale in England has been harvested by trafficked labour, he said. He had tackled many of the major firms about this. They had not all responded well. It takes quite a bit of auditing to make sure a firm knows it only uses cocoa which has been harvested responsibly.

But it can be done. The work of people like Steve had meant that we are promised that four fingered (but not two fingered ) Kit Kat are made with fairly traded cocoa.

So, the message I took away was to be much more careful about the chocolate I buy. It is going to be quiet a challenge - although knowing that four fingered Kit Kats are alright is definitely going to be a help.

The article was the 'Pause for Thought' column in last week's Cleethorpes Chronicle.  The picture is a sign we spotted near Novartis when returning from a walk on the Humber bank wall at the weekend; someone must have put in a bit of planning and effort to adapt the speed bump sign.

Building worries

It may be the tower of St Nicolas’ which is moving (or, more specifically, slowly sinking towards the south) rather than the south aisle which is moving away from the body of the church. That is the slightly disturbing conclusion of the measurements taken today based on the fixed points established not quite five months ago, although nobody is suggesting that the massive and majestic tower is about to topple over.

Today’s measurements actually show that the crack between the aisle and the tower has closed a bit, which wasn’t what we had expected at all. It is not this measurement but instead a simple horizontal pencil line drawn across the crack five months ago which shows where there has been vertical movement; the picture shows this looking at the west wall, with the aisle on the left and the tower on the right of the crack.

Given that a Churchwarden at St George’s rang this morning to say that some lead flashings have been taken from the building there, it hasn’t been an encouraging day regarding the stewardship of our buildings.

Serendipitous links

Japanese researchers have found unusually high levels of carbon-14 in cedar tree rings laid down in 775. A report in New Scientist in June speculated whether a solar flare (rather bigger than ones otherwise evidenced) might have been responsible, or, perhaps more plausibly, a series of flares over a couple of years.

On a whim, I took down an edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and was delighted to see that it’s almanac-like set of a couple of facts for every year has for 773 or 774 the information that ‘a red cross was seen in the sky after sunset’ (and ‘strange adders were observed in Sussex’), although the dating is difficult as the 776 Mercian-Kentish battle at Otford is recorded in the same sentence.

However long the shot, I was sufficiently taken by the vague possibility that I had stumbled across an interdisciplinary insight that I sent New Scientist a letter about it which, to my surprise, it published last week.

Meanwhile, I’m developing some single illuminated sheets for our three churches each with one slightly more secure bit of historical information.  I have just placed one about the Taylor memorial in St Nicolas’ (including the picture of the grave of Richard Taylor Esq posted here last week) and another about the Tickler memorial window in St George’s (including its references to the family’s Grimsby based jam manufacturing).

The two picture above are a first attempt (I need to go back soon and get something better) to capture what I need to illustrate an information sheet about the coat of arms of the Barnardiston family - which owned Great Coates between the 1300s and the 1600s and members of which are commemorated in the pre-Reformation brasses in St Nicolas’.

The top picture includes the Barnardiston coat of arms among fragments of mediaeval glass set high in a plain window in St Nicolas’ (which I guess was placed there as part of a re-fenestration at the time of the restoration in the 1860s). The bottom picture is of the entrance to Great Coates Primary School. I wonder at what stage the school adopted this as its logo (which appears on pupils' sweat shirts as well as the door)? And whether those who adopted it thought it was the Great Coates coat of arms or whether they knew full well that they were borrowing a design from a particular family of former Lords of the Manor?

Anyway, putting the two pictures together provides another serendipitous link which I hope some people will enjoy - certainly those at the school who gave me permission to photograph its front door did not know the design comes from the Barnardistons (and they tell me that the school is considering creating a new logo soon anyway, so the link may soon disappear).

Richard Taylor Esq

How common is it to put ‘Esq’ after someone’s name on their gravestone? I can’t remember coming across it before, but it can’t be unheard of elsewhere. I’ve walked passed this grave often (it is on the path along the south side of St Nicolas’, Great Coates) but it was only last week that I noticed the ‘Esq’, and it was only then that I made the link between the grave and the Richard Taylor commemorated on a memorial tablet in the church (about which I posted a while ago). The fact that they bothered putting this honorific on his gravestone is further evidence that, in the absence of any resident gentry, this farmer was regarded as a leading citizen in the village.

We are rich

Martha Payne isn’t complaining about her school meals. She is celebrating her good fortune in having daily access to them.  This is something hardly any of the media reports of  her Blog about her school lunches has picked up.  Several media reports even say that she is counting how many hairs there are in her lunches, whereas her Blog actually records the way in which there never are any.

She echoes in my mind one of the speakers at our recent clergy conference who (talking of something quite different) slipped in a reminder of what we already know: we are rich people; we have ready access to everything from plentiful clean water to any emergency medical treatment we need, so we could not possibly count ourselves as being anything else.

Aware of her own good firtune, she is drawing attention to school children across the world who do not share it.  She had done some limited conventional fund-raising (such as a cake sale) for the charity Mary's Meals, and she thought a Blog about her own school meals would be a way to raise some more.  She set herself a target of £7 000.

The publicity around her local Council’s temporary ban on her taking and posting pictures of her school lunches could not have been more helpful.   By this morning, the amount given to the charity through the page on the on-line donation site  linked to her Blog was more than ten times her target; it has passed £80 000.

The money is to be used to feed children at Lirangwe Primary School in Malawi, which happens to be forty miles or so from where I was born.

Meanwhile, the picture was taken beneath my study window last week.

Barnack

We called here during Half Term; there seems little excuse not to pull off the A1 north of Peterborough given the opportunity to spend even a brief moment at Tickencote or Wansford (both almost on the A1 itself) or at Barnack or Stamford (including St Martin's, Stamford).

We had been recommended Barnack at the recent talk at Barton-on-Humber as providing a parallel example of a Saxon tower with this sort of decoration.

But we also found a pre-Conquest Christ in Majesty.

And one panel of a mediaeval Annunciation with the marvellous feature of the three persons of the Trinity being together behind the conception of the Lord.

And this nineteenth century grave of a nineteen year old Sandhurst cadet cut down in his prime.

Conducting ministry

The Bishop of Lincoln’s Charge last week (at the end of the four-yearly residential conference for the clergy of the diocese) included the story of a group of musicians naturally taking its lead from the professional player who happened to be at the harpsichord rather than from the amateur Director of Music waving his arms about ineffectually in front of them.

His story embodied the difference between an imposed style for the leadership of a diverse community and leadership which is natural and recognised, between attempted dominance and the provision of a secure framework within which others can perform.

He was returning us to creative models for ministry in which a soloist’s gift is brought out by interaction with an audience and then a conductor’s gift is to bring and hold together the gifts of all - far cries from the caricature celebrity soloist in isolated glory or the maestro forcing his brilliance and personality on other performers.

I’ll wait to receive the two quotations he used and then post them here as well, because they are much more subtle than the pedestrian interpretations in the two paragraphs above.

While waiting to do that, I was prompted to look back four years to see how close his image is to ones which have been used in the diocese over the years and about which I blogged then at http://petermullins.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/models-of-ministry.html.

The model of the conductor is actually only one variation on a theme which included the image of the producer of a pantomime which I used often when responsible for clergy in-service training and

was hawking round for fellow clergy an article from the journal Theology which used this image - each new pantomime grows out of a specific shared tradition which is made new that once - the director has a role equal to the actors in enabling both the rootedness in the tradition and the creativity needed for them to pull this off

and the image of the impresario which the Bishop of Grimsby was including in a range of images he was offering clergy

we can’t go on running the show, but we can take every opportunity to make sure an attractive variety of shows go on.

Meanwhile, we had just had distant relatives from Australia to stay and took them at sunset to the point on the edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds from which it is possible to see both the Humber Bridge and Lincoln Cathedral; they could see neither because of the haze but they have put this picture of the sunset up on their Facebook page.