TEAM VISION 2008 and Beyond
Trinity /Providence United Church-Bobcaygeon
BACKGROUND
During these last few months, several members of this congregation calling themselves TEAM VISION led by Kim Prescott, chair of our church Council, have come together under the leadership of Rev. John Patterson from Haliburton and immersed themselves in several think tank sessions.
Principally, this was to be ground work for Trinity’s 150th Anniversary year of 2010 . In true Trinity fashion, we commenced our task with 3 questions :
We concluded that they, like early Methodists elsewhere, were people who believed in:
1. Faith in God, themselves and one another
2. Hope about the future, physically and spiritually, of themselves and their descendants
3. Charity towards all.
2. Who are we now ?
For the most part, we seem to be people who have intense interests in :
1. the arts,
2. the environment ,
3. the well being of humanity
3. Who will we become ?
From the onset we were encouraged to think big thoughts about this question and about the BIG issues facing all of us on Planet Earth, now and in the future.
These are issues that many would say are impossible to solve, especially on a local level.
But, by the conclusion of the 3 sessions, we had decided upon 3 basic but vital topics:
1. Food 2. Water 3. Shelter
Over the next few Sundays there will be reports on these topics and how we hope to involve ourselves in dealing with them as our way of celebrating who we have been,
who we are now, and who we will become.
TOPIC ONE : FOOD
Just when we had begun to believe that World Hunger was no longer such a pressing matter, we have been recently witnessing the coming together of many factors which are
causing a world food crisis of huge proportions.
But as the book Stuffed or Starved points out, a lot of the world is becoming more and more malnourished, while the rest of us are increasingly wasteful and abundantly overfed, consuming foodstuffs produced by farmers in far away places who never get to feed themselves or their children any of that same food .This is morally wrong . So how can we at Trinity/Providence address this major inequity ?
We think that first of all, we need to examine the eco-footprint left by our present global food supply and demand system. The average distance for an average Canadian meal from “farm to fork” is about 2500 kms. If everyone in the world were to eat this way, we would need several planets to sustain ourselves. Much of our food is now imported year round and this involves 17 times more petroleum production and carbon emissions than a meal made from local products.
This is not how our ancestors and the founders of this congregation consumed their daily bread. They lived with the rhythms of the land they came to settle and while we are not proposing that we all revert to pioneer life, many of us are coming to think that to honour our founders in the 150th year, we need to consider adjusting the ways we feed ourselves.
Some of us are now researching the 100 Mile Diet first tried by a couple in British Columbia in 2005. We are looking at Farm Fresh programs and also at sustainable agriculture which gives farmers all over the globe the opportunity to produce healthy food indefinitely without permanent harm to the environment.
To start us off, the Outreach Committee is hosting an After Service BBQ on June 1st. We will endeavour to use local ingredients only .
We hope to engage you in discussion at that time and in the coming months about how we can each challenge ourselves to make some differences in how we obtain and consume our daily food.
John Bick
Outreach Committee
May 18, 2008