Update: Thank you to everyone who gave to rooted and grounded – Green Christian’s Lent Appeal 2022. Your gifts have been sown into the good soil of Green Christian and will continue to grow and bear fruit through the year.
We welcome your donations at any time; you can give securely online here or send a cheque payable to Green Christian to Green Christian Treasurer, 35 Kitto Road, London SE14 5TW.
Have you planted a seed this spring? I love gardening, and my favourite bit is planting the seeds – even more than harvesting and eating (although that’s a close second!). The planting of a seed demonstrates something about the future that you hope to live in.
Maybe you don’t have a garden, allotment or window box, and don’t sow the seeds of plants, but we often value the imagery of sowing a seed when we do something small that we hope will grow and flourish in the future. Forty years ago, a small group of people began the organisation that has grown to become Green Christian. Today, could you sow a seed with a gift to rooted and grounded, our Lent Appeal?
The soil in my garden in York is heavy clay. It’s fertile and excellent for brassicas; it’s also cold and waterlogged in a wet spring, and bakes hard and cracked in a hot dry summer. But once a tiny plant becomes well rooted here, it grows strongly and puts up with being trampled by a toddler, pecked by birds and nibbled by slugs. The soil is home to countless bacteria, fungi and invertebrates; the more I learn about what lies below the surface, the more amazed I am. The complex relationships in the soil sustain life and teach us of God, who is the ground of being.
Green Christian is an organisation rooted and grounded in its members. And that’s a membership rooted in faith, with a faith grounded in God. This good soil allows good things to grow and flourish from tiny seeds. A relatively small number of faithful people growing together helps the Church to fulfil its calling to be good news for the whole creation. The writer to the church in Ephesus prayed that they would be ‘rooted and grounded in love’ and know ‘him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly more than we can ask or imagine.’
A gift to Green Christian’s Lent Appeal this year is a seed sown in good soil to grow and flourish. Maybe your gift will seem tiny like a mustard seed; maybe it will seem big and sturdy like a broad bean. All the gifts together will grow to make a beautiful garden that demonstrates something of our hopes for the future.
We’re painfully aware that the covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities in the UK and around the world. Some people reading this will be better off financially than they were two years ago, while others will be struggling. As a community of people sharing a common concern, we offer what we can, at a time that we can, trusting that God accepts and transforms our gifts.
This issue of inequality, and how it is bound up with Green Christian’s core concerns, is an important part of our Joy in Enough programme. Your gift to the Lent Appeal could help to continue and expand Joy in Enough, allowing staff to strengthen links with other organisations and providing travel bursaries for people on low incomes to contribute to the Joy in Enough autumn conference.
Please give online here, or send a cheque payable to ‘Green Christian’ with a note saying that it is for the Lent Appeal to: Green Christian Treasurer, 35 Kitto Road, London SE14 5TW. Thank you.
Hilary Blake is Green Christian’s Development Officer for the Joy in Enough programme. When she’s not fundraising or encouraging her children to help with the garden she volunteers with a cloth nappy library, a breastfeeding support group and an inclusive cycling charity, and is a Local Preacher in the Methodist Church.
Joy in Enough 