Gay and Lesbian Farmers

I've written an article about gay farmers for Guardian CIF. If you are a gay or lesbian farmer, you might be interested in this:

Christians are not generally known for breaking new ground when it comes to gay rights; they're usually struggling to catch up. Take a look back at this year for example: Christian B&B owners discriminating against a gay couple, Pentecostal foster parents insisting on being allowed to teach that homosexuality is morally wrong and continuing Christian resistance to gay marriage. Who would have thought that a helpline set up to support gay farmers was run by a Christian chaplain? But that's exactly what's happened.

Keith Ineson is an ex-farmer who now works as a chaplain for Churches Together in Cheshire. He extended the remit of his chaplaincy after handling more than one case of a farmer suffering from suicidal thoughts because he felt unable to come out as gay. Within six months of launching the dedicated helpline at the end of 2009, Ineson had received 52 calls – mostly from gay farmers over 50, some of whom were single, and all of whom felt imprisoned, thinking that they were the only gay farmer around. The concern is that if Ineson stopped work tomorrow, the helpline would stop with him: there is a need for Christians with rural knowledge and an understanding of gay issues to get involved in the work Keith is doing.

For the full article, see here.

National Ethical Investment Week

Can we invest ethically?

CIF Belief piece on cooperation in the world of ethical investment:

Picture this: India. Delhi. 2005. A multinational company is looking for skilled employees for five vacancies. It outsources recruitment to a local firm that asks candidates a standard set of questions. One question is "What do your parents do for a living?" The answer reveals where the candidate sits in the caste hierarchy.

Fast forward a year to 2006: A HSBC shareholder attends his bank's AGM in London. He raises the problem of caste discrimination occurring across multinational corporations in India. The chairman agrees this is an issue that needs tackling. HSBC meets with the Dalit Solidarity Network to discuss strategies. Proactive policy follows.

What has the church got to do with any of this? Well, churches in the UK have combined assets of £12bn. That is a sum that wields some power in the investment world. The Methodist church's Central Finance Board (CFB) looks after £1.1bn of those assets. The Ministers Pension Fund accounts for just over a quarter with a further £140m managed for non Methodist bodies under the Epworth name. In June 2010, CFB published its ethical policy on caste discrimination. It stated that companies "should be able to report to shareholders the progress made in enhancing the employment opportunities of scheduled castes within the context of recruitment and in career development". That's just one example. There are many more.

For the whole thing see here

Churches Call Osborne To Account For Welfare Fraud Exaggeration

CIF Belief piece on The Chancellor's Comprehensive Spending Review.

Here is the first paragraph:

It may be more than a week since the chancellor's spending review speech, but we are still wading through the fallout of what he said. Public service spending cuts will be the deepest since April 1975, according to Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis, with councils losing around 100,000 jobs. And that's not all. George Osborne got his numbers wrong in one of the most important speeches of the new coalition government. He exaggerated the figure for benefit fraud and failed to address the HMRC figure for uncollected tax revenue. If we are "all in this together", as he concluded, then surely he has got to get this right.

Click this hyperlink to read the rest.

Tweeting God

CIF Belief piece on faith and the net.

Israel and Palestine

I have not long returned from an intense week in Portsmouth covering media relations for the Methodist Church’s annual Conference. The Conference had such pulling power this year that we even had Ruth Gledhill (The Times’ Religious Correspondent) working in the Conference press office with us on Tuesday :) (she was there for the Archbishop’s address).

I have written a piece for CIF Belief on the incredibly painful decision the Conference took to boycott Israeli produce from Israeli settlements.

Church and media conference 2010

Is religion sidelined by the media? Broadcasters, church folk and humanists gathered last week to thrash things out. See here: CIF Belief in The Guardian Online.

The Death of Methodism - Not Quite

I was asked by Guardian Comment Is Free to do a piece on Methodist self-immolation - or the idea that Methodists and Anglicans are in some kind of sado-masochistic relationship...