Trade As One

Over the past few years, we’ve loved partnering with thought-leaders in the American Church.  Lynne Hybels and Nathan George worked together to bring Fair Trade to Willow Creek Community Church, and built on that shared experience to explore the connections between our spending and the poverty that dominates much of our world, and to discuss ways for the church to be a catalytic force for poverty alleviation through Fair Trade. They’ve coauthored a chapter in the new book “The Justice Project,” which was just released by Baker Books.We’re including an excerpt from their chapter, titled “Buying Justly,” below:

Anita, Bangalore

Even in the stifling heat, even indoors, Anita wore a long scarf wrapped around her face and neck. Six months earlier her alcoholic husband had walked out, leaving her pregnant and indebted to a loan shark. When her baby was barely a month old, the men came to collect the money she did not have. After abusing Anita verbally and physically, they seized her infant son as collateral on the $70 loan. Alone and afraid and certain she would never see her precious baby again, Anita had covered her head with gasoline and set herself on fire. But women from a small, local ministry heard about Anita and became advocates for her. Now, six months later, she was in a loving Christ-centered community that had re-united her with her son and given her a job making cotton bags for a supermarket in the UK so she could pay off the loan and build a future. Beneath the scarf her horrific wounds were beginning to heal.

Annette, anywhere in America

As Annette tossed the plastic bag onto the seat beside her and slipped the key in the ignition, her throbbing headache gave way to a dull sense of despair. She looked at the scattered contents of her shopping bag and wondered why she had bought any of it. She had come for a single item—a housewarming gift for her best friend, Beth. But as always, the colorful displays stacked floor to ceiling and the clever marketing messages transformed every gadget, every bauble she saw, into a life-enhancing necessity. And now her house, her life was full of them: trinkets for her to dust and re-arrange and sell in another stress producing garage sale; cheap and unappreciated toys for her kids to break; plastic water bottles and disposable plates and Styrofoam packaging to fill her trash can. And for what? So a hot shot in a big city office could pay a poor peasant across an ocean a pittance for his backbreaking labor? So a corporate PR department could finance a cover-up of a production process that mortgages our planet’s future? So Annette and her comfortable friends could spend more money, time and energy decorating their empty lives? But why bother to think about it? wondered Annette, as she maneuvered her car into traffic. What’s the alternative?

Half the world faces the crisis of extreme, dehumanizing poverty. The other half faces a crisis of meaning. The church, we would like to suggest, is the caretaker of the answer to both crises.

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In April 2008, Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois combined these principles in a month-long program called Celebration of Hope: The Hunger Initiative. Church leaders and staff challenged the entire congregation to join them in a five-day subsistence diet based on the food and caloric intake common to the world’s poor, and also to limit general consumption throughout the Hunger Initiative. The money saved through reduced consumption was then gathered and used for emergency food relief: volunteers purchased, packed, and shipped enough nutritional food mix to feed 15,000 children in Zimbabwe for one year. The church also addressed the issue of long-term food security through a partnership with Trade As One. Over the course of two weekends, Trade as One and Willow Creek staged a World Market in the church lobby, with attendees purchasing nearly $250,000 worth of fair trade products—olive oil, rice, sugar, chocolate, coffee, shampoo, moisturizer, T-Shirts, cards, stationery, purses, jewelry, scarves, and organic cotton shopping bags. These household items and gifts that would normally have been purchased in conventional stores guaranteed fair, living wages to men and women in the developing world who are often marginalized: people living with HIV / AIDS, women rescued from sexual exploitation, families redeemed from forced labor.

Ongoing purchasing partnerships between fair trade companies and local churches could significantly contribute to a more just distribution of the world’s abundance. Nearly 43% of Americans regularly attend church, creating an automatic constituency of almost 130 million people. What could happen if 130 million Christians embraced fair trade as a means of bringing good news to the poor and meaning to the rich? What if we began to see our spending, not just our giving, as a matter of discipleship?

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The Church is uniquely positioned to bridge the ever-increasing gap between the poor and the rich – the gap that feeds global tragedies of disease, despair and violence. With unequalled access to both, the Church can bring people like Anita and Annette into mutually redeeming partnerships. The question is: Will we? Will we humble ourselves enough to acknowledge how deeply we have distorted Jesus’ Gospel by dividing works from faith, action from proclamation, social justice from personal piety? Will we understand that the only antidote for our disease of materialism is a solidarity with the poor that moves us to action on their behalf?

Excerpted from: “The Justice Project,” edited by Brian McLaren, Elisa Padilla, and Ashley Bunting Seeber. Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, Copyright 2009.

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