Yes to the future
Speech by Dr Peter Carruthers, Executive Director, at the Reception following the JRI Commissioning Service on 15th May 2001.
Dame Janet, Sir John, Friends and Colleagues,
The last occasion like this was my departure nearly 2 years from the Centre for Agricultural Strategy at the University of Reading, after more that 20 years on the staff. On that occasion, I started with the words of Dag Hammerskold, former secretary general of the United Nations:
To all that has been, I say, ‘Thanks’. To all that will be, I say, ‘Yes’.
In many ways, I have a similar task today. So at risk of repetition for my colleagues from Reading here today, I again take Hammerskold’s words as my starting point.
JRI brings together two passions that have been with me since childhood - a fascination for nature and a love for the Bible. And I am firstly grateful to my late parents who inspired both to begin with, and to all who helped to develop and deepen them since. My wife Judith has been with me for the latter part of that journey and I am grateful for and to her for all the experiences and, perhaps, the risks she has been prepared to take!
I need to say thank you, also, to all those behind my being here today: to Sir John Houghton and the Directors of JRI for appointing me; to Dame Janet Trotter and the College for providing such a convivial and appropriate base for our work; to the Countryside Agency for releasing some of my time; to my colleagues David Thistlethwaite and John McKeown for all their efforts and extra hours in the last few weeks; and to all of you for helping to make this launch of our new phase day so memorable.
I owe a special debt of gratitude my friends in the Agricultural Christian Fellowship (ACF), Christian Rural Concern and the Arthur Rank Centre, who have been a source of great encouragement and fellowship in recent years. And I’d especially like to pay tribute to Christopher Jones, coordinator of ACF and Farm Crisis Network, who has, through his words and example, spurred me along this road - although neither of us foresaw that it would end here!
I am grateful above all to God, who has kept and sustained me here through the past years and who has now seen fit to open up a new door and a new direction, with new opportunities and challenges.
So what of the future? Can I, can we, welcome it with the confident affirmation of Dag Hammerskold? We are, after all, in the midst of a crisis - in the countryside, in the global environment, and in our society. The future is, of course, always uncertain - but perhaps ours is more so!
Yet I must, we must, echo Hammerskold’s resounding ‘Yes’! It is in times of crisis, above all times, that the prophetic voice is most needed. And that is central to JRI’s vision - to inform and challenge the churches as to its responsibility for God’s earth, and to be an ethical voice in the wider environmental arena.
The immediate task is to build soundly on all that has been achieved so far. To do this, we plan to move forward on four fronts.
Projects will form the core of our activity - focused on specific issues or on developing our core principles. For example, in the next few months, we plan to look at the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the wider issue of the future of agriculture, as well as continuing our work on global climate change.
Publications such as our briefing notes will continue to be a major means of communication. But we plan to develop the website - both as a way-in to other resources and a shop front for our own work.
Partnerships are an essential part of our future strategy. We plan both to continue to work with organisations with whom we are already associated, such as A Rocha and Christian Ecology Link, as well as to build new relationships and seek common agenda with others - including, I hope, within the College. A particular vision of mine is to bring together environmentally concerned Christians with those concerned with agricultural and rural matters - and I am delighted that we have represented here today Agricultural Christian Fellowship (ACF), Christian Rural Concern, the Arthur Rank Centre and the Rural Theology Association.
The fourth front is prayer - that hidden work which provides the ultimate powerhouse as well as reminding why and for whom we are working.
The core of JRI’s mission is advance understanding - understanding that draws deeply on both science and theology. If I may put it this way, we seek to be a scholarly wing of a wider concern for environmental stewardship and sustainable development. Rightly then do we sit within a School of Theology and within an academic institution with strong interests and reputation in environment and countryside.
Yet this identity brings with it two challenges.
The Evangelical Declaration on the Care of Creation, published in 1994, is a comprehensive Christian statement on environmental responsibility, and was a significant milestone in JRI’s own history. Commenting on it, Peter Harris, the founder of A Rocha stated that "truly evangelical declarations are best made by how we live, protestations on paper serve very little…the urgent task in changing the way we live as Christians had to begin with behaving differently, and not simply obeying new rules".
The first challenge then is to translate words into deeds. This is not always easy for scholars and academics, yet it is a challenge to which we must rise. After all, New Testament writer James urges us to be doers of the word and not just hearers (James 1:22). Jesus Himself taught that a tree was not known not by its words, but by its deeds. In the final judgement, the sheep and the goats are not sorted out on the basis of what they said, but what they did (Matthew 25: 31-46).
The second challenge is related. It is the challenge to move from opinion to action. George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona community, is credited with defining an academic as ‘someone who can hold a vital issue at arm’s length for a lifetime’. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the midst of another and greater crisis, wrote in the second stanza of his ‘Stations on the Road to Freedom’.
"Daring to do what is right, not what your fancy may tell you, valiantly grasping occasions, not cravenly doubting - freedom comes only through deeds, not through thoughts taking wing, faint not nor fear, but go out to the storm and the action, trusting in God whose commandment you faithfully follow; freedom exultant will welcome your spirit with joy".
Of course that is not the full poem nor the full story - but the challenge is there - that in addressing issues, we move beyond assembling all sides of an argument and promoting a reasoned debate to coming to conclusions as to what is right and being able to act on it. This is call for all times - but I believe a call that is especially for our times.
If there is one parable that epitomises the mission and message of the John Ray Initiative it is the parable of the talents - the story of the master who leaves his servants with different amounts of money, returning later to see what they’ve done with it. Stewardship is ultimately about being faithful in that which has been entrusted to us.
I do not expect the future for me or JRI, or indeed for Church and society, to be easy. But I believe in a God who is there and who will oversee that future. And, as the Master in the parable, He will return and ask us to give account of our stewardship of the things of the earth and of our relationships with one another. It is my hope and prayer that His final statement on my life, and on all of ours, will be ‘ You have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master’ (Matthew 25: 21).