Trafficking, Water, Wallis

Blog Action Day is coming up in Oct - there's a link for more information right down the right column of this blog. Not sure why it decided to hide itself way down there, but now you know, and have no excuse for not finding it!

I was hoping that they'd choose Human Trafficking as their big issue for the action day, but they've chosen Water, which, in terms of the need for clean water in many countries is certainly an issue, and the lack of which results in deaths.

However, I've been getting tweets (tweets galore, in fact) relating to Human Trafficking and consequently that's an issue that's more on my mind. A friend on Facebook alerted me to a site called The A21 Campaign, this morning, so I've been checking it out. In line with its name it has 21 things you can do to help make people more aware of human trafficking. Click here for the list.

I went and heard Jim Wallis speak on Tuesday - he'd been brought to the city by the Professor of Public Theology at the Otago University. He's a fairly low key/laid-back speaker, has a good sense of humour, tells lots of stories, and (quixotically) is married to the woman who was consultant to the series The Vicar of Dibley. She's an Anglican priest, British born.

His theme is injustice, injustice, injustice. You may have heard of Sojourners, the organisation that he heads, but he does far more than that. He has the ear of people in high places - including Barak Obama, and is a Christian who is able to speak into society in a way that many Christians cannot - through lack of opportunity. You might put him in the prophetic mode, except that he wasn't wearing anything outlandish in the way of garb, now was he eating locusts or intending to cook his evening meal over dung; nor had he buried his underwear in the ground and disinterred it a year later (only to find, as would be expected, that it had deteriorated considerably); now has he been fed by ravens at any known point.

Nevertheless, prophet to the nation(s) is pretty much what he is. Thank God for him.

Wallis had plenty of injustice issues to comment on, and there's only so much you can say in a couple of hours, so he didn't speak much about human trafficking, as it happened. It did come up at one point, when he pointed out that there were more slaves now than there had been in Wilberforce's time - millions more. Wilberforce successfully fought for the abolition of slaves but the battle needs to be fought all over again in our day. Check out the A21 site if you're devoid of ideas as to how you might be involved.