Economic Justice

I went to our care group Bible study last night and it was a very interesting and challenging evening. The topic of the sermon was "In God We Trust" and it was based on Matthew 6:19-34. The conversation eventually came around to a discussion of James 5:1-6 - some very challenging verses on the issue of economic and social justice.

"Look here, you rich people, weep and groan with anguish because of all the terrible troubles ahead of you. Your wealth is rotting away, and your clothes are moth-eaten rags. Your gold and your silver have become worthless. The very wealth you were counting on will eat away your flesh in hell. This treasure you have accumulated will stand as evidence against you on the day of judgment. For listen! Hear the cries of the field workers who you have cheated of their pay. The wages you held back cry out against you. The cries of the reapers have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have spent your years on earth in luxury, satisfying your every whim. Now your hearts are nice and fat, ready for the slaughter. You have condemned and killed good people who had no power to defend themselves against you." James 5:1-6 (NLT)

The question in the study guide was:
James 5:1-6 is a sobering text when we consider our wealth as compared to the standard on the global scale [a member of our group pointed out that if you have a personal computer in your home, that automatically puts you within the top 1% of the world's population!] What responsibility do we have for economic justice on the global scale? What changes can we in our spending and earning that would benefit the world's poor?

The question is a very practical question and we discussed how difficult it is to live these verses out in a real way. Personally, I feel that God is calling us as Christians to a higher standard. We know somewhere in the back of our minds that some companies are not entirely ethical in the way that they go about their businesses, but we don't really know enough about it to make it change our shopping habits. I think the verse directly before the passage we read is very telling in this issue: "REMEMBER, IT IS A SIN TO KNOW WHAT YOU OUGHT TO DO AND THEN NOT DO IT" We may not be sure about where the products we buy come from, but that isn't really an excuse... especially in today's information-superhighway age - we have a lot of information at our fingertips, it just takes a little time to access it, but as the verse says, if we know that we really should do better but we just don't bother to put the effort in, its a sin. Anyway, I have been trying to collect some informaiton on better alternatives and here is a list of websites that may be helpful:

MEDA - Mennonite Economical Development Association. The website explains who they are and what they do and you can either make a donation online (similar to the World Vision gift catalogue, where you buy school supplies for $30 etc.), or you can "invest' by loaning a sum of money for a specific project.
www.meda.org

The eBay company that does something similar (that Frank was telling us about) is MicroPlace and this is their website:
www.microplace.com


Here is a website with a list of the "Most Wanted" corporate human rights violators - it has a list of companies who are known to be gross violators of human rights around the world, what they are accused of doing and which organizations are battling them:
http://www.globalexchange.org/getInvolved/corporateHRviolators.html

So the companies listed on the previous website are some that we could consider avoiding. The folowing website is a directory list of ethical companies... so we may be able to find substitutes for the bad ones of this site! And it's Canadian!
http://www.ethicaldirectory.ca/index.php

Some stores that I personally know of that are trying to do better:

Cotton Ginny – they have a social responsibility code of conduct and a large line of Organic cotton clothing
MEC – (Mountain Equipment Co-op) - they have organic clothing, a social and environmental responsibility code of conduct and they recycle old plastic-based clothing into new fleece clothing etc.

Ten Thousand Villages - phenomenal for so many things - they have fair trade sugar, tea, cocoa, chocolate as well as paper, gifts, home furnishings, toys, music, books etc. etc. I did my entire Christmas shopping in the little store in Kelowna and I found some amazing (very appreciated) gifts. The fair trade coffee, tea and cocoa/sugar are obviously more expensive than the regular stuff in Superstore... but remember that at the end of the day, somebody is paying for the cheap product... maybe not us, but someone somewhere... actually having to buy the more expensive fair trade items means that we naturally eat less bad stuff (caffeine, sugar etc.!) - so it's sort of like a diet!! Also, they have a website and you can order things and have them shipped anywhere in Canada.

Thrift Stores - I know, I know - but sometimes its worth thinking about if we really need brand new all the time - for example, Mr Joyful now buys jeans for work from the thrift store because they just get wrecked at work anyway, so why buy brand new at three times the price? So even though most of you work in classy professions, maybe consider thrift stores for when you need painting clothes or just stuff for working out in your basement...??
A couple of others:
* Sage Creek Canada www.sagecreekcanada.com (organic and fair trade cotton clothing)
* No Sweat Apparel www.nosweatapparel.com (An American company, but click on Store Locations, and then Canada to find Canadian retailers)
* www.lululemon.com
* Coco International Artwear www.coco.ca