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Day four
Yesterday (Thursday) I met Michael Winter, a man coming up to the age of 80 who has been volunteering a morning or an afternoon a week at CSM for 10 years. Michael said that he first became interested in politics at the age of 15 when Clement Attlee won his 1945 landslide victory promising social reform. However, Michael said that he resigned from the Labour party in 2003 due to the Iraq war, when he cut his membership card in half and posted it to 10 Downing Street. Over the years Michael has seen CSM change and develop, and noted that the organisation has become more professional and the Socialism has been sharpened and said that CSM kept socialism alive in the Labour Party and influenced Labour thinking. When I asked him how his Christian faith and his political beliefs worked together he said that he sees Capitalism as incompatible with Christianity which has been proven by the recent economic events. He also said that the socialist principle "from each according to his means to each according to his need" was a principle based in the Bible, from the books of Acts and 2 Corinthians. When I met with Michael he was working in the CSM office inputting figures into the member database and I couldn't help but admire his commitment and desire to serve God through doing the mundane and 'boring' tasks which mean that the full time office staff have time to focus their attention on the more pressing matters. I loved this work ethic and feel its really something that Jesus talked about, Michael is really serving CSM simply by doing the jobs that aren't neccessarily that fun or interesting but that need doing and are essential for the running of the Christian Socialist Movement.
Later on I also met with Daniel Gover, the editor of the latest copy of 'The Common Good'. Daniel is the parliamentary researcher for Rt. Hon. Stephen Timms, MP and got involved with CSM through the organisation Christians in Politics. I loved his answer when I asked him about how he mixes his faith with his politics because he said that he sees politics as an outworking of his faith according to the work ethic written about in the Bible. I thought this was really important; that he saw politics this way, particularly that politics was an outworking of his faith rather than his faith being an outworking of his politics. This reminded me of a conversation I had earlier with Jay Hart Román, about how if we are Christians then everything we do is Christian and there is nothing that is seperate from God. Daniel said that for him politics is about coming to a good compromise with people and that often a 'compromise' is seen as something bad and negative but that for Christians politics should be about coming to a good compromise with people, a compromise that has Christian input. It was great to meet Daniel. I really admired his commitment to the CSM magazine, which he said that he underestimated at first, but I know from speaking to Jay that he worked really hard to make the issue great.
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Grace Vanstone-Hallam, 24/07/2009 |
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