New practical, global resource launched for churches engaging with inequalities of land access and use

On the afternoon of Wednesday 16 July 2025, the Global Relationships and Justice Seeking Church teams hosted a special event at Methodist Church House with Graham Philpott who works for the Church Land Programme based in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Graham was only in Britain for a few days and it seemed a good opportunity for some key members of the Connexional team to meet him and hear about what he does.

Graham has recently contributed to a new resource which was published by MCB on the 1 August on the subject of Land Rights, particularly as it disproportionately affects women, children and people with disabilities and long term health conditions. This resource, now available in both English and Spanish, has been compiled out of a series of global conversations convened by MCB over the last couple of years. These have been led by co-Chairs in Sri Lanka and Colombia, and participants have been able to talk about the challenges faced in their locality with regard to access and use of land, what practices they have developed specifically in response to inequalities and discrimination and what learning there has been which can now be shared more widely. In these online gatherings all participants had time to contribute, were treated as equal partners and offered something unique and of value into the discussion. From these conversations with global partners, we have distilled our learning into six reflections on practice as it relates to theology in the hope they will stimulate dialogue and spark action in local churches in different contexts around the world.

One of these six reflections is particularly focused on Graham’s practice and the event we hosted gave an opportunity to see how these global themes are contextualised and manifest in a British context. The specific challenge Graham brought to us as the Methodist Church in Britain is how the Church in South Africa continued to unintentionally perpetuate inequalities of land ownership and use post-apartheid, and how they have since moved from a ‘doing to’ to ‘collaborating in solidarity with’ model of engaging with people unjustly affected by this issue. He also highlighted how the language of rights and ownership reinforces a Western worldview of land as property to be exploited for profit, rather than a gift that ultimately belongs to God for the benefit of all God has created.

Graham talked about land as identity and land as spirituality, and the rupturing of our relationship to land as a consequence of conquest and displacement by colonialism. This starts to speak into our discussions about reparations, but also enables us to question our own relationship to land in the UK. We are well used to hearing about the chronic shortage of housing and fears around immigration, but what alternative ways of thinking and being does our faith point us to and what can we learn from our Christian brothers and sisters by way of a provocation and plea? This most explicitly links to the work of the Properties team and JPIT, as well as our collaborative, cross-Connexional working groups gathered around Priorities for Justice ‘seeking justice for refugees’ and ‘tackling inequality and poverty’. Although, we can all be mindful about shifting our language and well-intentioned activity away from a doing to or for, towards being in solidarity with. My hope is that this new resource and meeting Graham will add fuel to deliberations still at an early stage, but which will enable us ultimately to be more faithful disciples, better stewards of our tradition and more radically justice seeking as a Church.

To find out more visit Global Networks for Mission or download the resource in English or Spanish.