Church Action on Poverty Sunday

Time for new wine skins - worship resources for 21 February 2021

Lord Jesus,
the fabric of our society has been patched many times,
and yet still there are holes,
the places where the poor and the vulnerable
struggle to exist.

(from a prayer by Nick Jowatt)

To mark Church Action on Poverty (CAP) Sunday on 21 February 2021, CAP has produced a thought-provoking collection of prayers, hymns, Bible readings and creative activities to explore the importance of listening more to people on the margins as we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic. People like the blind man Bartimaeus, who calls out to Jesus for help in Mark 10: 46-52.

All the resources, including slides to use in online worship, are available for download from the Church Action on Poverty website.

Three featured hymns include two by Andrew Pratt, the first of which draws on both the image of new wineskins for new wine and on the story of Bartimaeus:

That’s torn it, all we planned is ripped asunder,
the force of fermentation strains the seams;
society has witnessed skill and blunder,
a virus spins nod tests our human schemes.

Blind faith has opened wide our eye to chaos. . .  

Also worth exploring is a set of Bible studies drawing on events from the Acts of the Apostles. Life Changing Stories: scripture from the margins looks at this account of the early Church as “a story of people on the margins of society who were empowered to go out and change the world.

“We remind ourselves that the original audiences for the Acts of the Apostles’ teaching, and for the Gospels, were often people who were themselves marginalised by poverty, even living under military occupation.”

Former Methodist vice-president Jan Sutch Pickard looks at how Peter and John challenged the religious authorities in Jerusalem – “ordinary people speaking out for change” (Acts 4: 1-20). Another of the five studies included in this free-to-download resource is written by the Revd Dr Raj BharatPatta, a minister of the Andhra Evangelical Lutheran Church of India, currently serving in the Stockport Methodist Circuit in the UK. He re-visits St Paul’s encounter with a Roman tribune in Acts 22: 22-29 and explores the importance of citizenship, “which has been a matter of privilege for some, a matter of struggle for some and a matter of denial for others.”