This month: Four appeals at Christmas - Food for thought - Aid against Aids - Letter from Chennai - Pressure pays off

Four appeals at Christmas

This year, the church’s Christmas giving is focused on four appeals: Spurgeon’s Child Care; the Roma Schools Project in Shkodra, Albania; the work of Pastors Theophilus and Prakash in India, and Open Door.

There are several ways in which you can contribute to these causes.

First, you can give a donation in lieu of postage or cards through our ‘Christmas Cards postal system’ (see back page). Collect an envelope from our church treasurer, Chris Songer; put a donation in the envelope and indicate, on the outside of the envelope, your preferred charity - either ‘Shkodra’ or ‘India’. Return the envelope to Chris or place it in the offertory bag and the money will be passed on. 

By a present card for the Shkodra project - speak to Carol or John Baughan if you have a special request of card and greeting.

Over the Christmas period, our ‘loose’ offerings on specific Sundays will be for three of these charities. At the morning Carol Service, on 18th December, we will be focusing on Open Door.  The offering at the Family Carol Service on the same day will be benefiting the Roma Schools Project in Shkodra, Albania and, as is our usual custom, on Christmas Day we will be supporting the work of Spurgeon’s Child Care.

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Another ‘fact that should change the world’.

Food for thought

It’s the sort of lunch that many of us in the Western world eat: a ham and mustard sandwich on softgrain bread, packaged in a plastic-enclosed triangle; a bag of salt’n’vinegar crisps, and a bottle of orange fizzy drink.  It’s tasty, not particularly health-conscious but it’s a convenient, filling lunch.

The ham sandwich contains 13 ‘E’ numbers, additives such as emulsifiers, treatment agents, stabilisers and acidity regulators. There are some odd ingredients too, including ‘maize grits’. And why should smoked ham need water?

The crisps contain flavour enhancers - monosodium glutamate and disodium 5 ribonucleotide.  The drink contains eight per cent orange juice but it also has glucose-frusctose syrup, sugar, aspartame and saccharine, preservative, flavouring, colouring and ‘cloud’ - or stabiliser E1450.

In 2000, the food industry spent some $20bn on making our food look prettier, taste nicer and last longer.  This is big business and it is driven by the need for industrialised countries to feed a lot of people cheaply - and profitably.  According to the food additives industry, these chemicals enable our food to stay fresh longer and have made the concept of ‘convenience food’ possible.  Without food additives, they say, we would have to spend more time in the kitchen - and more on shopping since our food would start to rot after a couple of days.

However, this issue is not as simple as ‘chemicals over nature’.  For centuries, humans used natural substances, such as salt and smoke, to preserve food.  In early societies, where the success of the hunt could not be assured and crops could fall prey to disease, it was vital to find ways of preserving food.

Nowadays, less than one per cent of food additives by weight are used to preserve food.  Ninety per cent are ‘cosmetic’ additives: flavourings, colourings, emulsifiers (to make the food feel smoother in your mouth), thickeners and sweeteners.  By disguising bland and low-quality raw materials, substances like these can convince us that we’re eating something that’s better than its constituent parts.

The worldwide market in flavourings is worth $3.6bn a year.  Synthesising flavours is a complex process - replicating even ‘simple’ flavours is the product of hundreds of chemical reactions.  There is no requirement on manufacturers to detail what is in their flavourings.  They must only say whether it is natural or artificial - and ‘natural’ only means that the flavouring has been extracted from a ‘natural source’ (not that, for example, strawberry flavour has come from a strawberry).

Some 15,000 tons of synthetic sweeteners are used every year - and are cheaper than sugar to use. However saccharin has been shown to cause cancer in rodents and aspartame has been linked with dizziness and migraine.  While 540 food additive compounds are now judged ‘safe’ for human consumption, there are doubts over the safety of 150 of these.

If you buy a ham sandwich, you want to taste real ham, not a mixture of animal tissue flavoured with chemicals.  You may not want to have to read the small print on fruit drinks to see if they contain sweeteners.  Fresh, well-cooked food has all the flavour and texture it should need.  While some of this issue is about the choices we make, much more is about the choices that are made for us - by retailers and manufacturers.  So happy eating, this Christmas season!

Abridged from ‘50 facts that should change the world’ by Jessica Williams (ISBN 1-84046-547-6) and supplied by Aneurin Little.

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Aid against Aids


The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) is asking governments, businesses and individuals to support its global campaign, ‘Unite for Children, Unite Against Aids’.  According to Unicef, more children were killed last year by Aids-related diseases than the combined death tolls from the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake.
Aids is responsible for the deaths of 1,400 children under the age of 15 every day.  Most of these children are from sub-Saharan Africa but Aids-related deaths of children are now rising rapidly in Asia.
Unicef’s five year goal is to wipe out Aids among young people - by preventing pregnant women from passing on HIV to their children, giving effective medicines to Aids victims in the 15 to 24 age range, and helping children orphaned by this pandemic.
Meeting Unicef’s targets will cost up to £17bn by 2010 - equivalent to the current annual turnover of fast-food giant McDonald’s.

Spotted in The Metro by Peter Kelleher.

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Letter from Chennai

Greetings to you all in the name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.  By the grace of Christ and all your prayers, thank you very much for all your loving kindness and support.
It was really a great joy for me to have fellowship with all those connected with Marshalswick Baptist Free Church during my stay in the UK.  Naturally, we would be delighted to see any of you at our church in Chennai!
We are all fine here.  In your daily prayers, please pray for our church ministries - as we pray for you and your ministries in our daily prayers.
At this year’s Christmas service, we are going to distribute 100 saris to the poor widows and the aged women in our church, along with women in the nearby villages.  We would love your prayers and financial support to help us to expand God's kingdom in this area in the days to come.

From Pastor Prakash Raj & Diana, Calvary Telugu Baptist Church, Chennai.

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Pressure pays off


After frantic negotiations, the end of September brought international agreement to the debt cancellation deal proposed by the G8 in June and July.
Your support has been crucial in creating the political will to see this deal through: both Gordon Brown and the World Bank President, Paul Wolfowitz, acknowledged the importance of worldwide public pressure in securing this deal.
We know that debt cancellation frees countries to spend their own money on their own people, instead of giving it to the rich world. And all the evidence shows that, so far, debt cancellation has benefited millions in Africa and elsewhere by paying for healthcare, education, clean water and crucial infrastructure.
But it is not over yet. Some issues still need to be resolved. Despite some of the hype, the current agreement does not mean that 100 per cent of all unpayable and unfair debts will be cancelled for all countries that need it.
Your determination and energy in calling for debt relief over past months and years have been crucial in taking us from a position where governments routinely refused to listen, to one where they are taking steps towards ending debt domination. More details from the Jubilee Debt Campaign.