This year's One World Week material is now available online- saving paper and postage and fitting with its environmental theme.  One of the options is to invite people to do a rough and ready 'footprint' including questions about your house.  Dibley manse pushes me well into the worst category, but to be honest the questions would alsopush a lot of poor people in this country and even in the two-thirds world into the same category because they don't have insulation or double glazing in their detached homes (think shanties, tents and mud huts for example) or because they eat meat too often.

The points it is trying to make are valid - westerners who have the ability to make changes that impact climate change and who enjoy the greatest material wealth also have the greatest responsbility.  Which for me poses serious questions about our church buildings and manses.  Another take on Haggai 1 (and others) on the panelled houses perhaps?

It also made me think about the difficulty of creating these 'way in' resources and the use of simplistic questions.  No, I don't think that someone living in a shanty in Soweto or wherever damages the planet because they don't have double glazing or cavity wall insulation, but the seeming implication that only vegetaraianism can be supported by the planet I find over simplistic and less convincing.

As I have the task of preaching for the Churches Together OWW service, I will need to get my mind a little further around some of these questions.  (Oh, and I concluded that despite my best efforts, the house I live in and the distance to the nearest crem put me in the category of needing 3 planets like earth to sustain my lifestyle!)