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Faith-Based Community Organising – what is it and what are we working towards?

For many years now, Tearfund has been at the forefront of calling for change to the systems and policies that degrade the earth and entrap people in cycles of extreme poverty and inequality. Our passion for good development has always been coupled with a desire to inspire Christians in Australia to embrace a biblically shaped response to poverty and injustice.

If we look at the most significant political and social transformations of our time – the abolition of the slave trade, the campaign for civil rights, and the cancellation of debt for the world’s poorest countries – and consider how they came about, we start to understand the key to unlocking entrenched and unjust systems. The answer in each of these cases was a movement of ordinary people, led from within the church, thinking differently, defying and shifting cultural norms as well as calling on the powerful to change.

Faith-Based Community Organising is a set of tools which help movements bring people together to shift power and work collectively for change.

Tearfund organisers, work to lovingly shift power towards our global partners by:

• Engaging and Mobilising their faith communities to respond to issues of injustice
• Lobbying decision-makers to enact policies which benefit those experiencing extreme poverty.
• Encouraging others to make lifestyle commitments and take individual actions which benefit those experiencing extreme poverty.