Description
How to make spiritual values count
ANTONIA SWINSON
208pp
A practical guide to money’s role in everyday Christian living
‘If all Christians bought this book and changed their priorities we would have revival in this land!’ Keith Tondeur, Credit Action
‘A timely book with an important message.’ The Tablet
'Absolutely marvellous ... the word is RELEVANT.' Kevin Cahill, author of Who Owns Britain
What does money mean to you? In whose interest is it for the population to be up to its eyeballs in debt? How does your childhood shape your views on money – for life? How does the financial world seduce us into accepting double standards?
In this timely, practical and entertaining book, Antonia Swinson shows us how we can make our spiritual values count. She dares us to challenge the financial establishment and chart an escape route to financial salvation. You will never look at money in the same way again. The author is an acclaimed writer, broadcaster and award-winning financial journalist, and has also had three novels published.
Extract
What a Golden Jubilee really Means
Two Jubilee pictures:
1. A Sunny day in June 2002. It is the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. A hot sunny June day, thousands are packed into The Mall in London. TV commentators tie themselves up in hyperbole, as the nation celebrates the Best of British. I’ve always had a soft spot for the Queen. That day she looked really happy, but I wondered whether she or the crowds knew what the term Golden Jubilee originally meant?
2. A young preacher, good looking and charismatic, is invited back to his home town to preach. All the townsfolk turn out to hear him, having heard on the grapevine he has come on rather well and it is human nature to take credit for any scrap of reflected glory. The town is a thriving community, situated at a crossroads of several key routes with a hill behind, which the children in the town like to climb, to look out over the countryside for miles.
The young man reads a passage from the Old Testament, ‘The Spirit of the lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me . . . to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour’ (Luke 4: 18–19). Then Jesus closes the book.
Bombshell. As Sir Kenneth Jupp points out, this was nothing less than a direct attack on the local landowners. And by a carpenter’s son, too! Jesus only has to add one or two nice remarks about the Gentiles, being as open to God’s mercy as the Jews, for these bigwigs to lose their temper and drag the scallywag up to the top of the hill to throw him off. Jesus’ ministry is in danger of being ended before it has begun.
He leaves without honour in his home town, because he has rocked the property boat. If everyone started bringing good news to the poor and preaching land redistribution, where would we be? Can’t you just hear the locals afterwards? For the year of the Lord’s favour was the Jubilee, which in ancient times redistributed the Promised Land among the twelve tribes of Israel every fifty years. Detailed in Leviticus 25, this was a reckoning, when debts within families were cancelled and land restored, in order to cut out the danger of any landowner monopoly. For as any third-world aid workers will tell you, landlessness = slavery. The practice of Jubilee land restructuring had gone out of favour centuries before Jesus’ time. But that reading was a wake-up call to Nazareth’s property owners. His ministry would bring the good news to the Have-nots, not the Haves. A key part of his mission statement was that the oppressed shall inherit the land.
…
Yet, in the UK throughout 2002, Jubilee Year, the real meaning of the Golden Jubilee was not apparently celebrated by the churches. Why? Follow the money. Some denominations own land and shares, and have needed all the land income they could get, after the stock-market falls, to pay clergy pensions. Yet, what an opportunity missed by the churches to connect with the rest of the population, ‘the oppressed’ in Jesus’ words, who struggle daily to keep a roof over their heads in a system designed to disconnect God and Money.
© Antonia Swinson