I feel I really have to blog a bit about the unfair game which I used in my sermon for Harvest on Sunday if only in homage to Dave the wibmeister who inspired me with the idea.
I have to say that I was finding the task of preaching on Trade Justice quite tricky as getting a handle on WHAT some of the organisations were actually campaigning for proved rather difficult. Thank heaven for the Trade Justice Movement which had an excellent site with clear information and stories of real people. Having finally grasped at least a few of the barest basics of international trade economics and the World Trade Organisation, I then endeavoured to make this even VAGUELY appealing to the children from ARK (our Sunday School), the young people from Scouts and Explorers let alone endeavouring to impress my new boss at least a little bit!
Well the unfair game seemed to please a least a reasonably wide section of the assembled populace. The game involved two tables with soft drink bottle skittles (one with cheapo value bottles and one with brand labels for that extra message enhancement!) and two teams of children representing, on one side, the Western World and, on the other side, the Developing World. Each team had a blue ball and a green ball. The difference was that the Western World team had sponge footballs to knock over their skittles whereas the Developing World had two small ballpool balls to represent their more limited resources.
I got some good feedback about the whole service and my contribution but I think the thing that really pleased me was the fact that, according to our Coffee Shop Manager Cindy who is also our Traidcraft co-ordinator, the sales of Fairly Traded goods at our monthly Traidcraft stall were far in excess of our average sales. People must have understood what I was getting at. How often do preachers get that kind of confirmation that their message has been heard?
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