Annual Report: Tearfund 2010

Aim

The Petersfield Group exists to inform and inspire prayer and support for Tearfund in this area.

Tearfund takes a comprehensive approach to releasing people from poverty and working for truly sustainable change. They work to inspire the church to transform communities. They mobilise the local church to work with poor communities to bring material and spiritual transformation: to speak out in advocacy, and to prepare and respond to disasters.

A major initiative is their “Connected Church” work which helps develop partnerships between churches. Their ten year vision is for 50 million people to be released from spiritual and material poverty through a world-wide network of 100,000 local churches.

Petersfield Meetings

We meet on the second Tuesday of every other month, and were well provided with speakers last year. Unfortunately, the January meeting had to be postponed due to the snow and ice, so we were reduced to five meetings. The topics covered were as follows:

On March 9th, Fran Pyatt explained the work of auditing mission activities, and related some of her experiences visiting disaster zones where Tearfund was doing relief work.
On May 11th, Nick Roberts, whose visit had been postponed from January, talked about his activities with Tearfund which had led to him also to work in auditing. It backed up the importance of this little publicised aspect of the work.
On July 13th, the Southern Region Specialist Volunteers Manager, John Archer, and the Churches Liason Officer, Liz Green, both came, and we had previews of the Summer appeal and the Harvest material. John introduced us to “Connected Church” as a trailer for the next meeting.
On September 9th, we focussed on “Connected Church” seeing how it worked from the point of view of churches in a developing area, and secondly from the view of three English Churches linked with partner churches abroad. We also prompted action on Climate Change in response to the Global Action team's material.
On November 9th, we addressed a new Tearfund initiative working to relieve the world-wide problems of violence against women. Mandy Marshall, joint founder of “Restored” explained the problems and what this organisation was doing. She drew our attention to the situation in the UK where it is seldom discussed, especially where it occurs in church families. 9 copies of the draft domestic abuse pack were subsequently accepted by local churches.

Other Activities

Petitions supporting action to minimise climate change were signed at St Mary Magdalen, Sheet, St Peter's, Petersfield, and by the Greening Petersfield group. These were presented to Damian Hinds MP on Nov 5th. He is well informed on such matters, and it was a mutually encouraging meeting as we saw how local individual actions complemented the national government initiatives.

Thanks

Our thanks go to our supporters who come from a wide area. Please invite anyone you know who might be interested in Tearfund’s work, and feel free to contact Ken at 01730-233769 for any local support in addition to the Tearfund helplines.