Osian jailed as part of the struggle for equal rights for Welsh speakers

Tomorrow, Friday November 6th at 9.30 am my friend, Osian Jones, North Wales organiser for Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society) will be sentenced to a month in prison by Pwllheli Magistrates. The magistrates have already warned him that he faces imprisonment because of his refusal to pay fines for his part in non-violent direct action on High Street stores as part of a Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg’s campaign for a comprehensive Welsh Language Measure that would give Welsh speakers equal rights in all spheres of society.

Osian will be the second member of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg to go to prison this year. Ffred Ffransis was imprisoned back in June for refusing to pay fines also imposed for his part in the campaign for a comprehensive Welsh Language Measure.

Osian Jones said:

It’s interesting that both Ffred and I faced prison this year for our part in this particular campaign. What is more significant is that Ffred the ‘offences’ for which Ffred was imprisoned go back to January 2001 which proves that this particular campaign has been long and hard. The sad thing is, that the Welsh Language LCO which is now on offer, and which is the product of all this campaigning is utterly inadequate since it does not give the Welsh people their legitimate linguistic rights which enables them to live their lives fully through the medium of Welsh, nor does it’s powers extend to the private sector.”

“Even though we argued our case with conviction before committees in both the National Assembly and at Westminster it became obvious to us that the legislative process in Wales is both wearisome and defective, and that we have no choice but to continue with our direct action campaign. I hope that my imprisonment will give other people the inspiration to campaign for the language and that we will see the responsibility for legislating on the Welsh language transferred in it’s entirety to the National Assembly in the near future. The Welsh people have had to wait a long time to see their linguistic rights realised. They deserve a great deal more than the LCO which is now on offer.

Please pray that God will grant Osian courage as he faces the next month behind bars in the name of a just cause.

The BBC tolerating injustice

The other week through Tearfund’s Superdager application in Facebook i sent the following message to the BBC’s Director General Mark Thompson in relation to the BBC decision i force George Alagiah to resign as Patron of the Fairtrade Foundation:

Dear Mr. Thompson,

Regarding the forced resignation of George Alagiah as Patron of the Fairtrade Foundation, the BBC is concerned that Fairtrade causes a ‘potential conflict of interest’ and ‘could undermine [his] impartiality’.

But Fairtrade is not controversial. The Fairtrade mark has become mainstream – more than 70 per cent of the UK population recognise it, and Fairtrade goods are on every high street. Worldwide, consumers spent over £1.6 billion on Fairtrade products in 2007 – that’s over 1.5 million producers and workers in 58 developing countries now benefiting. Who can say this is controversial?

Surely criteria could be agreed that will serve to ensure that both the integrity of the BBC and Mr Alagiah’s enduring service to the Fairtrade Foundation are effectively safeguarded.

Please reconsider Mr Alagiah’s forced resignation from the Fairtrade Foundation and allow him to continue acting as Patron.

Rhys Llwyd

This week i received the following response from the BBC:

I understand that you are disappointed that George Alagiah had to step down from his role with the Fairtrade Foundation.

On its website www.fairtrade.org.uk/get_involved/donate/ the Fairtrade Foundation asks its supporters to help fund its “lobbying and influencing key players across society in commerce, government and campaigning groups” and that the organisation will “continue to push the Government to ensure that all aspects of the global trade system are fair and supportive of development”. Other leading charities have said that The Fairtrade Foundation seeks to “transform trading in favour of the poor and disadvantaged”. Such an ambition is the prerogative of the charities. Many may find it admirable though others may take a different view of global economic priorities.

It is not the business of BBC journalism to take a view on this or to be perceived to take a view. We are committed to due impartiality which means we don’t take sides on issues of controversy. Our job is to represent all sides in an argument accurately and fairly and test them as rigorously as we can to allow our audiences to reach their own judgements. And it’s not enough for our journalism to be impartial. We must also be seen to be impartial. That’s why it’s inappropriate for a BBC journalist to take a high profile, public role representing an organisation which, as the charity makes clear, takes a very particular view of the controversial issue of global trade.

Thank you once again for taking the trouble to share your views with us.

Regards

Craig Wilson
BBC Complaints

This response from the BBC is shocking because it legitimizes the argument for un-fair trade! Proverbs 28:5 springs into mind: ‘Evil men do not understand justice, but those who seek the Lord understand it fully.’ In the name of impartiality the BBC have in reality made their stand by tolerating injustice.

Visiting Tearfund HQ

Yesterday I travelled with Hywel Meredydd, Tearfund’s manager in Wales, to Tearfunds head office at Teddington, London. Hywel was taking part in a Poverty Prayer DVD they were filming but he took me along with him because he’s keen to get my input on different strategies to get more Welsh speakers and Welsh speaking churches a part of Tearfund’s work. Amongst other things we discussed was the need to develop more of a Welsh online presence.

Tearfund 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. Tearfund are addressing a wide range of issues including HIV, water and sanitation, reducing the impact of disasters, economic injustice and climate change.

If Tearfund would just be a humanist charity it would still be an amazing organization; but what excites me about Tearfund is the fact that it’s not just any humanist charity it’s a radical movement of committed (or if you wish ‘evangelical’) Christians. That spiritual dimension to Tearfund means that the zeal and Koinoniaesq feel around the work is very special indeed. What this means in practice is that prayer is central to Tearfund’s work. At Tearfund they believe in doing everything they can. It’s a way of working that they call integral mission. It means that while they know people need material things to survive, they choose to work through church-based partners who won’t stop at just the material basics when it comes to helping their neighbours in need. They’ll do everything they can. Churches know and care about the people they live with. They see them as more than just mouths to feed – they know what they’ve been through and the kind of help they need.

Tearfund see people as more than just physical entities, we all have emotional and spiritual needs as well. The local church, operating at its best, has the power to change people’s lives, to give them a new perspective, to help heal emotional scars and offer the hope they need – to bring people together. Taking this approach has proved, in Tearfund’s experience, the best way to help people make lasting changes in their lives that free them from poverty. This is why working through local churches at the place of need is such a powerful way to help people.

Another great thing about Tearfund is the fact that 91% of money raised reaches the front line. Only 9% of the budget is spent on administration, staff, advocacy, education, further fund raising etc… This is significantly less than most major charities with Christian Aid coming in with 30% on administration! This is achieved by Tearfund through very careful spending reviews and a big emphasis on volunteers and action through local churches rather than an over emphasis on paid staff. Despite Tearfund only having two part time workers in Wales the money raised here is as much as other charities who have eight and more full time workers – that speaks volumes.

I don’t think you must be a Christian to be involved in charity work proper and I believe humanist charities like Oxfam and the more humanist elements withing Christian Aid do very important and brilliant work. But for me as a committed Christian and a young church leader in Wales I do feel that Tearfund shares’s the vision closest to mine – basically, believing and living the Gospel of Christ!

But what was great yesterday was meeting young Christians who were fired up to fight injustice and work to end poverty. Here in Welsh Wales we have hardly any young Christians full stop; and I can count those I know of which have a passion to fight injustice on one hand!

How to get involved with Tearfund?

• You can visit the website to find out about the latest news so you can get praying about the work and give some money if you can.
• And if your a Facebook user you can sing up to the Tearfund SuperBadger app through which you can lobby politicians about various issues Tearfund feel strongly about.

Please pray especially for Hywel and Miriam and all the volunteers Tearfund have in Wales and pray for Janet and the other brilliant people who I met at the head office. Pray that the Spirit will lead them in their work and that through them more and more Christians will live a more responding life to the Gospel and though that integral mission will happen and people all over the world through Tearfund’s work will see material and spiritual transformation in their life.

August madness

Last week I was busy at the Eisteddfod doing this and that (yes, I know, I need to renew the domain), the week before that I was busy on the Start Something Tour; this week I moved house from Bangor to Deiniolen. I’m now back in Aberystwyth prepering my sermon for Souled Out which starts this Friday. After that I hope to have a few days breathing befroe settling down in my new house in Deiniolen and get back cracking on the PhD after the August “rest” – hope to get another chapter in by the end of first week of September.

That is all.

Report from the Tony Campolo meeting, Carmarthen

Saturday night I went to the Tony Campolo meeting in Carmarthen. The Chapel was packed out, possibly as much as 500 there, seldom do we see preaching meetings attracting so much people in Wales these days. Most of the people there were from the Baptist Union of Wales’s English convention which was held during the day but also a good number of local folks turned in – many of them Welsh speakers which was very encouraging.

The meeting started with some worship lead by a well rehearsed local (I presume) worship band. They launched through a few modern day classics like King of Kings Majesty, Mighty to Save and Light of the World before powering through the victorious Crown Him With Many Crowns. The Spirit’s present was very much felt during the singing by all who were there. This was followed by a word of prayer and a reading from scripture then Campolo took to the pulpit.

Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22: 34-40)

His message was a warm but also hard hitting mix of a call to personal faith in Jesus and a challenge for Christians to live their lives in the light that Jesus laid it all down for them. His delivery was rather eclectic – he used a lot of humor and also used a lot of stories he’d picked up during the years to convey his point. But when needed he reverted to some good old fashioned Baptist staring the congregation out and shouting on us to repent and follow Jesus anew.

He finished his sermon with one of his often used motifs: “When you were born, you cried and everybody else was happy. The only question that matters is this: When you die, will YOU be happy when everybody else is crying?”

The meeting was bought to a close with the very Welsh, at the request of Campolo himself, Guide me O Thou great Jehovah. This was one of those meetings that I will remember for years to come.

Tony Campolo comes to Carmarthen

One of my favorite Christian thinkers of our time is Tony Campolo, I have huge respect for him. This Saturday he’s the keynote speaker at the English Welsh Baptist’s annual Union meeting and the evening meeting is public so I’m going to hear him speak live. I’ve been reading the books and tuning in to the podcasts for some years now so I’m really looking forward to see and hear him in flesh. It really saddens me that some Christians go around branding him as a Liberal only because he preaches the Kingdom of God in it’s full glory and not only personal salvation. He still affirms the importance of personal salvation only that he teaches that the Gospel is more than personal salvation only. In my view he knocks the nail on it’s head and brings a much needed counter emphasis to the evangelical world.

The meeting is at 7pm, Saturday 13th June at Tabernacle Chapel, Waterloo Terrace, Carmarthen – £5 on the door. Arrive early to avoid disappointment.

I’ll let the man speak for himself now….

A stand for civil rights

Ffred Ffransis, a veteran language campaigner and a committed Christian, was banned from taking a Welsh Bible into jail and forced to eat only potatoes while behind bars at Bridgend’s Parc Prison this week. Fred was sentenced to five days at Llanelli magistrates on Monday for refusing to pay an eight-year-old fine of £100. The 60-year-old campaigner said he was appalled at the lack of effort to serve the Welsh community. He was reduced to eating only potatoes because he refused to fill in an English-only form to request vegetarian food. After taking his Bible from him on the way in they didn’t provide him with a Welsh Bible in his cell either.

Ffred has been sentenced to around 6 years in total over the last 40 years, and has served around 4 years in prison. He has been sentenced to prison a total of 8 times. Here are the times he was sentenced to a lengthy periods:


• 1987 (Cardiff Court) – Campaigning for a body to develop Welsh Language Education (1 year – served 9 months)

• 1973 (Huddersfield Court) – Welsh language channel (1 year – served 9 months)

• 1971 (Mold Court) – Welsh language channel (3 years – served 2 years)

• 1970 (High Court, London) – In support of Dafydd Iwan, Road Signs campaign (3 months – served 2 months)

Personally I’ve been arrested four times in the past four years, but have never been given a prison sentence.

It’s very sad that even in modern post-devolution Wales Welsh speakers still have to resort to non-violent direct action to draw attention to our lack of civil rights in vast areas of day to day life.

Who created nations? God or Man?

Here is an adaption of a few ideas R. Tudur Jones gave in his paper Christian Nationalism (1979), it’s very interesting because although R. Tudur Jones himself is a Christian Nationalist he does not believe as many Christian Nationalists do that God created the nations. His understanding is that God ordained men to be cultural beings and through their cultural endeavor they created nations. So nations and cultures should not be guarded and kept simply because they were created by God but rather because they were created by man who created them under the Sovereignty of God.

Wales shares with other Christian nations the conviction that God has been at work in its history. The conviction goes back to the very dawn of our history when our forefathers began to become conscious of themselves as a specific people as the Roman Empire of the west disintegrated. The conviction can be expressed in many ways. It can be a powerful belief that the nation has enjoyed divine protection during the vicissitudes of its history. It can also be a belief that it is especially favored by God and is an elect nation doubtless this way of thinking owes much to familiarity with the Bible. The Bible has much to say about nations and their fate and. above all, it has much to say about Israel as God’s elect people. And it is quite obvious that Christian people in many lands have understood the histories of their own nations on the analogy of the history of Israel. It is a small step from this conviction to the assertion that nationality is to be understood as one of the ordinances of creation, a radical form of community created by God.

But God did not create nations, God created man and man formed nations. This is why it is misleading to talk, as some theologians have done, of nationality as one of the “orders of creation”. At the same time, the various forms of society that man has evolved during the centuries have a close connection with God’s work as creator.

When we turn our attention to a nation’s life, we realize that all cultural work of its people has a deep religious significance. It has to do with their obedience to God. If they produce social institutions, or works of art, or literature, or systems of jurisprudence and of economics, in the light of God’s covenant with man, that Nation’s life has not been in vain. To extinguish such a nation’s existence thoughtlessly is a matter of serious moment. And such a heritage may well be extinguished by the nation’s own citizens as well as by a foreign oppressor.

The Political Bible

It will not do to argue that the Bible provides us with no guidance in political matters. Let us remind ourselves of our starting-point. Man is to serve the glory of God in every aspect of his life as a creature in creation. His religious obedience to his God is expressed in his work as a maker of culture. Politics is very definitely a part of man’s appointed sphere of religious labour. It would be astounding if the volume which is to serve as man’s guide in glorifying God refrained from saying anything about politics. And in fact, the Bible is a surprisingly political book. Is is rather interesting, in the view of the attention being paid at the present time to both the ‘Theology of Politics’ and the ‘Theology of Liberation’ that some of their leading principles were being promulgated in Wales well over a century ago. Gwilym Hiraethog knew his Bible. Worship and politics are not the same thing; but they cannot be divorced from each other without denying that God is God and that this world is his by right of creation and redemption.

Not my words but the words of R. Tudur Jones. Very interesting.

Blog Dyfed Wyn Roberts

Dyfed, lost somewhere on Ynys Môn, he's honestly not as far out as this picture suggests!

I first met Dyfed when I got my interview to be Warden of John Morris Jones two years ago. John Morris Jones is the Welsh speaking hall of residence at Bangor University. At the time Dyfed was Head Warden of Rathbone, the “English Hall” next door, and he also administrated the whole warden system of the University. During the interview I remember him taking a keen interest in two things. First of all he took a keen interest in my research field and secondly he took a keen interest in my faith – I think I must have said in the application letter that I was a committed Christian. All this baffled me as he hardly asked anything directly about the job and role I was being interviewed for!

When I got home to Aberystwyth that night I was intrigued so I turned to that post-modern god for answers, Google. I found out that Dyfed, in addition to his warden and student support services role, was also a part-time lecturer in the Theology Department and he had been in full time ministry and was planning to return to it at the end of the year. It would be an exaggeration to say that we are now best friends but as brothers in Christ I like to think anyway that I knew I had a fellow Christian I could turn to if the whole Warden thing got to me! He perhaps doesn’t know it, but he did have a sort of role in advising me what Church to go to when i arrived in Bangor. I very much enjoyed our short but frequent chats on the way to the laundry, at the Christmas dinner, and when he took his dog for a walk.

Dyfed has now left the University and returned, with his lovely wife Helen, to full time ministry on his native Ynys Môn. He has a very very interesting blog where he shares some of his vision for the work of the Kingdom on Ynys Môn. What is great is that Dyfed and Helen are really doing it, for example Helen has taken over the running of the Post Office in Brynsiencyn, the village they have moved to. The previous postmaster retired a few months ago and no one was willing to take on the service. Fortunately the office has been kept open by someone on a temporary basis, but now Helen’s time has come to take it over. Dyfed tells that ‘there is a lot of life in it for her and she is excited at the prospect of being at the heart of village life.’ It is a great opportunity to serve the local community. Brynsiencyn is a relatively poor village, with many elderly people depending on the post office to receive their state pension. Not having this service locally would have meant a bus journey to Llanfairpwll. This whole rooting in to the community for the Kingdom really excites me and is a huge encouragement.

So, keep a look out for Dyfed’s blog if you want to be encouraged and inspired.