Christian Aid Week will soon once again have come and gone and St.Mary’s will once again, no doubt, have coaxed from our neighbours a record response to the annual appeal – a result in which organizers, distributors and collectors can justly take pride.

What is disappointing to some of us is that, once the Week is over and the cash safely banked, St.Mary’s as a church seems to forget about the churches own Relief and Development Agency for the rest of the year. This is not to say that individual members do not, on the quiet, make their own contributions in other ways, but, as a church, ours does not lend its weight to, or even seem curious about, the work the Week helps to fund: for example the Till Receipts Campaign, which by 1999 had persuaded the seven largest UK supermarkets to sign up to an Ethical Trading Initiative, designed to ensure that none of the food they offered us was produced at the cost of its producers’ poverty and ill-health.

In all my years at St.Mary’s our involvement by Dr.Morris in the final stage of Jubilee 2000 is the only instance I remember of this pattern being broken. How good it would be if we could maintain the impetus of the moment and press forward in support of Christian Aid’s follow-on from the debt campaign, “Trade for Life”, (see material in the Bell Tower), as so many other churches throughout the UK will be doing.