INVITATION
Hello and Welcome to 2025. We want to wish every one of you a very happy and prosperous year ahead, we are excited looking forward to the New Year.
Beginning this month, we plan to post a blog each month that you can read in 4 minutes. We hope it will keep you informed and sometimes challenge thinking, but also attempt to explain a little about the culture and DNA we want to cultivate in Sturr.
They broke bread in their homes together with glad and sincere hearts (Acts 2:46). We have this written on a chalkboard in our home, it’s a pointer to how we want our home, and ourselves to look and feel.
It is also a vision of what we want for Sturr as we navigate the space between what is and what could be.
It is about invitation. Come and pull apart, break this bread with me. Let’s wrestle with this conundrum together. Join in with me what we are doing and who we are. Let’s do it joyfully, but let’s also bring respect and sincerity to this task too.
As we work together, let’s pull apart ‘mission’ and examine the impact on each other, by learning, listening and discerning, linked together with working with others from similar and different cultures, to build a sustainable environment where justice is outworked.
Those we are working with in their communities are already doing wonderful things and have a vision to improve the environment in which they live and work. We join in, by their invitation with a heart to build relationships that cultivate honour and respect as we complement and collaborate.
It could be in Pakistan, where we are working with a group of entrepreneurial young people led by Faizan John. They are setting up a non-profit organisation, Mercy Foundation whilst combining this with a ‘normal’ job, which helps fund, this vision. These young people want to see an end to bonded slavery among brick workers in their city of Faisalabad.
It’s exciting to work with them, as they take the lead examining and partnering with others to unpick a huge injustice. It might look to be beyond them, but they are giving it a try and we are collaborating with them. This is just one of the opportunities that Sturr is being invited be a part. Other opportunities we have are in Laos, Vietnam, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Poland and Jordan.
This invitation to break bread together asks for commitment from all those involved. There is a tendency for groups to see that a financial reason is the only solution. Whether it is to support by giving or take by receiving. There would appear to be no other reason for these groups to connect?
‘Money, money, money, always funny in a rich mans world’, sang the Swedish super group Abba, and people from a plethora of nations, look to the West and naturally see Westerners as loaded with riches who simply have no wants, and we in our materialistic culture propagate this thinking.
This is just one of the challenges as we sit around the table breaking bread together. How do we collaborate financially so that neither party is exploited, but that we all can contribute with integrity, with glad and sincere hearts bringing honour and respect?
Bread is delicious but it has a sell by date. The yeast in bread is a living organism, keep it too long and the bread goes mouldy, Maybe it’s time to dispense with the mouldy view we may carry of mission, the colonial, we are here to help you and tell you what to do model?
We were so blessed when one of our Sturr Trustees shared this recently, “in our work with others it shouldn’t be our footprint that is seen but the smell of our fragrance”. It reminded me of a quote that has been our lodestar ever since Julie and I, entered into mission nearly 30 years ago;
Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves’’ *
At Sturr, we humbly desire that the invitation from our partners is to break bread together, and in doing so they smell the fragrance not see a footprint.
Throughout 2025 and beyond we shall be looking at other words and actions, like; Equality, Sustainability, Opportunity, Sower, Lookout, Collaboration, Presence
Bless you and thankyou for your support and we hope you have an opportunity to think a little differently!
Mark & Julie
* Quote attributed to Lao Tzu (Chinese philosopher)
