All members one of another?

Michael Schluter of the Relationships Foundation & Jubilee centre spoke this morning at the Chiltern Prayer Breakfast, with MP's, business and community leaders. Michael was a world bank economist, frustrated by the ineffectiveness of much aid activity, and the various theoretical models offered in East Africa. Michael believes Biblical (OT) teaching about Jubilee, Freedom from economic slavery, relational criminal law & education, are resources for an increasingly divided, unhappy and frustrated UK. Our manic, fragmented and precarious relational life came bottom of the UNICEF advanced nations wellbeing/ quality of life survey, with 1/8 of the population medicated for depression.

1. 100 people in a room actually represent (by the time you tot up their links) half a million relationships! Our educational system examines academic and learning skills, but not the main thing employers find makes a difference — emotional/ relational intelligence. How crazy is that?
   
   
2. Pretty much all the measuring sticks for human activity are financial. We think we are ‘the developed world,’ when actually we are relationally underdeveloped compared to some poorer countries. Yet this whole language reinforces the idea that only money really matters.
   There has to be more to life than GDP! Dr Schluter quoted Bobby Kennedy —

Gross Domestic Product
does not measure the health of our children,
the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.
It does not include the beauty of our poetry
or the strength of our marriages,
the intelligence of our public debate,
or the integrity of our public officials.
It measures everything, in short,
except that which makes life worthwhile...

Bobby Kennedy, 1968