More than a hundred Christians have pledged to live simply, generously and thankfully over the next 12 months.

Christians from all denominations made the Promise of Life during the 2009 conference of Breathe, a network of Christians seeking to live a less consumerist and more God-centred lifestyle.

The Promise of Life commits Christians to “savour what we have” and “pray for what we need”.

“Because everything is a gift, we live with open hands, tread lightly on the earth, share freely our homes and our things … No longer caught in the consumer dream, we’ll invest our all in the kingdom of love,” it reads.

Mark Powley, Breathe co-founder and Associate Pastor of St Paul’s Church in Hammersmith, London, reminded conference delegates of the words of Jesus, that to gain their life they must first lose it and that to give is more blessed than to receive.

“It’s not about having more stuff but about enjoying each thing more,” he said. “It’s a commitment to try and live differently. It’s a promise of life because it leads to life.”

The conference on Saturday was the network’s second since its launch in 2005 at the Make Poverty History march.

The main speaker, 24/7 Prayer’s Pete Greig, said the challenge for Christians in the consumerist world lay not in evangelisation but in spiritualisation.

“How do we live with humanity in a world that dehumanises us? How can be more human than anyone else around us? How can we be more alive than anyone else around us?” he said.

Drawing on the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, Greig said that modern society was breaking down because of a craving for omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence.

While the explosion of online communities like Facebook and Twitter had made it possible to have more friends, Greig said the sharing of information had only led to “false intimacy” and the neglect of real friends.

The craving for information, meanwhile, was rooted in distrust and a need for control.

“Sometimes our desire for clarity, our desire for knowledge, our desire for information is a double bluff. It’s because we don’t know how to trust like a child does,” he said.

“The fruit of it is that we are exhausted, confused, scattered, and society is breaking down. We are not able to handle many of the things we are developing.”

Greig went on to reject a Darwinist ordering of society, saying that the concept of the survival of the fittest was completely opposite to the message of Jesus in the Gospels and caused people to believe they must overcome one another in order to succeed.

Rather, he said he was attracted to the ideas of the excommunicated Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who took a more organic approach to creation based on the idea that the organisms that grow and move forward are those that are best able to cooperate with one another, while it is love that makes creation an ongoing act.

“Christ laid down power and control and therefore He was resurrected. It is in His humility, fragility, mortality, weakness and humanity that we overcome,” Greig said.

He added, “One of the greatest antidotes to the whole power drive is gratitude, thanking God for what we have not trying to be more or get more.”

Greig concluded by urging Christians to encounter God in the present.

“The challenge we have if we are going to live with full humanity is: how do we in the workplace in the school run, in church, in our private space, in our public space, how do we encounter the presence of God there and then,” he said.

“Unless you encounter God in the present tense and encounter him now, you will never meet him.”


On the web: ibreathe.org.uk/