CT: Post G8, what is your long-term response to that outcome?
GT: We are going to continue to reinforce our message of what they need to do and what we need to do. We are not giving up on our goal of keeping them accountable and going back to the Gleneagles promises. We will seek to take that up at the national level through the Micah Challenge campaign so that hopefully when they come back together in Japan - where Africa and climate change will again be at the top of the agenda - we will continue to see progress.
We will also continue to encourage Christians to deepen their commitment in many different ways like at the community level, providing care for the poor and suffering, creating jobs, providing healthcare, promoting safe lifestyles to combat Aids.
We will also encourage Christians to advocate for the poor in their local communities and with their governments.
I think wherever churches are they need to have both local and global involvement, and I think encouraging churches to think in a missional way about impacting society starts with their own community. And that comes down to the person in the pew. How are we going to encourage that individual to deepen their commitment? If every church increased its budget of giving to the poor by additional one per cent, that's a huge amount of resources that would be made available. So it's about encouraging what is doable and while not being overwhelmed by the magnitude. We are encouraging all to do more.
CT: Christians are very passionate about the climate issue. Are you hopeful about promises from government leaders to cut their carbon emissions?
GT: Well, we can always hope. I think the good news is that the G8 have agreed to a process within the UN. The 2050 commitment from the EU, Canada and Japan is significant and we have to have something in place by Bali to replace Kyoto. So now that some of those pieces are in place, it is really incumbent on politicians to follow through and we need to remind them of what they committed themselves to do.
The danger is that we continue to lag in our discipline of responding and keeping our promises. Yet we don't have that much time to deal with the reality of what we are facing.
There are also minority evangelical perspectives that don't blame global warming on human activity, so we recognise that we don't have complete unity on the science. But as I travel the world there is a deep sense that we need to be caring for creation. So I think as Christians making the case for carbon reductions, I think most evangelicals are committed to that process.
CT: How is the focus on the MDGs going to tie in with your missional work?
GT: We are committed to seeing churches be God's instrument in transformation in local communities around the world. And transformation means spiritual transformation. So as part of our commitment to global evangelisation we are very pleased to be partnering with Lausanne III on the next major global conference on world evangelisation in 2010.
We are also committed to other areas of engaging our societies through promoting religious freedom, the freedom of choice. And then of course our social justice programmes are at work in places like Darfur, where we are supporting refugees.
In all of this there has to be a solid underpinning of theological and missiological reflection. As evangelicals we are committed to the word and I think we need to deepen our own theological and missiological reflections around the issues of the day.
