Joint Public Issues Team
The Joint Public Issues Team (JPIT) is a partnership between the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Methodist Church, and the United Reformed Church.
The purpose of JPIT is to help the Churches to work together for peace and justice through listening, learning, praying, speaking and acting on public policy issues.
The work of the team aims to:
Share the message in words and action that political engagement is integral to Christian discipleship
Understand what churches need in order to speak and act prophetically and prayerfully on key issues of justice and peace
Equip, energise, affirm, support and resource our churches, at both local and denominational level, in their engagement with politics and public issues
Enable our Churches to speak together with a distinctively Christian voice in promoting justice and campaigning on public issues
Build deeper coalitions and partnerships to further these outcomes locally, regionally, in the nations, and internationally
Visit JPIT website and the Methodist.org website social justice page for more information.
Extract from www.Methodist.org.uk: As Christians, we are called to act justly, and to work for God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. The Methodist Church has a long history of living out our calling to justice and peace, by speaking up in the public square. From the Wesleys' work on prison reform and the abolition of the slave trade to a Methodist presence in campaigns such as Make Poverty History, the Fairtrade movement and Jubilee 2000, taking a
stand is part of our Methodist heritage. Today, Methodist churches around the connexion reflect this in Our Calling, to be ‘a good neighbour to people in need and to challenge injustice’. As churches host debt centres, food banks, supper clubs and mutual aid groups, they continue to question why such help is needed. Not only do we want to see poverty and inequality alleviated, but we also want to change the structures and systems which bring it about in the first place. Much of our social justice work is done ecumenically, in partnership with other churches in the UK (including the United Reformed Church, Baptist Union of Great Britain and Church of Scotland), as part of the Joint Public Issues Team (JPIT). JPIT exists to equip Christians to act and pray on issues of injustice, resource churches to reflect and campaign effectively and help our churches to speak out with a distinctively Christian voice on injustice. We work together around our ‘Six Hopes for Society’:
Our minister, Deborah, draws our attention to the following statement from the Joint Public Issues Team: A statement signed by over 1450 church leaders opposing the government’s Illegal Migration has been handed to 10 Downing Street, saying that the government’s proposals are “incompatible with our Christian conviction that all human beings are made in the image of God”.
In the statement, church leaders say they are “appalled” by the proposals in the government’s Illegal Migration Bill to “detain, punish and reject thousands of people seeking safety”, and that they will “foster discrimination and distrust” and cause “immeasurable harm”. Church leaders are calling on the government to withdraw the legislation, and to honour the UK’s “moral and international obligations” by establishing “safe and accessible routes to enable the UK to play its part in welcoming people in need of safety”. Revd David Hardman, Methodist Public Issues Team leader, said: “If ever there was a contemporary example of ignoring our neighbour and walking by on the other side, this is it. On a moral level, these proposals lack compassion and respect for people’s dignity. On a practical level, they fail to see that punishing people who cross the channel in small boats without offering alternative safe routes will only cause pain and increase the backlog of people who are stuck in unfit accommodation here in the UK. Even whilst some MPs are pushing for further tightening of this cruel approach, we know that we can and must do better than this. Today we call on the government to lead the way to change by creating and implementing new safe routes by which people can come to the UK to seek sanctuary.”