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’: