I did some copywriting work once for a charity called ‘Feed the Hungry’ (FTH). I enjoyed reading up on their philosophy. If I’m stating it right, they believed every community had God-given ways of sustaining themselves. FTH’s job was to catalyze the community to find and start deploying that source of ‘daily bread’. Then FTH would move on, job done. Even the poorest communities, they believed, could find, under God, a way of sustaining themselves.
Their theology is an expansion upon the prayer Jesus taught us: ‘Give us today our daily bread’.
Maybe these ideas don’t just apply to the poorest communities. The rich world is pockmarked with towns that have lost their old source of daily bread.
For example, in the town I grew up in, the biggest industry was making asbestos conveyor belts for the coal-mining industry. We had a school trip there once, to give us some ideas of the working life, which for some of us was just a few months away. This may be news to some, but the market for asbestos conveyor belts isn’t what it was.
What has replaced local industry? Government jobs and chain-store jobs. What’s been lost? Local pride. My home town also used to manufacture cast-iron drain-hole covers, and as a kid I would point it out if I found one in some distant street somewhere. We were famous! Our drain-hole covers were the finest, or perhaps the cheapest, but they were something.
A council in the NW of the UK (Preston maybe?) has pushed against the trend by trying to spend its council money locally. They get a local start-up to supply school dinners (for example), instead of hiring one of the established national providers. Like FTH, this council is trying to catalyse new initiatives that eventually might sustain themselves.
Economists grumble that everyone did what that council is doing, it would on balance be less efficient. That council are arguably wasting tax-payers’ money by not choosing the cheapest provider. But the extra inefficiencies may be worth it. I wonder if part of ‘daily bread’ is growing local businesses? And if it is worth some effort to catalyse that? That daily bread is not just about sustaining an individual but sustaining a community? That that can be an aim of prayers and faith? I wonder if a return to proud local businesses (even if they manufacture lowly drain-hole covers for a grateful nation) might be one way to dispel the powerlessness that many feel?