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Who we are?
We are Alison Marshall and Ricci Downard, very ordinary concerned Christians who want to pray in an informed way about issues of global climate issues and the impact it has on individuals unseen to us - unseen because they live far away, and unseen because they may not yet have been born. We are members of three different Edinburgh church congregations - St Mungos in Balerno, Currie Community Church and Holy Trinity in WesterHailes but this website is not endorsed by any of these churches. This resource builds on the COP27 resource which was largely developed by Sue McLeod and we owe her a huge debt of gratitude. We are not experts in what has been posted but hope that we have done some of the homework for you to enable you to pray wisely.
If you'd like to contact us we'd love to hear from you.
Why This Website?
As in 2022, we thought it would be good to mark another COP with our wider church family by posting a short daily prayer to our church Facebook page during the fortnight of COP meetings so that important discussions are underpinned with prayer.
We quickly realised two things: (1) we needed more knowledge about the COP issues if we were to write or source relevant prayers and (2) the prayers were going to have to be VERY short for a Facebook post and we felt the issues required something a little longer, possibly backed up with some relevant Bible verses.
So this website is our response to those two realisations. It gathers together some of the reading we have done (more about that later) and it provides some longer prayers and a few Bible passages related to each subject.
How Do We Expect The Site Will Be Used?
We intend to visit daily to remind ourselves of the issues being discussed at the COP so that we can pray more effectively, and we hope others will as well.
We hope that the summary of our internet wanderings around the subjects is of use to others and provides a springboard to more investigation, and we hope that some enjoy using the prayers.
We don't expect that many people will read every day's entry in full - so no pressure there. However, we have short memories and we wanted something to return to as a reminder about the importance of all of these issues.
Where Has The Information Come From?
Our starting point for each day has come from the information for that day provided on the COP28 website. All of the COP28 discussions sections come from those pages and documents and, depending on the scope of the information provided, parts of the Issues and Hope sections also contain information from those documents as well as from wider reading. Information from the COP28 website has not been referenced individually but we've provided a link to it in the Find out more section at the bottom of each page.
If we've still been left with questions after reading the COP28 information, we've launched out into the worldwide web (emphasis deliberate in this context). What a fantastic resource, even if we do have to use it carefully and judge the validity of what we have read. We hope that we've navigated the pitfalls successfully. We have tried to provide inline links to everything we've used.
Why The Choice and Order of Sections?
We start with a short prayer because that's what we want to post on Facebook each day and because even at our busiest we can manage a prayer of that length... and we believe that every prayer counts.
But the issues are complex, hence a longer prayer which tries to speak a little more to each issue: although we confess to finding it very difficult to find adequate words for some of them. And of course the Bible is not silent on any of these issues, so we have tried to find out what it says. We hope our choices are not contrived: the exercise has certainly opened our eyes to the need to delve more deeply.
The ordering of the next three sections Issues, Hope and COP28 discussions is deliberate. Whilst it might make sense to look at the COP28 discussions first, the reality is that the COP sessions are quite specific about what they are addressing and as newbies we found the detail quite confusing at times. So Issues comes first, and these really are only some of them: they are complex and we've just skimmed across the surface.
The Hope section was something of an after thought born of the need to acknowledge that although these issues are big and it's generally agreed the world is not moving fast enough to resolve them, a lot of people have already invested a lot of effort and we should celebrate this. We definitely have not done justice to this section.
In the COP28 discussions section we have summarised our understanding of what is going to be discussed in each of the sessions and have chased down a lot of acronyms in the process. The United Nations is a huge organisation - a web that can be difficult to untangle to get a quick understanding of how different groups work - but we hope our summaries are accurate enough to help.
The Find out more section is short on most pages and is really just a means of catching details of sites and documents that we didn't link to in the main text. Occasionally there is a reference to a document that we found particularly illuminating.
And a quick thank you...
...to the faithful St Mungos Monday prayer cell warriors who have sense checked and proof read the pages Lorna, Sue and Wendy. And chauffeur Karen Downward!
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