There was a sense that a flotilla of ships—the various campaigns of Initiatives of Change, their captains and crews—had come together as a single fleet when 70 people met at IofC’s London centre in Greencoat Place, 27 September 2008. The all-day New Season Fair included stalls for 10 of IofC’s outreach programmes operating in and from the UK. The need for trust-building, between individuals and in society, was emphasised in presentations throughout the day.
Welcoming everyone to the fair, Elisabeth Tooms, chair of trustees of The Oxford Group, IofC UK’s legal body, said that the purpose of the fair was to ‘inspire, inform and involve’. She stressed the core values that lay behind IofC’s mission ‘to build trust across the world’s divides’, including the profound sense of forgiveness experienced by Frank Buchman, the Oxford Group’s founder. He had gone on to ‘encourage people to live out their faith and beliefs in a practical and social context’.
Today, Ms Tooms said, a failure of trust between individuals, communities and countries was at the heart of difficulties ‘to build a world based on kindness, justice and generosity’. This was the kind of society IofC wanted to create. The aim of IofC UK was to ‘raise up a new generation of trust-builders—people who will, in their own way, lay the foundations of a just, kind and generous society’. IofC UK was now building relations with various other groups ‘with whom we have a common ground’, she said, whilst ‘bringing to the relationship our particular insights and experience which can underpin and enhance what they do’.
She had been impressed by how quickly people could be caught by the concept of trust—‘people working for peace, community and cross-cultural relationships, and ending poverty’. All understood the importance of trust as a foundation.
Ms Tooms quoted from a set of Affirmations drawn up at a global IofC consultation several years ago: ‘An individual can be a powerful agent for positive change in society’; ‘Unchanging values of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love offer a practical framework of principles by which to measure our individual and collective behaviour’; and ‘listening in silence to God’s’ leading, to the inner voice or to conscience is an essential source of inner freedom, discernment and direction’.
She concluded by quoting from the book The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong, about the Axial Age when the founding sages and prophets of the world’s great religious faiths first expressed their beliefs: ‘The Axial sages were not interested in providing their disciples with a little edifying uplift, after which they could return with renewed vigour to their ordinary self-centred lives. Their objective was to create an entirely different kind of human being. All the sages preached a spirituality of empathy and compassion; they insisted that people must abandon their egotism and greed, their violence and unkindness… If people behaved with kindness and generosity to their fellows they could save the world.’
Kate Monkhouse, convenor of IofC UK’s three-person Executive Team, quoted that it had become fashionable to claim that the UK was suffering from a trust deficit—in politicians, public services, financial institutions, in our communities and in the media. Too often, she said, efforts to build trust ‘rely too heavily on our subjective feelings to tell us what’s wrong with others’. Fortunately there was a better way to build trust based on relationships and IofC historically had some humbling case stories of how that had been done.
She quoted an unknown author: ‘Trust is a peculiar resource; it is built rather than depleted by its use.’ She said that Professor Eric Uslaner, at the University of Maryland, had outlined two types of trust: strategic and moralistic. The first was based on a contract that is calculated or negotiated. The second was based on values and integrity, on a ‘covenant that we share’.
She also quoted from Nick Spencer in his book Rebuilding Trust in Business (Grove Books): ‘To be fully human is to be in right relationship—shalom (at peace)—with God, other people and the rest of creation.’
Ms Monkhouse continued: ‘Through trying to listen to guidance [from God] daily and talking sensitively with people—being willing to admit “I too was wrong”—all help.’ The executive team’s ‘Next Steps’ document for IofC UK had proposed four levels of trust: spiritual, personal, social and global, ‘or if you like, personal, relational, cultural and structural’, she said. ‘Our peace-making efforts need to be built on foundations at each of these levels to be effective.’ And ‘building trust across the world’s divides’ meant ‘going out of our way to create bridges to close gaps created by distance, difference and discord.’
The fair participants spent time in small groups discussing what sort of divides IofC had the capacity and capability to address and mitigate; and what activities should be the priorities to enable trust to flourish. Or as Executive Team member Paul Devos put it: ‘how best to achieve what is burning in your heart’.
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