The Doughnut- an important perspective.

That one? - Or this one?

Canadians are fans of doughnuts with endless brands. But the one I have recently discovered is more than a calorie laden deliverer of sugar but a way to bridge economy and the planet. Kate Raworth’s doughtnut brings these two aspects of our lives together in a remarkably intelligent way.

I was moved after a recent conference to ponder the words in a distributed report entitled Church Growth Statistics. Not surprisingly totals were down showing a decline - and there was an underlying anxiety in what the report showed. If only 25% of the parishes studied were growing what did this predict for the future.

The benchmarks were the number of persons attending on Sundays and the average annual donation. From my not-for-profit director days, I would have used similar ones. What both depend on for a happy outcome is growth. Enter an aging population with aging buildings. The vocabulary shifts at this micro level the same way it does in the macro one. We start to hear about “sustainability”, or “sustainable growth” or” long term sustainability” as the video below shows. What is missing is the reality that we live on a planet whose capacity for growth has limits. To make it even worse, our collective practice of exploiting its resources make it even more devastated

Economics is complicated. So is politics We have to decide whether we are citizens or consumers in every realm in which we exist - even church land. I expect there will be some new perspectives on how we use words like growth and sustainability going forward..

Here’s some help with the doughnut:

You can also visit Kate Raworth’s site for more information here.