talking to... MARK POWLEY Mark with his wife and children outside their Leeds home 22 <strong>Jesus</strong> <strong>Life</strong> www.jesus.org.uk
<strong>Jesus</strong> <strong>Life</strong> editor, James Stacey talks to Mark Powley, co-founder of Breathe, a Christian network for simpler living. Mark, tell me a bit about yourself and your background. I grew up in Bury, near Manchester. My dad was a social worker who became a vicar; I got serious about God when I was a teenager. Around that time, I also changed my diet, started running, avoided drinking – even coffee, let alone alcohol! I was a bit of a teenage Pharisee, really. But in it all, I grew a passion for justice and I saw that lifestyle change was important if you’re going to follow <strong>Jesus</strong>. At Nottingham University, I met my wife, Ailsa; we’ve been married 13 years in July and have four kids. I was a youth worker for a bit, then an R.E. teacher. After I trained in the ministry, we were in Croydon for three years, in Hammersmith for three-and-a-half years, and now I’m a leader in a church here in Leeds. How did Breathe get started? At university, I was part of a prayer group in which God did some powerful things. Out of that quality of fellowship came an important conversation which revolved around this question: when we’ve got money what are we going to do with it? We knew we needed to learn about sharing, about having a vision beyond being comfortable. We tried to face honestly the challenges of living as Christians in the UK’s consumer culture. We started sharing our budgets with each other, exploring real accountability. We wondered what had happened to the vision of simplicity set out, for instance, in Richard Foster’s book Freedom of Simplicity. “Who’s doing it now?” we asked. I started to dream of a movement for simple living. But, as I often said to Ailsa, if there was such a movement, I wasn’t sure if I could be part www.jesus.org.uk of it – “I’m not good enough, I’m not living simply enough”. Then the thought came: what if the movement wasn’t for people who had “arrived” at a simple lifestyle, but for people who want to get there or at least want to start getting there, or even just wanted to ask the question, what does Christian simplicity look like? I said to Ailsa, “We could call it ‘Choke’ because <strong>Jesus</strong> said our possessions choke us”. She said no-one would want to be part of something called ‘Choke’. She was right of course; we called it Breathe. Within six months, a friend and I found ourselves at a Make Poverty History protest in Edinburgh, standing by a stall and inviting others to join Breathe. And you had a slogan! Yes. “Less stuff, more life.” That was in 2005. We had about 100 people sign up on the day; now we have nearly 1,000 people on the e-mailing list and the blog gets plenty of interest. We produce e-newsletters, tell stories, give personal accounts, undermine adverts – we try to be creative and stir ideas and inspiration. Undermine adverts? Well, take the ticket sales company, Lastminute.com. They promoted travel breaks with the slogan “<strong>Life</strong>: book now.” Okay, it’s catchy and witty, but when you actually think about it, this slogan stinks. What if I can’t afford to book “life”? That must make me, what? Dead? And even if I do go away, this seven to 14 day break is “life”. What if it rains when I get there? And when I return, what about the other 50-odd weeks of the year? Are they non-life? The whole advert works on the lie that quality of life can be bought and sold – with the threat of “not living” hovering in the background. So we started an “ad-watch” – critiquing adverts, unmasking their lies. It might not Continued overleaf s s <strong>Jesus</strong> <strong>Life</strong> 23
Change language