Jesus Life 87 - Jesus Army

Jesus Life 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 Jesus.
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 Jesus 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 “Life: 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
Jesus Life 23