By MARY EVA CASSADA
Special to The News & Record
A national leader in the simplicity/sustainability movement will speak Saturday at Faith Community Church, noon-1:30 p.m.
Gerald Iverson is the national coordinator of Alternatives for Simple Living, a nonprofit organization based in Columbus, Ohio, that equips people of faith to challenge consumerism and live justly.
The church’s minister, Dan Skelton, said Iverson will carry a message people – and Christians – need to hear.
“We as a culture are extremely materialistic,” he said. “We always gotta have more; we always gotta buy more.”
But being mindful with our money isn’t just about commonsense issues like staying out from under credit-card debt. It’s also, as Skelton sees it, a spiritual matter. In his church, before the offering plate is passed, there’s a “word of giving” from the New Testament addressing just how we should use our cash.
Spurning the shopaholic mentality frees up some dough for charitable causes, for example.
And if money were an issue in Biblical times, it’s even more so now.
Skelton laments that the whole idea of what “middle class” means, of what a “normal” lifestyle is continues to have the bar raised by greed and Madison Avenue – and it’s darn tough resisting.
To NOT buy into that mentality takes a deliberate re-evaluation of one’s excessive ways.
Of course, Skelton and his flock are hardly hippies.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m a free-market capitalist,” said Skelton, who was a business major in college. “But I’m not blind, either.”
Alternatives for Simple Living was founded in 1973 in Jackson, Miss., as a protest to the commercialization of Christmas. Its mission is to "equip people of faith to challenge consumerism, live justly, and celebrate responsibly," Iverson told Sojourners, a Christian magazine.
In articles and books, Iverson has urged informed, environmentally conscious consumerism; charity; attention to both spiritual and physical health and awareness of global cultures.
“[V]irtually everyone in the U.S. …[is] not yet dealing with the damage that their lifestyles do to themselves and the Earth. They also do not yet see that they have the most resources to do the most good,” he wrote in Greenmoney Journal.
Dr. Robert Plapp, a South Boston dentist, is the “instigator,” he said, of getting Iverson here as part of a tour Iverson is doing through the Southeast. Plapp has contributed to Simple Living.
“It’s not Live Aid. It’s not Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’” quipped Plapp, who said it isn’t about politics, right or left. What he wants is for people to realize they’re often manipulated and seduced by Corporate America.
“There’s a need to hone our senses to how people are being taken advantage of,” he said. “Information is power; knowledge is power.”
The public is invited; a complimentary light lunch will be served. The church is located next to the Halifax County Middle School. For information, call 572-6516. Iverson’s website is www.SimpleLiving.org