Martin Johnstone delivered an inspirational talk beginning with three powerful stories:

1. When Martin was an assistant minister in Castlemilk and his car battery was broken, a local man heard of the problem and appeared at the door, asking if he needed a new one. Just 15 minutes later, a battery appeared at the front door. In many of the poorest communities, there is a spirit of entrepreneurism, albeit sometimes in the black market or grey economy.

2. At the Poverty Truth Commission recently in Glasgow City Chambers, one of the groups who talked about their struggle were 20 ‘kinship carers’, grandmothers who looked after their grandchildren because of a ‘missing generation’ caused by death or addiction. Jessie said, “I’ve already lost one generation to drugs and I’m not losing another – get it sorted!”

One week ago, the Director of Social Work called Martin asking for a meeting – this was unheard of previously. Jessie’s entrepreneurism is leading to a move for societal change.

3. In Royston, when Bolt FM is on air, crime levels drop. A young Royston man was asked what he would like to do most – the answer was to see an elephant in the wild. One year later, he was part of a group of young folk in Zambia, but was looking edgy. When asked what was wrong, he explained that he’d taken cannabis every night for years, but when he knew that he had the chance to see a real elephant, and had to go through customs, that was the chance to go drug free. Societal change – meeting need.

Martin Johnstone spends his life hoping to work alongside the poorest. He is employed by the Church of Scotland to support work in the poorest 60 neighbourhoods in Scotland where, in Martin’s view, there are greater levels of creativity and innovation than in the 10 richest, in order to survive. He also heads Faith in Community (Scotland), an ecumenical and multi-faith partnership aimed at tackling poverty together, all agreeing that it offends God.

George Bernard Shaw said “the reasonable person adapts themselves to the world. The unreasonable person insists on adapting the world to themself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable person”.

In the present world crisis, we cannot maintain the trajectory we have been on. The sudden ‘drop’ that we experienced in the world economy last October/November is something that is seen elsewhere in the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in poverty on unprecedented scales – we live in a planet where we recognise ‘the drop’. It is in ‘the drop’ that is the place for societal entrepreneurism.

We are living in a world where for the first time for a while the future looks much less certain than it did to our parents. What makes for a ‘good city’? Manuel Castells, a leading sociologist says it is a place where his grand-daughter can grow up healthy and safe – on that criteria, it seems to be less and less a ‘good city’.

Therefore, the challenge is how are we going to use our entrepreneurial skills to make the city and world a ‘good place’ for our grandchildren? Progress, in Martin’s view, depends on being ‘unreasonable people’ – not accepting that the current way is how things always need to be done.

Examples of ‘unreasonable people’ are:

* Mohammed Younis – ‘the banker of the poor’ – described recently as the world’s greatest entrepreneur through his brilliance in micro-credit. Tiny group loans to millions of people have enabled them to start small businesses and lifted them out of poverty. Thanks to the loans, Bangladesh no longer looks like the poorest part of the world.

* Desmond Tutu – recently presented to the General Assembly – a global voice against the injustice of apartheid, changing the world and society.

* Mary Miller – one of the co-founders of the ‘Jeely Piece’ club in Castlemilk, which over a generation has been making life better for young people in that community.

* Jean Forrester in Possilpark with the ‘Abigail Project’ – a café in church as a safe space for addicts and their families, and now supporting an organisation assisting grandparents caring as parents.

At their different levels, these four people share a common resilience, determination, trustworthiness, an absence of complacency, and are not content with the answer ‘no’. They are boundary crossers, but are aware of where their feet are planted. As Susan Price of Lloyds TSB recently said at an accountant awards dinner – “we cannot offer value without having values”.

Question areas

# Mutual support and encouragement – Martin talked of ‘Faithful Purpose’, a volunteer programme within Faith in Community Scotland which invites those from well-off churches to allow their skills to be used in the poorest communities For further information contact Margo Uprichard (margo@transformationteam.org tel: 0141 221 4576)

# Vision competing with finance – Martin talked of perseverance, of the millions of small acts of kindness that, for example, Pentecostalism is built upon – that’s what moves mountains in building communities (not just buildings!).

# Hope for this generation – if you tell kids they are rubbish, they’ll believe it. You must affirm them, and be prepared to accept that they might disappoint you. Very few media stories portray young people in a positive light, so it is important that we emphasise the positive.

# Recognition of faith at work, particularly in the public sector – in Martin’s view, society is spiritual but does not like organised religion. This is a fact which churches need to face up to. We need to recognise what the public sector should pay for – human flourishing – not evangelism, which is the church’s job. That being said, if you take an example like the Poverty Truth Commission, it demonstrates that faith communities have a clear role, not in banging our drum about how important we are, but in action alongside the most vulnerable. If we do so, people will have no choice but to take us and who we are seriously.