Welcome to Regents Theological College as a CreatureKind Partner

by David Clough

Regents Logo.JPG

CreatureKind is delighted to welcome Regents Theological College as our latest partner institution. Regents campus is on the western slopes of the Malvern hills in England. Regents is among the foremost Pentecostal Bible Colleges in Europe and one of the largest in the UK. It is also the national training centre for the Elim Pentecostal Churches.

Regents kindly invited me to give their annual Wesley Gilpin lecture in March 2018. I offered a number of possible lecture titles and was delighted they opted for ‘Eating More Peaceably: Christianity and Veganism’. A good number of staff, students, and external visitors attended and the response was encouraging: the audience was engaged and there were no shortage of questions to follow. I took the opportunity to meet with the college’s catering manager in advance of the lecture and was delighted to hear that for a long time he had been strongly committed to the idea that the college’s catering policy should reflect its Christian values.

Since then, CreatureKind has been in conversation with Regents about the possibility of their becoming a CreatureKind partner institution. CreatureKind partners typically commit to:

  • an audit to review trends in their consumption of animal products and report on where the animal products are currently sourced from;

  • an action plan to reduce consumption of animal products and move to higher welfare sources of animal products they continue to serve;

  • continued reflection on further ways to attend to the implications of a Christian understanding of animals for their institutional life.

It’s been great to see Regents’ commitment to embark on this process and to raise the issue within the Elim Pentecostal Church nationally. In the partnership agreement, Regents affirm that they are ‘committed to living into the promise of a reconciled creation by learning more about animals as a faith concern and by taking action to improve the lives of farmed animals’. CreatureKind looks forward to continuing to work with Regents as they continue along this path.

Regents affirm that they are ‘committed to living into the promise of a reconciled creation by learning more about animals as a faith concern and by taking action to improve the lives of farmed animals’.

It’s a particular pleasure for me to welcome the first Pentecostal CreatureKind partner. Pentecostal churches share my own Methodist Church roots in the Wesleyan Holiness movement. As I’ve explored in another video lecture, ‘Early Methodists and Other Animals: Animal Welfare as an Evangelical Issue’, both John Wesley and the early Methodist movements were known for their concern about cruelty towards animals. Wesley wrote an essay on the souls of animals as an undergraduate at Oxford, and he preached against animal cruelty (most famously in his 1781 sermon ‘The General Deliverance’ on Romans 8). He copied letters he received concerning cruelty to animals into his journal and published books on animal theology. Neither modern Methodists nor modern Pentecostals are often aware of this legacy, but I’m excited that institutions such as Regents are helping to recover this distinctive legacy.

If you know of an organization that might be interested in making connections between its Christian values and concern for animals, do get in touch. CreatureKind’s partner programme can support theological colleges, seminaries, churches, and Christian schools, universities, and other organizations in finding the right first steps for practical action in their particular contexts. We’d love to hear from you.

Friends House in London Signs Up to CreatureKind

We were delighted to be at Friends House in London, the centre for Quakers in Britain, to celebrate their signing up to be a CreatureKind institution. Friends House have been leaders in the ethical sourcing of food products, and were the first religious organization to be awarded Compassion in World Farming’s Good Egg and Good Chicken awards. They were enthusiastic about CreatureKind because of our focus on getting institutions to commit to a cycle of identifying strategies to reduce overall consumption of animal products and identify opportunities to move to higher welfare sources for remaining products.

Photo: Friends House / Quaker Centre Cafe

Photo: Friends House / Quaker Centre Cafe

At the launch event, we were joined by Quaker Concern for Animals (QCA), an organization with its origins in Christian opposition to vivisection in the late 19th century. Thom Bonneville of QCA expressed his warm appreciation for this commitment of Friends House and their previous hosting of QCA World Animals Day events.

Friends House provided samples of new vegan items from their menu, which included cashew nut curry, falafels, sausage rolls, and snacks and chocolate. The catering staff at Friends House were recently able to enhance the organization's plant-based offerings with help from a chefs’ training event provided by Humane Society International. The results were quite delicious. 

Photo: Friends House / Quaker Centre Cafe

Photo: Friends House / Quaker Centre Cafe

Photo: Friends House / Quaker Centre Cafe

Photo: Friends House / Quaker Centre Cafe

In his remarks, David described how the current unprecedented extent of livestock farming was bad for humans, bad for animals, and bad for the environment. He noted that in 1900 the total biomass of domesticated animals was around 3.5 times that of all wild land mammals, but by 2000, a fourfold increase in domesticated animals together with a halving in wild animal numbers meant the biomass of domesticated animals had grown to an astonishing 25 times that of wild land mammals, with dramatic effects on increased land use and environmental problems. Unlike many other global problems, David noted this was something we can act to address immediately, as individuals and members of institutions, by reducing consumption of animal products and moving to higher welfare sourcing.

David gave an enthusiastic welcome to the commitment Friends House have made to reduce their consumption of animal products by 20% over two years and look for additional opportunities to move to higher welfare sources for remaining animal products. As part of their commitment, Friends House will also launch a new vegan CreatureKind menu for their events catering.

CreatureKind is in conversation with a number of other institutions and organizations in the UK and North America about signing up to CreatureKind. If you belong to one we should be talking to, do let us know!

CreatureKind Partners with University of Winchester in Groundbreaking New Program

How do you stop factory farming? Reduce the demand. Today, the University of Winchester became the first institution internationally to sign the CreatureKind Commitment, meaning that they have pledged to: 1)  reduce their purchase of animal products; 2) source meat, dairy, and eggs from higher welfare farms for its catering operations on campus; and 3) educate the campus community about why they decided to make these important changes.

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