Introduction to the Justice Pie Project

In May 2009 a group of dear friends from our church (Connexus Community Church in Barrie, Ontario http://connexuscommunity.com/) went together to Oasis Retreat Centre on Manitoulin Island. We are all active volunteers at our church and elsewhere, we all have jobs and children and very busy lives, but during our retreat, this question kept coming up: God cares deeply about the poor and the oppressed, what more could we do to help?

After we got home from the retreat my husband Steve and I knew we wanted to take on some kind of small project. Our family and friends are amazing and caring people and we knew that many of them would like to work together and learn more about justice and help others. Steve, our son Evan (age 11) and I talked and prayed about what we could do and we came up with the following basic principles:

• Our project needs to be simple and manageable given how busy life already is
• It should be small enough to not compete with the other volunteer and donor commitments
• It needs to allow both adults and children to be involved
• Our project should give us new skills for any future justice work
• It should build community among those involved
• Our project should promote family and group volunteering

• It should help people learn about the issues and needs in our community and world

• Our project should give us a way to make a small difference in the world around us

In June 2009 we developed a plan for the Justice Pie Project. We would work together with any willing helpers to make pies for family and friends in exchange for a $10 donation per pie which we would give to an organization dedicated to rescuing victims of modern slavery: The International Justice Mission Canada. Steve, Evan and I set our fundraising goal at $300 by the end of September. We are going to have a Justice Pie day at our house on Saturday, August 8, 2009 where we would bake pies, learn about modern slavery, raise funds for an important cause, and have a day of fun, swimming, a potluck supper, and fellowship with whoever is willing to join us. Steve and I will provide the ingredients for making pies and we hope everyone who comes will donate $20 and take home two pies.

Though this idea is small, we hope we will learn a great deal and build our skills for getting more engaged in justice AND next year, maybe another friend would develop a justice project around a cause close to their heart and we would support them! We also hoped to show our children (and ourselves) that ordinary people like us don’t have to sit by on the sidelines; we can get involved, even in a small way, in the issues that concern us in the world. 

If you can't come that day, you still help by picking berries (or drop off some rhubarb!). Another way to help is to share your best pie recipes or pie stories with me. Or, you could pray for justice – rivers of it!

Why did we choose to support this cause? Like me, I’ll bet you may have thought that slavery ended many years ago. But did you know that there are millions of slaves right now in 2009? Did you know that there are more slaves now than at any point in history? The International Justice Mission Canada is a human rights organization that rescues victims of slavery. See www.ijm.ca/ for more information.

We baked our first Justice Pie (my Grandmother’s treasured rhubarb custard pie!) on a sunny warm June day (Father’s day!) up at my parents’ house in Sudbury. We started off the baking of our first pie with this prayer: “Dear Jesus, we want to do something to help people in need. Please help us and bless what we are doing.”

We hope that God will take this small offering of pie and love and community and use it to bless the lives of others.