Who We Are
Six Justice Practices
The Just Love Network is a global network of support and action for all connected with Just Love. We gather around a set of six Justice Practices that express who we are and what we care about.
Read on to find out more, or take the survey to help shape how the Network engages in these practices going forward.
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Love Widely
In a culture where love is transactional, sentimental and reserved for those who are like us, we choose to model our love on the abundant, unconditioned agape love of Jesus. Love Widely is about practicing hospitality – building friendship and connection that crosses social divides and welcoming the excluded into family.
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Serve Humbly
Serve Humbly is about work: what we do with the time and gifts that God has given us. It is about offering all of our work - paid and unpaid - as worship to God and in service of our neighbours. Together, we want to show up to the great challenges in our world, and to the situations and circumstances that summon us, with a posture of self-giving love and a hunger to cultivate beauty, goodness and justice.
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Live Lightly
To Live Lightly is about living free from the attachment to things that cannot, ultimately, satisfy our desires. It is about resisting an economy built on greed, accumulation and exploitation. It is about aligning our consumption with a deep care and reverence for God’s good creation.
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Pray Boldly
In Praying Boldly, we depend on God and we rest in his love. Our work for God flows out of a deep, rich life of intimacy with God. In prayer, we partner with God: we lament for all that is wrong and hurting, and we intercede and contend for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven.
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Give Deeply
Giving Deeply is about financial generosity. In a culture where money is a means of power, security and status, we chose instead to share - viewing any money that God has entrusted to our care as a gift to steward for the good of our neighbours.
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Change Structures
Change Structures is about building systems and institutions that work for the flourishing of all image-bearers. That means engaging with politics. By politics, we mean the way we organise life together in our neighbourhoods, regions and nations. In a time of societal fracture, failing institutions and rising ideological extremism, we pursue the alternative politics of Jesus.
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These 6 practices express something of what it means to radically and fruitfully live out Jesus’ call to social justice in our moment in history. Every one of them is rooted directly in the life, words and example of Jesus. Every one of them is also flexible, and will look very different for each one of us according to our experiences, place and context.
These are at first aspirations: dreams of who we want to be and how we want to live, for the benefit of others. Over time, these aspirations become commitments, resolutions to live and act in a certain way, even when it costs. Eventually, these commitments become practices, which in turn become habits: a real-time experience of God's grace worked out in our lives.
That's what these are. They are not:
A to-do list.
A set of rules, laws or entry criteria.
A comprehensive or exhaustive list of what it means to "seek justice" - they only scratch the surface.
Most importantly of all, we're not expecting any one of us to be going 100% on all 6 of these at once. We're only human. They also require a great degree of contextualisation - what it means to "live lightly" or "engage structures" will look different for different people, not least through our different experiences of privilege and oppression, power and exclusion.
There is much that is missing here, and much that falls short about these 6 practices. However, these 6 principles are our starting point, a broad structure and framework that holds us together and shows us the direction of travel. Put simply, in 10, 20, 50 years time we all want to look a little more like Christ in each one of these areas.
So what are they?
About the Just Love Network
We're a lifelong space of support and action in the work of social justice, gathering around six Justice Practices. And we’d love for you to join us!
We run a mixture of events, communities and action projects across the UK and online.
Let’s pursue justice in the way of Jesus, together.