Limit Your Consumption
During the Limit Your Consumption Challenge, we will look at making small but purposeful changes in how we steward our spending.
Choose a few sustainable ways you can limit your consumption, then redirect those dollars to help alleviate hunger. Through the money collected, we will feed over 10,000 children in Zimbabwe. Any additional funds will go towards our church partners efforts to provide solutions for combating hunger in their communities. Those monies will be collected on Mother’s Day weekend (May 10-11), and together we will celebrate the abundant impact your limited consumption will bring to the life of a hungry child.
Next Steps
1. Choose ways you will limit consumption between now and Mother’s Day weekend (May 10-11).
2. Every time you limit your consumption, put aside the money you saved.
4) Bring what you saved to church on the weekend of May 10-11 (Mother’s Day Weekend), and celebrate how our small changes in consumption will be magnified to fight the ravages of hunger.
If you are writing a check, just note “COH 08” on the memo line, and all such checks will go directly toward alleviating hunger and our Global Poverty initiatives.
To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. --Matthew 25:29
| Five–Day Solidarity Challenge You can also choose to participate in the Five-Day Solidarity Challenge. From April 21 – 25, eat as half the world’s population does, with meals of oatmeal, rice, beans and vegetables. |
And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday
--Isaiah 58:10
The American diet is vastly different than much of the world. Half the world’s population lives on $2 a day or less. As an act of solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the globe, we encourage you to eat as they do for five days, April 21 – 25. Set aside the money you would have spent on additional groceries to include with your special offering on May 10-11.
-
Meal Options
- Plain oatmeal or Cream of Wheat
- A tortilla, rice and beans
- Rice with bits of fish or chicken and a vegetable
Portions
Portion sizes are much smaller than a typical American meal. One cup or eight ounces is a generous portion. Meat is a luxury, with the average African consuming about ¾ ounce per day—the size of a small chicken nugget. Fresh fruit is rare, available only if locally grown and in season.
While these meals seem meager by American standards, they actually represent diets in the broad middle of the world’s population. Approximately 1 billion people live on even less—only $1 per day.
**Please use your discernment in determining a portion size that will allow you to function in a safe manner and to also experience what life is like for the other half of the world. Those with medical conditions should honor your physician's medical recommendations. Contact your doctor if unsure about participation in the challenge.
In a society that has increasingly become inundated with materialism and spending, it’s hard to remember the day when our smallest need was not promptly met. In fact, Americans as a nation know a level of wealth never experienced in history. Consider the following:
2006 Statistics |
USA |
The Developing World |
Median Annual Income |
$48,201 |
$730 |
Daily Income |
$132 |
Less than $2 per day (3 billion people) |
Percent of Global Income (GDP) |
27% |
3.9% |
The distribution of global wealth is a landslide in our favor. And yet simultaneously, more Americans than ever describe an ache, a loss of meaning, an emptiness inside. A hunger, if you will. Could it be that, as we overeat, overwork, overspend, and overstimulate ourselves with entertainment, we are simultaneously starving ourselves spiritually? Have we so oversaturated our every physical sense, that we have dulled our spiritual senses.
