28th September 2025
It's another Harvest Festival*
* with apologies to all who read this and suffer an immediate earworm...
Across Penge and Beckenham over the next few weeks, churches, schools and other community groups will be celebrating Harvest. Many of them will donate the food and hygiene items collected to Living Well. Most weeks, Living Well spends over £2K on food in order to meet the demand - but the produce gathered from community generosity at Harvest time will often last until Christmas.
It's a long time (although just about within living memory) since we ploughed the fields and scattered in Penge and Beckenham. Most of our food comes from the supermarket, or an online order. In a 2024 survey, only a third of primary school children questioned could identify a courgette; only a quarter a beetroot. And yet Harvest Festival remains popular, including among families who rarely attend church.
I wonder whether harvest taps into our deep longing for community and relationships. In an individualised, atomised society, where we listen to our own music and watch our own TV on our own devices, where we rarely interact with a human being, still less with the land, for our daily needs, harvest speaks of something different. Harvest reminds us that we belong to a whole web of interconnected, interdependent relationships. When we buy a tin of tomatoes, we are somehow linked through that to the farmer who grew the tomatoes, the factory employees who processed and canned them, the driver who delivered the tins to the supermarket, the checkout operator who rang them through... If we give the tin away to a food bank, we are somehow linked through that to the volunteers who will sort, bag and distribute it, and to the family who will receive it. We are also connected to the many other people who will be donating tins, packets and tubs of food around our community - and the little each of us brings will together make a big difference.
The Bible tells us that God made us for relationships - to live in relationship with God our Creator, with other humans, with the creatures God has made and with the land itself (Genesis 2). Since the very beginning, human sin has damaged those relationships... but the image of God which the Creator placed in each of us means the desire to connect is still there. As we gather our tins and packets for a harvest gift, let's give thanks for the work of all who have been involved in getting the product to our shopping bags, and let's pray a blessing on those who will receive our offerings, our signs of connection.
