Lent Event is a community based Christian social justice movement begun in Australia in the early 2000s by Sarah White of Sydney. It began in the West Epping Uniting Church.
White perceived a need to help people in underdeveloped countries and, to raise money, proposed a variation on the Christian habit of giving up luxuries for Lent by asking people to donate the value of their forgone luxury. Lent Event is thus promoted as not just a fundraising venture, but a spiritual journey.
Lent Event is partnered with Uniting Church Overseas Aid (UCOA), an arm of the Uniting Church in Australia, and is supported by UnitingCare Australia.
In 2009, Lent Event will have programs helping needy people in:
- Papua New Guinea (clean drinking water).
- Timor Leste (East Timor) (health and agricultural development).
- South India (preschools in the Nilgiri Hills region).
- Sudan (water and education for the Nachipo villages -- see photograph).
- Solomon Islands (health care, staff training, and health centres).
- Zambia (drop-in centre for orphans - Mwandi area).
The 2007 video promoting Lent Event featured leading Uniting Church figures Rev Dr James Haire and Rev Bill Crews, and Sarah White. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKtWFZvuFi8
Famous quotes containing the words lent and/or event:
“Borrowers are nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war protracted.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)