Mary Lean is a writer, editor and spiritual director, living in south-east England. She co-edited Initiative of Change's international magazine, For A Change, from 1987 to 2006. She is author of 'Bread, Bricks and Belief: communities in charge of their future', which examines the role of spiritual change as a catalyst for community development. She writes on refugee, environment and development issues, on spiritual growth and on people who are making a difference, and is Secretary of the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, which befriends asylum seekers and immigration detainees held at Tinsley House Removal Centre in the UK. She is married to John Bond.

Mary Lean reflects on a major upheaval in her life.

THIS MONTH sees the release of a new film, The Imam and the Pastor, which tells the story of a remarkable peacemaking partnership in northern Nigeria, a region where thousands have been killed in Muslim-Christian conflicts.

The realisation that God's longing for our love is as great as our longing for his and the role of prayer

OK, I draw the line at Big Brother — and I’m ashamed of my sneaking weakness for I’m a Celebrity, get me out of here!, in which a group of celebs eat creepy crawlies and brave snakes in the Australian jungle.

While we rush around our homes checking for dripping taps, the water companies also have some work to do, putting their own house in order.

When we chose the name For A Change, nearly 20 years ago, we were pleased with the pun.

'THREE MEN AND THREE WOMEN came to our house at 5.30 am. My wife started to cry. They took first my wife and my son, and then me and the two children....

I looked up '2006 year of' on the internet and discovered that, according to various authorities, this is the Year of Deserts and Desertification, of Rembrandt (born in 1606) and of Mozart (born in 1756).

The value of the food each Briton throws away each day is more than the sum half the world's population has to live on each day.

At the end of last year, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) brought out a sobering report. For every child in the world today who enjoys the security of home, school, healthcare and regular meals, one does not.

The harrowing pictures of starving children may seem a million miles away from the peace and beauty of the Swiss mountains. But Mountain House in the village of Caux, high above Lake Geneva, holds a key to the resolution of such tragedies.

With all the pressures we put upon ourselves in this achievement-driven world, it’s sometimes a struggle to hang onto the truth that God delights in us, just as we are.

Abduljalil Sajid, Chairman of the Muslim Council for Religious and Racial Harmony, UK, gives a voice to Muslims who have forgiven in circumstances where many Christians and others would fail the test.

On 1 May, the European Union will have 75 million new inhabitants—and ten new member nations, bringing its total to 25. The ‘rich man’s club’ is opening its doors to its less wealthy neighbours—amid muttering from many of those already ensconced in its comfortable armchairs. It may seem strange—even presumptuous—for a publication based in the UK to welcome the new arrivals. To the rest of Europe, Britain has sometimes seemed an awkward member of the club, carping about the rules, resisting change and casting aspersions on everyone else. Although our government championed the enlargement, the prospect has sparked a xenophobia in some quarters which is matched only by attitudes to asylum seekers and refugees.

disappear into months.

As you reach out for a jar of coffee in the supermarket, you can give a hand to the people who grew the beans, discovers Mary Lean.

Like most western Europe countries, Switzerland is seeing a rise in asylum applications. Mary Lean finds out how the Swiss are responding.

Not many people launch out on a new career in their late sixties, but composer Margaret Rizza did. She talks to Mary Lean.

What can a play about a reclusive American poet tell us about ourselves? Quite a lot, if the experience of its creators is anything to go by. Edie Campbell and Jack Lynch talk to Mary Lean.

Mary Lean is transported by the work of a man whose art was his message.

Theatrical success didn't make Vendela Tyndale-Biscoe happy. Nor did drugs and partying. Mary Lean finds out more.

It’s a long way from a remote village in Pakistan to Brighton, England. Imam Abduljalil Sajid tells Mary Lean about the encounters which inspired his passion for interfaith understanding.

The world lay at RD Mathur's feet as a young man - and he decided to give everything to try and change it. He talks to Mary Lean.

The first of two Agenda for Reconciliation conferences focussed on peace-building initiatives. It included private 'dialogues of the heart' between citizens from the Great Lakes area of Africa (Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and Uganda) and also among people from Sierra Leone; and a round table meeting of people from Bosnia Herzegovina involved in setting up a truth and reconciliation process there. Here we print extracts from Donald Shriver's keynote speech on forgiveness, and (below) Mary Lean meets some of the peace builders who took part.

Mary Lean finds some remarkable companions on the road from fear to love.

Exiled and in despair, Osman Jama Ali had no idea of the impact an unexpected letter would have on his life. The Deputy Prime Minister of Somalia’s first government for a decade talks to Mary Lean.

What difference would it make if people learnt to be leaders at the beginning rather than the end of their careers? Mary Lean finds out.

Veteran potter David Leach believes art is about transcendental values. He talks to Mary Lean and Anastasia Stepanova.

Since we last wrote about Walkerswood, Jamaica, in 1994, its cottage industry has burgeoned into a company with a £2 million turnover. Mary Lean reports, and (below) visits its London showcase, Bamboula restaurant in Brixton.

One in 264 people alive today has had to flee their home. While millions struggle in refugee camps, others bang on the doors of Western nations asking for asylum. Mary Lean examines a crisis which tests our humanity at the turn of the Millennium.

At 18, Paul Gundersen was risking his life for his country, Finland; at 55 he was haggling with bureaucrats behind the Iron Curtain. It was in Caux that he made the choices which formed his business philosophy, he tells Mary Lean.

The Government of New Zealand has taken the unheard of step of apologizing to the Maori people--and beginning to redress their grievances. The architect of this process, Attorney General Sir Douglas Graham, spoke at the Agenda for Reconciliation conference in Caux in August. Mary Lean met him afterwards.

'Employers have found that it is no longer possible to rely on home or school to have taught a school leaver how to make a moral judgement,' explains the Director of the IBE, Stanley Kiaer. 'A code of business ethics can help once a school leaver had joined a company.

It's not just the ethereal scenery that brings people from conflict areas to Caux in Switzerland. Mary Lean takes part in a remarkable meeting of hearts.

What happens when people with a common cause disagree about the way forward? Trade unions, political parties, churches, lobby groups and charities all face this dilemma from time to time. Some groups delay a decision and become absorbed in internal wrangling; others split. Mary Lean explores the experience of MRA in Britain, which has recently sold the Westminster Theatre.

Mary Lean meets the British World War II veterans who are calling for reconciliation with Japan.

Honest conversations about race, reconciliation and responsibility challenge us to confront our past and its legacy and welcome new beginnings.

An international media forum in Sydney discusses the media's freedom of press versus responsibility to society.

Over the last two decades the Maori people of New Zealand have found new confidence through a movement which runs 'language nests' for pre-school children. Mary Lean visited the headquarters of the Kohanga Reo Trust in Wellington to discover what has happened since we last covered the story in May 1991.

British politician Frank Field talks to Mary Lean about gun control, sleaze and the moral force of the welfare state.

Caux's history made it the ideal place for a high-level symposium on reconciliation. Mary Lean reports.

Another major global UN conference - this time on cities - has taken place in Istanbul.

The people of a former red light area have run the pimps and drug dealers out of town. Now they have launched a plan to regenerate their district. Mary Lean investigates.

Through no fault of its authors, Survival in our own land overran its publication deadline. But when it appeared last year it was a historic event in itself - and an immediate best-seller.

The Kriegs describe the year that their daughter was addicted as the lowest point of their married life.

Taken hostage? How would you cope?The knock on the door, the knife or bullet, the disappearance,the interrogation - it might happen anywhere, from Irelandto Argentina, in London or Paris as well as Beirut.For Jean Waddell it happened in Tehran. Seven years later she talks about her experiences to 'For A Change'.by Mary Lean

For 40 years Buchman built up a worldwide network of men and women of different views and backgrounds united by their determination to seek and try to follow God's will.

Like the early Chinese painters, Heaton Cooper sees landscape painting as a means of interpreting the divine spirit. 'I don't monkey around with the mountains,' he told a recent television interviewer.

'No one comes here except the army-, it's too dangerous,' the driver told his passenger, a tiny but determined woman agricultural student. The area, in the mountains of Northern Thailand, had been devastated and depopulated by guerrilla warfare.