Nine Kenyan delegates and three editors gathered together at the Mennonite Guest House in Nairobi the last week in January. Their task: to proof the manuscript of a history of the Kenya Mennonite Church (KMC), a Mennonite World Conference member church - writes Debbi DiGennaro.

The idea for this book, chronicling KMC?s 50-year history, was birthed in 2003 at the Mennonite World Conference summit in Zimbabwe, in a discussion between Kenyan Bishop Dominic Opondo and David W. Shenk, author and EMM global consultant.

?This is the account of the acts of the Holy Spirit in calling forth and forming the Mennonite Church in Kenya,? wrote Francis Ojwang, primary researcher and author of the book, in the foreword. ?Just as ancient Israel and the early church made a very high priority of writing their history of the acts of God among them, so also the KMC needed to record their journey with Jesus Christ.?

The nine delegates were bishops, pastors, and leaders, each representing dioceses of KMC. They spent three full days pouring over the nearly 200-page manuscript. They read each section aloud and then discussed whether the story it portrayed was accurate ? moving on only after reaching consensus, in the African way. There were stories to amend, adjectives to tweak, and because of the different ethnicities involved, misspelled vernacular words and place names to correct.

During the reading, David Shunkur, a Maasai pastor from Olepolos, read a section of the manuscript that described his own congregation?s story. Shenk, who served as a consulting editor, said, ?It was a moving scene to see Shunkur proofing a paragraph about history he had made himself years before. The delegates showed an enormous amount of ownership in the process.?

The book will be published by Uzima Publishing House, the Anglican publishing house in Kenya, early in 2013.

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When the government?s Welfare Reform Bill first went through the House of Commons last year, signalling a massive overhaul of the benefit system and around £18 billion worth of cuts affecting some of the least well-off in Britain, there were ? remarkably ? few ruffles at Westminster.

But in January 2012 the balloon went up. That was largely due to a small group of disabled and sick people who were determined not to be ignored by politicians and the mainstream media. They took to the Internet and launched one of the most successful social media awareness campaigns we ever seen.

The ?Spartacus report? and campaign (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/responsiblereformDLA) started off using the Freedom of Information Act to reveal a huge level of concern and opposition to the coalition?s plan to take 500,000 people off Disability Living Allowance, replace it with a new payment, cut costs by 20 per cent, and introduce a vague and untested assessment regime. Up to 98 per cent of expert respondents disagreed with key aspects of what was being proposed. As did Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson, it transpired.

Suddenly, three million people started talking about this on Twitter. Thousands began lobbying. Churches and bishops questioned the arbitrary and unfair nature of a one-size-fits all, top-slicing benefit cap. The Institute for Fiscal Studies raised issues about the government?s sums. And charities called for a legislative pause and review of the Bill as a whole, given serious concerns about its impact on disabled youngsters, cancer sufferers, the terminally ill, those in housing need, carers and children in low income or unwaged families.

As a result, the coalition lost an unprecedented seven Welfare Reform Bill amendment votes in the House of Lords, where crossbenchers and independents exerted their power and knowledge to question what was being done to the most vulnerable in society.

?If we are going to rob the poor to pay the rich, then we enter into a different form of morality,? said Lord Patel, responding to arguments that slashing welfare payments was justified by the need for deficit reduction.

Actor and comedian Francesca Martinez, who lives with cerebral palsy, went further. By trying to reform welfare without putting human need and suffering first, government was proving ?morally disabled?, she declared.

The coalition can and will force its changes through. It is using procedural measures, minor concessions and ?financial privilege? to do so. But the long-term political fall-out from all of this could be immense. Legal challenges are being investigated. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is being invoked. Lords reform will also become more of a minefield.

It is ironic that an unelected revising chamber has proved more sensitive to democratic procedure and the need to listen to ordinary people than the elected one. That does not justify the current set up. But it sends out a strong warning about simply cloning the second chamber on the first. The warfare over welfare has also shown just how powerful citizens? action and web-based crowd sourcing can be. Politics 2.0, anyone?

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© Simon Barrow is co-director of Ekklesia. This article is adapted from his regular column in Third Way, the Christian magazine of social and cultural comment. http://www.thirdwaymagazine.co.uk/

Ed Miliband has accepted David Cameron's cuts. Ken Livingstone shares Boris Johnson's commitment to business. And according to one-time wannabe Scottish leader Tom Harris, Labour "want you to get rich". Today's party owes little to Methodism, let alone Marx. But if Labour has lost its soul, the Tories never had one and the Lib Dems sold theirs a long time ago.

All three embrace a materialistic commitment to modern capitalism ? they just differ in how it might be made a little nicer. It is the Green party that now embodies the natural political expression of the more progressive traditions found in dissenting movements such as Quakerism and radical Catholicism.

Many are asking what the point of Labour is, particularly as the time is ripe for an economic vision that refuses to bow at the altar of growth ? one that sees people as fully human, not competitive economic units. The charge of "naivety" that once held back such a perspective rings rather hollow today. It is the free-market narrative that is now discredited. Relentless and largely illusory growth based on credit was unsustainable. Inflation driven by rising commodity prices following the depletion of scarce resources has made a monkey out of monetarism. And this in addition to the huge human, social and environmental cost, seen in rising inequality and pollution. "Responsible capitalism" is an oxymoron akin to "well-mannered war".

An appeal to give up the pursuit of wealth isn't an automatic vote-winner. But the alternative to the pursuit of riches is pursuit of a richer vision: neither austerity nor excessive wealth, but rather "sufficiency plus", where needs are met, and then some, while a fuller understating of human welfare is championed.

Having less can be more. Too much choice is not liberating. There is something to be said for rhythms of life, for patience and delayed gratification, where everything isn't available instantaneously. Seasons are enjoyed because they aren't there all year round. Fifty-hour weeks come at the expense of family and friends. That's if we have a job at all.

As well as robbing us of our lives, the system pits us against one another in an endless quest for more, which fuels greater inequality, dissatisfaction and unfulfilment ? for both the winners and the losers. We feel left behind our neighbours and other countries if we don't better ourselves economically. We have forgotten who the economy is for.

The alternative is not state socialism. There has always been trade, exchange and barter. But modern capitalism is a relatively late arrival. There are alternative economic models, from mutuals, industrial provident societies and credit unions to small businesses and trading ventures that operate with counter-cultural values. Right now there are more members of co-operatives in the UK (which, the Co-op group points out, have outperformed the British economy by over 21 per cent since the start of the credit crunch) than there are shareholders.

The great leaders of the next few years will not be those who career down another blind alley on the coat tails of outdated and damaging economic models. They will be those who can manage a transition economy, through inevitable de-growth, on to a more sustainable footing. They will need to foster a 'wartime spirit', perhaps, but where the common enemy is not the financial crisis. If we see it in those terms, the competitive nature of the system means we can never truly be all in this together. All we do is sacrifice the most vulnerable for the sake of the system. The real foe is capitalism. One way or another we'll wake up to the fact.

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© Jonathan Bartley is co-director of Ekklesia, and the Green candidate for Lambeth and Southwark in the forthcoming Greater London Authority elections. This article is adapted from one that appeared on Guardian Comment-is-Free, with acknowledgments. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/jonathan-bartley