You can dramatically improve your quality of life by putting family and friends first, writes Amy Butler.

Do you ever feel as though there’s just not enough time in the day to do everything you need to do? At the end of a busy day at work it’s hard enough to remember to take the garbage out, let alone to call mum.

Dr Michael Schluter, in Australia last month to see his new book The R Option launched by the Australian Labor Party’s leading public policy thinker, Lindsay Tanner, may have an answer. Indeed, Tanner’s endorsement offers a remarkable testimony to the hearing Dr Schluter’s work is receiving in political circles.

Dr Schluter explains that our consumer-driven culture is taking a big toll as we focus less on relationships and more on increasing material wealth. In essence, globalisation has created a climate hostile to relationships.

The Relationships Foundation is a political lobby group in the UK, secular in its focus, yet explicitly based on the values of the Bible. The aim of the lobby is to help people see that in order to benefit our society and ourselves, relationships need to be at the heart of public and private life.

It was during his time in Africa, working with the World Bank and International Food Policy Research Institute that Dr Schluter, an economist, made his discovery about the centrality of relationships. “I became very interested in how the church could respond to Marxism in Ethiopia, socialism in Tanzania and capitalism in Kenya,” he explains.

“I began to look at what the Bible teaches about economics in detail. It became clear to me that biblical teaching in the Old Testament dealing with economics was a coherent system of thought that could be set up against capitalism or Marxism – but I couldn’t see what the central idea was.

“Then one day in my daily quiet time I was reading Matthew 22 where Jesus is asked a question which was quite close to the question I was asking. The question was, ‘What is the greatest commandment?’ and the answer Jesus gives is, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbour as yourself.’ And then Jesus makes a key statement: ‘On these two laws hang all the law and the prophets.’ I realised that Jesus was saying that the one idea that integrated the whole of the law and the organisation of society was love.”

Though he is the first to admit he is not a theologian, Dr Schluter makes a convincing theological argument to support his discovery about the centrality of relationships in the Bible. He points out that the idea of ‘righteousness’ in the Old Testament suggests ‘right relationships’ rather than simply an absence of guilt in a judicial sense. Jesus’ death on the cross is described as an act of reconciliation which is a relational term. Eternal life is not simply about existence but ‘knowing’ God.

The Bible, he says, is concerned with relationships of justice, mercy and peace in both the personal and the national context and with right relationships in the family and community context. Thus the Relationships Foundation is concerned with lobbying for change in both the public and private spheres.

“We’ve been into prisons looking at relationships between prison officers and prisoners, we’ve worked with the National Health Service looking at what we call primary care groups which are groups of GPs working in towns who meet together for peer support,” Dr Schluter said. “We’ve also done a lot of work in unemployment through trying to build relationships between citizens of the city who are the ‘haves’ and those who are the ‘have nots’. We do this through an employment bond program.”

The success of the Relationships Foundation is not only seen in public policy, but also in the lives of individuals.

“One job created from the employment bond program was a man who’d been in prison in his younger years and since coming out of prison had never been able to find a job. He put in an application for £3000 to buy a van and some gardening equipment to set up a small business. Now, three years on that business has gone very well. He says he is so thankful to have had the opportunity to start the business, as no bank would offer to back him. When we do our next employment bond program he has already put his hand up to be the first to buy a bond himself with the profits of his business.”

It is often said that it’s better to be poor but happy than to be rich and lonely. But this does not appear to be a value Australians have embraced. Rather, Australian culture is characterised by its hedonism.

Indeed Clive Hamilton, executive director of the Australian Institute, said at an address earlier this year, “Our culture is built on the pursuit of happiness through material acquisition. We envy the rich for their wealth and apparent freedom and glamorous lifestyles, yet we know at a deeper level that they, like Faust who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly success, have sacrificed what is truly valuable.”

In examining research into what makes people happy Dr Hamilton says, “The psychological research confirms in an academic way what the great sages have been telling us for centuries. The secret of life, the path to a rich and fulfilled life lies in devoting ourselves to a higher cause, to others.”

Dr Schluter agrees. It does not take much for people to realise that right relationships are of far greater worth than possessions. “People who run hospices will tell us that when people are facing death they think about restoring relationships,” he explains.

The Relationships Foundation is not evangelistic in its aim but rather Dr Schluter sees it as ploughing the ground for other people to plant the seeds. It is only when people come to understand that there is something wrong with their relationships – when they understand ‘sin’ – that they look to Christ for salvation.
Thinking so much about making relationships work, one might expect that Michael Schluter is a relationship ‘guru’ with all the answers. But no, Dr Schluter describes himself as an ordinary sinner, like us all.

“Certainly just because one thinks about and studies relationships does not make it easy to practise them yourself. I’m very conscious of the weaknesses and failures of my own relationships and in fact, the more I think about and talk about relationships the more obvious the weaknesses become.

“As my own sinfulness has become more apparent, I’ve gained a greater understanding of how much God loves me as a person and how infinite are the resources of his grace. It is the daily reassurance of how much God loves me that has been the bedrock of my ability to go on with the Relationships Foundation through thick and thin.”

Dr Schluter says there are many things the Church needs to ‘unlearn’ from Western society, particularly individualism. “We are always meant to be part of a Christian community rather than worshipping God in isolation. There are so many encouragements in the New Testament to pray with other Christians and to be part of that community rather than trying to go it alone,” he said.

“Part of the purpose of writing The R Option is to encourage non-Christians, but also to encourage Christians to start to look at all areas of life in terms of relationships. That may be everything from microwave ovens and meal times through to how we think about cities, the health service and the criminal justice system. All areas of life need to be reinterpreted and re-examined from a relational perspective.

Dr Schluter’s focus on relationship has its critics within Christian circles. He has had to deal with criticism that it is fruitless, even wrong, to try to impose biblical laws on a society that hasn’t first accepted Christ.

In answer, he rejects the notion that he’s trying to create a theocracy and says society cannot be changed through imposition, but through persuasion and the democratic process. “We have to win over hearts and minds to see that what the Bible is teaching is actually best for people.

“What we’re pursuing is a social vision. It’s a whole way of thinking about the world and God as a relational God. We have to understand God’s laws in their original context and try to apply the intention of those laws into our contemporary situation. This requires a lot of hard work but it’s not a hopeless or fruitless exercise and when you make discoveries about God’s intentions, it’s always very rich and powerful in its application.”