We are group of Christians from Gloucester who believe that our Christian discipleship should find expression at every level of our lives - including our working lives. The message of Jesus speaks to people's material experience of life, at the social, economic and political level as well as to our inner, spiritual lives. In fact, we believe it is not possible to separate the two. So, as Christians we want our economic activity, our daily labour, to resonate with the values, principles and ethics which we have learned from our Christian faith. Jesus calls us to challenge injustice and inequality, to dismantle structures that cause exploitation and oppression, to affirm the absolute equality and worth of every human being, to identify with the cause of the vulnerable, the poor, the outcast, to renounce lifestyles based on excessive consumption and the accumulation of wealth whilst others remain poor, to steward and sustain the natural world around us. As Christians we inherit a tradition from Jesus (Mark 10:28-30) and the early church (Acts 2:44, Acts 4:32) of common ownership and the overcoming of economic hierarchies - "no longer slave and free, but one in Christ"(Galatians 3:28, Colossians 3:11). We believe that the model of the small scale workers co-operative resonates most closely with the values and principles of our Christian faith in the area of economic activity.

Our Christian faith also leads us into a deep concern for the wellbeing of this planet. We believe that we are called to be stewards of our God given resources, not reckless consumers. We hope that our zero-emissions transport service, our recycling service and our refill scheme will act as a small contribution towards encouraging a more responsible and sustainable relationship with the world on which we depend.

The Green Cross Co-op has identified "Ten Marks of Gospel Economics" which we seek to express in the way our co-operative is run:

1. Work as liturgy
2. Rejection of wealth accumulation
3. Common ownership of the means of production
4. Debt Free
5. Planet compatibility
6. "Inefficient" generosity
7. Covenantal relationships (in preference to contractual)
8. Local (and small)
9. Engaged with alternative economies
10. Limited Growth

We have produced a fuller statement about these 10 Marks - Click here for this as a pdf file

We are also constituted as a "not for profit" business, so that any surplus from our business must be distributed to causes with similar aims and objectives. The size of our co-operative is limited to 20. So that any growth beyond this would be through the development of new small scale co-ops.

At present there are eight members of the Green Cross Co-op.