Two hundred years ago, the song ‘Amazing Grace’ challenged Christians to end the injustice of slavery. In the 1960s, songs of faith provided the soundtrack to the American civil rights movement. Today, the power of music to inspire people with a heart for the poor remains unchanged. And to this end, Micah Challenge has released a new CD called Heart Life VOICE.

‘Micah Challenge is an international network that asks people to think about how faith and poverty issues connect and how we can respond and live lives that reflect God’s concern for the poor,’ explains Amanda Jackson (pictured left), national coordinator of the campaign in Australia.

‘The Micah Challenge is the result of a huge meeting that happened in England in 2001, when a group of Christians got together and said we need to respond to the issues of our century, of our new millennium.’ The group considered the (then recently adopted) UN Millennium Development Goals and identified poverty as a crucial issue of our time. ‘As Christians, we see the Millennium Development Goals as reflecting our mission and, even though they’re not perfect, we think we should support them and encourage our government to support them so we can halve global poverty by 2015,’ she says.

Amanda has been national coordinator of Micah Challenge Australia since it started in mid-2004 and her role takes an educational and advocacy approach. ‘I do everything from sending out updates to people to keep them informed about the campaign to talking to politicians. ‘It’s important to inform people [about the issues], not just play on an emotional response to poverty.

‘We really encourage everybody to talk to their local politicians, share their concern for the poor and say “this is something people in your constituency care about”.’ Amanda’s research into the role music plays in social justice campaigns was the inspiration behind the Heart Life VOICE project. ‘I’ve always been interested in social movements that were led by Christians,’ she says. ‘I discovered that for a number of them, music was a key part in inspiring people. ‘In the Bible you read that often when people went to battle, music was a part of how they would inspire people beforehand and celebrate God’s victory afterwards. ‘Music seems to me not just separate from the idea of justice and advocacy but actually really closely tied up with it. So, if we’re going into “battle” for the poor, then we really need to be equipped, and part of that equipment comes with worshipping God through music.’

Amanda says that when she discovered the lack of Christian songs about God’s heart for the poor she thought, ‘Let’s do something about it’. The album’s 13 songs were selected from 80 submitted for consideration from around the world. ‘That job was left to the album’s two producers, Mark Evans and Jeff Crabtree. They sat down and looked at each song in terms of its quality and musicality, but also the words,’ she says.

Artists include Antiskeptic’s Andrew Kitchen, Steve Bevis and Salvos Nathan Rowe, Michelle Kay and Phil Laeger. ‘It’s fantastic that we have songwriters from so many church backgrounds on this album,’ says Amanda. ‘Sometimes it seems we only want to have things to do with people that we know or recognise. ‘But [on this album] we’re saying, “This is God’s language and it’s God’s call”. And it’s very exciting.’