Small is beautiful in global development, says Archbishop of Canterbury

Small–scale initiatives are important in regenerating local communities, Dr. Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican Church has said.

Addressing global poverty, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the local church and its associates is "probably the only organization of civil society that can deliver [development] goals concretely at grass–roots level, in modest but real ways."

Dr. Rowan Williams, who was on a recent trip to South Africa, said, "Whether it's the work of the Mothers' Union, which is a great sacrament worldwide...whether it's micro credit initiatives in a village somewhere; whether it's a small school in the back of beyond like the little school that we visited meeting under a tree in Southern Sudan at this time last year. All of those are examples of the real difference that no one else can make."

Speaking to a gathering of Anglican mission consultants in South Africa, Dr. Williams said that the churches and faith organizations, many supported by Western agencies, play a major role in Africa's development, where state, organizational and civil society infrastructure could be weak.

Many have praised this work, but some critics have alleged that it could create dependency or give the churches too much leverage.

Dr. William's focus, however, was on the small–scale. "There's a role, heaven knows, for the large–scale NGO, and I'm not for a moment saying they should not exist; I have huge belief in and a passion about the work of Christian Aid and many other large agencies, yet what we need to do is not to think that there's a solution which can be delivered from large agencies top–down and ignore the rest; nor to suppose that everything can be done by local initiative," he said.

"We need to have a kind of mental and moral map in which each organization at every level simply asks 'what is it that can be done here in this way, with these people?' so as to value both the large scale and the small scale," he said.

The archbishop also noted that the church needed to challenge perpetrators of injustice and to remind them of their own suffering. "Have you understood that you are deprived and dehumanised by a system that tolerates the idea of superfluous people, allowed to remain invisible? Have you understood that it's your life we're talking about as well?" Dr. Williams urged.

He went on, "I'm not sure that's something we hear very easily or readily in the prosperous West or North; that we are victims of injustice as well, because to be a perpetrator of injustice is also to be a victim of it. We are making ourselves less human if we don't respond to God's call to meet the needs of those who suffer."

The church stands for the principle that no–one can be forgotten or left outside in God's Kingdom, Dr. Williams said, adding that it was important to resist global notions of isolation and security based on resources.

"There are no 'gated communities' in the Kingdom. There are no communities that are protected from involvement in the loss or the trauma of others, much as we'd like to think so. We all know what it's like to live in an urban environment where so much of the development that goes forward seems to presuppose that, actually, you can protect some people from the poverty or the need of others. We know what it’s like to live in a world where, again and again, we act as if there were some kind of protection for the wealthy, the resourceful, which would allow them to live with no consciousness of and no impact from the privation of others," he said.

This, he said, had profound implications for what the Church had to say to the community of nations: "...the church is saying to the world 'The form of human community that's ultimately in accord with God's purpose and God's nature is one in which this principle applies: this principle of mutual enrichment and the converse, the mutual impoverishment that happens when we forget or ignore the suffering of others.'"

"The Church today...is bound to be asking in any given situation ‘Who is being forgotten here? Who is not being heard' To be asking 'Who are the ones who are not reached by the Law and the Gospel? Whose deprivation or diminution is actually wounding us all here in this situation or that situation? And that means positively that the Church has to be involved in creating, consistently, globally, participation and empowerment," the spiritual leader of the world's 78 million Anglicans and leader of the Church of England said, urging the Christians to seek for the outcast and the excluded.