The Methodist Church engaging with Business Industry and Commerce






It provides an excellent basis for a dialogue with politicians and the business community about the sort of society we need to move towards where wealth is a matter of well-being for the many, and our responsibilities to relieving the causes of poverty in the two-thirds world are actively discharged.

There are some weaknesses. There is a tendency to highlight the more intractable problems, such as the persistence of child poverty even after eight years of a government pledged to abolish it, and the continuation of the 'long hours' culture in the face of overwhelming evidence of its destructive effect on individual health and family life, without offering realistic policies to solve them.

There is a companion volume of essays Prosperity with a Purpose -Exploring the Ethics of Affluence (price 11.99) which I have not seen, and which may 'unpack' these difficult questions in more detail.

I would like to hope that both volumes will be widely read and discussed in all the churches. For those of us who have difficulty getting these issues onto the agendas of our local churches and circuits they may be a very timely resource.


Conference booking link

Prosperity with a Purpose




Ian Parker writes ---

Those who have been in touch with the thinking side of Industrial Mission over the last 20 years will find little that is new in this report.

The value of the business world in creating the wealth upon which the provision of social goods depends, the danger of unregulated market forces, the increasing gap between the best paid and worst paid jobs in our society, the existence of 'structural sin', the threat to the environment, and many more of the concerns which have been discussed within the movement are mentioned in its 60 A4 pages of largish print.

What is new is that it bears the imprimatur of all the denominations in these islands and represents a remarkable convergence of Christian thinking on a wide range of issues which arise out of economic activity.

Building on The Common Good issued by the Catholic Bishops and Unemployment and the Future of Work published by CCBI before the 1997 General Election, it banishes the myths
(a) that Christian morality can have nothing to say about economics, and
(b) that gross inequality and suffering are an inevitable consequence of economic growth.