The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has said that the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) provide a key focus for the churches of the Anglican Communion.
Speaking at the start of the TEAM Conference (Towards Effective Anglican Mission), an international Anglican conference taking place in Boksburg near Johannesburg in South Africa, Dr Williams said that working towards key objectives like the MDGs raised fundamental and positive challenges for the Anglican Church.
Dr Williams will invite delegates at the conference to consider the resources in the Anglican Communion worldwide that could be offered towards the delivery of the MDGs, the better coordination of such contributions, effective relationships with government and voluntary organisations worldwide, and maintaining a keen motivation across the communion to combat scourges of disease.
He said he hoped the conference would give Anglicans a "shared vision and a shared energy" for aid and development, adding that aid and development concerns had produced a common understanding across the Anglican Communion, despite sizeable fissures in some areas: "One of the remarkable things is the willingness of people to work together towards addressing development goals as a sort of basic Christian imperative, even when there is tension or disagreement in other areas."
He said that this willingness was a key motive in launching Anglicans in Development, a web-based resource from Lambeth Palace and the Anglican Communion Office to support church-based programmes in delivering better education, poverty reduction and peace building to local communities in the developing world.
"We do have serious disagreements on some areas of ethics and doctrine, but the fact remains that we're all called by the same Jesus Christ to the same mission in the world, to the mission of reconciliation, mission of justice, mission of caring, and it would be a very grim reflection on our life as a Christian community if we had to put all that on hold while we sorted out other things," he said.
