Archbishop Williams Encourages Christian Aid on 60th Anniversary Service

Christian Aid, an agency of churches in the UK and Ireland, celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. Inspired by the dream of a new earth where all people can secure a better and more just future, Christian Aid’s sustaining contribution to the UK and the world has been recognised by Christian leaders.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the 77-million strong Anglicans around the globe, spoke to over 2,000 Christian Aid supporters on the anniversary service at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Tuesday.

In the message, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams explained the Christian teaching of giving and that gratitude would be overflowing among the people who receive. He said, "We are commanded to act in this way so that God will become visible and people will give thanks. We are to live in covenanted trustworthiness and to share all we have so that others may be more free and more fully capable of joy in God."

World poverty and trade injustice are currently common challenges of all mankind. Christian Aid has placed itself in the frontline of the battle along with many other international aid agencies and world leaders through its active anti-poverty and trade justice campaigns. In response to this, Archbishop Williams claimed that a fundamental lack of trust is hampering the world's commitment to fighting poverty.

"... the scandal of our current global economy is not simply that it leaves children dying, that it leaves over a billion in extreme need. It is that it reinforces the assumption that trust is not possible and natural; it reinforces a picture of the world in which rivalry or mutual isolation are the obvious forms of behaviour. The rich protect their markets while talking about the virtues of free trade," Archbishop Williams said.

"Do we want to live in a world where trust seems natural? That is the question we need to be looking at today, as believers and as citizens."

"Christians are committed to building a world in which trust and mutual exchange seem natural because what appears as the creative source of everything appears - through human action - as trustworthy and generous," the Archbishop said as he encouraged all Christians to take responsibility in changing the world through their generous offering to others.

"The Church exists so that all will learn to give thanks... therefore it exists so that the possibility of dependable and generous life will always be held up within the human world as something given and indestructible."

Even though Christian Aid is often perceived as a charity to provide aid to the poor, Archbishop Williams expects Christian Aid, as an agency of churches, to be always inspired in the Christian faith and to lead others in giving generously and abundantly to the world. In his opinion Christian Aid should be more than a convenient problem-solver.

"We are not just solving problems but reshaping a whole world of feeling and perceiving - 'not only supplying the needs of God's people, but also overflowing in many expressions of thanks to God'."

"Christian Aid has an impressive history of urging that community to act as if it meant what it said and did in its ritual. The gospel that motivates Christian Aid is the good news that God has shown himself faithful and unreservedly generous."

"We must pray that at least the next sixty years of this body will continue to prod and irritate and inspire all of the churches to work with growing urgency for a joyful world, a world overflowing in expressions of thanks to God. Our hope is the glory of new creation, after all - not justice alone but justice that is constantly being revitalised by the grateful longing to share and to give to others the freedom to give. That is how God has treated us; that is how we are to relate to each other. The bread of God is in our hands; it is given to be broken for the world," Archbishop Williams concluded.