Christians today were ‘blind’ to the spiritual dangers of wealth, according to Melburne’s Anglican Archbishop, Dr Philip Freier.
Scriptural teaching about wealth had been ‘totally attenuated’, making it our ‘greatest moral blindness’, he will tell Melbourne Synod today, Saturday 16 June, meeting at Dallas Brooks Hall, Victoria Parade, East Melbourne. All media welcome.
In his Presidential Address to the 850-member Synod, beginning at 9.30am, he will also call on Melbourne Anglicans to live more simply:
‘We have often allowed the seemingly all-powerful forces of consumerism, which constantly bite at our heels, to make us self-centred and too concerned with our own comfort and economic security.
‘Unless we say a clear and deliberate YES to a spirit of generosity, and to living life more simply, we will not resist these forces. Nor will we seek to confront them when they rob others of even the basics required for sustaining a simple life, let alone which allow for the possibilities of the flourishing of human potential – something we regard as sacrosanct in the West.
‘Let us admit with shame that half the world’s population – three billion people – is living on under two dollars (US) a day. The true costs of our self-indulgent lifestyles cannot be properly measured unless we consider their effects on the lives of those who have been forced into a new slavery in the two-thirds world.
Download the Archbishop's Synod Charge in full here (pdf)
‘Moreover, the true costs of our Western lifestyles cannot be properly considered unless we look at the impact on all of the rest of creation – the air, soil, plant and animal life. I challenge myself and each one of us to reflect on the daily consumer choices we make, and on how we are complicit in creating and supporting economic injustice which imprisons others in lives of suffering, and adds to pollution and global warming.’
Call to fasting and prayer
In response to global poverty, Archbishop Dr Freier will call Melbourne Anglicans to observe a day of fasting and prayer on Wednesday 4July.
‘The first week of July marks the halfway point for reaching the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015,’ he explains in his address.
Aggressive atheism ‘fundamentalist’
Commenting on recent attacks on Christianity, Archbishop Dr Freier said ‘aggressive atheism’, while an understandable response to the sort of religious fundamentalism which leads to intolerance and violence, could ‘exercise a fundamentalism of its own’. It failed to see that ‘at the heart of Christianity there is deep and abiding truth, love, peace and justice’.
He reminds Synod members that 2007 is the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, ‘brought about by the passion and courage and tireless efforts of Christians such as William Wilberforce and others’.
‘They demonstrated that when we become what Jesus calls us to be - salt and light - we have the power to transform both individual lives and the culture around us,’ he said.
Ends
Item from: The Anglican Church in Melbourne