Methodism & Poverty

When I first saw the headline, "Methodism Needed in Madness of Poverty," my first thought was that this was a creative translation from a foreign news source. Foreign it is - The Globe and Mailis a Canadian paper - but it really is talking about Methodism, or at least John Wesley's teaching on money. Based on a World Bank report on poverty, the article suggest Welsey's admonition to "Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can" as a much neglected solution to world poverty. Noting the apparent failure of many years of country to country assistance (too often siphoned off to the overseas accounts of the country's elites), economic reform that allows the hard work of the poor to be productive for them - and not just for the bottom line of Western companies that thrive on their low costs - would be a good, and Methodist, solution to world poverty.