It is reasonably well known that William Wilberforce campaigned for many years to end slavery in England. What is less known is the story of the community of friends that shared his struggles and his evangelical Christian faith. That is the story which Stephen Tomkins tells in his book The Clapham Sect: How Wilberforce’s Circle Transformed Britain. The friends included John Newton the author of “Amazing Grace”, John Thornton one of the richest businessmen in England, Hannah More a famous writer, Henry Thornton a famous banker and economist, and a number of other notable people.

Although Wilberforce and his friends never formed a separate church or religious group, they were pejoratively referred to some years after Wilberforce’s death as the “Clapham Sect”, and that name has persisted. As well as taking the lead in the anti-slavery fight, they were deeply involved in the colonisation of Sierra Leone as a new home for freed slaves. This turned out to be a highly unsuccessful social experiment. They were also involved in various campaigns to combat immorality and in the founding of the Church Missionary Society and various other missionary endeavours.

With the benefit of hindsight, many of the activities undertaken by Wilberforce and his friends can be regarded as mistaken; however in my view the author is a little too forceful in passing judgment on the moral views held by the members of the Clapham Sect. The story is an important one for Christians to be aware of, as it shows how a small group of sufficiently persistent Christians can create significant lasting differences in a whole country. I enjoyed reading the book, although I found some parts more engaging than others.

The “business-is-best” philosophy is powerful and seductive, but it is a dangerous mirage when applied to social change, according to Michael Edwards in his book Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World. To read my full review of the book, please visit my business blog.

This is the sixteenth in a series of posts discussing themes from The Trouble With Aid by Jonathan Glennie. In chapter 7 the book discusses the calls which have been made in the past five years for “more and better aid”. Most people and organisations in the aid trade recognise that there have been deficiencies with the ways in which aid has been handled in the past. Meetings of governments and civil society resulted in 2005 in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, outlining ways in which aid needed to improve.

The five principles of the Paris Declaration are: Ownership – developing countries need to decide their own policies; Alignment – donors should support national strategies, institutions and procedures; Harmonisation – donors need to work better together; Managing for results – monitoring, decision making and resource management need to be improved; and Mutual accountability – developing countries should be accountable to donors, but donors should also be accountable to recipients for meeting their promised commitments.

According to Glennie, most reviews of the Paris process say that it is not ambitious enough, not working fast enough, is more problematic than anticipated, and fails to take into account the critical importance of the accountability of governments to citizens in recipient countries. Donors have been largely ignoring the five principles, and in Glennie’s view the Paris Declaration entirely overlooks the most serious problems with aid, such as aid’s negative impact on policy choices and on the effectiveness and accountability of state institutions.

Dan Pallotta has posted some interesting observations about charitable giving on his Harvard Business Review blog. Dan says that charitable giving in the US has been approximately 2% of GDP since 1970, and many humanitarian organisations proceed on the assumption that the rate of American generosity is fixed. However, a significant minority of people give away 10% of their income or more, suggesting that the overall amount of giving could be higher if the rest of the population could be persuaded to become equally generous.

According to an international comparison published by the Charities Aid Foundation in 2006, Australians gave 0.69% of GDP in charitable donations, compared with 1.67% for Americans and 0.14% for French people. Perhaps there is less felt need for charity in countries which have more extensive social security provided by the Government. According to Dan’s figures, religious Americans donated 3.5 times as much to charities overall, not just to religious institutions.

All of these facts lead to Dan’s assertion that charitable organisations need to invest a higher proportion of their funds in marketing in order to generate more income. This is obviously difficult advice to follow because of the popular perception that it is not ethical for such organisations to use donors’ funds for marketing. I wonder, though, whether something other than marketing may be a primary trigger for people’s generosity.

Accused genocidaire Omar al-Bashir, who is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, was welcomed to Kenya last Friday, in contravention of Kenya’s obligation to arrest him. Dignitaries from a number of different countries were invited to witness the signing into effect of Kenya’s new constitution, and the welcome shown to al-Bashir seems to send a clear signal that people in power in Kenya intend to continue to regard themselves as being above the law.

The International Criminal Court is currently investigating a number of crimes that were committed in Kenya in 2008 in the wake of disputed elections. After Kenya’s parliament prevaricated for more than a year over how those responsible for perpetrating the crimes were to be tried, or whether they were to be held to account at all, responsibility for conducting the trials was handed over to the International Criminal Court.

It has been speculated that Kenya’s leadership as a whole does not want anyone to be held accountable for the post-election atrocities. There has been a long history of immunity with senior political figures not being held accountable for embezzlement, murder or any other types of crimes. The latest incident with al-Bashir suggests that the forthcoming International Criminal Court proceedings will not be met with co-operation.

On this day 175 years ago, a group of people from the schooner Enterprize disembarked near the mouth of the Yarra River to start a settlement. The Enterprize was owned by John Pascoe Fawkner, a Tasmania publican who was the son of a convict and had himself spent some time in jail. Fawkner did not arrive until two months after the settlement began because he was detained in Launceston because of seasickness and money owed to creditors.

The new settlement was known as Bearbrass, which is thought to have been a mispronunciation of the aboriginal name Birrarung. Fawkner’s party was joined by a rival group of settlers financed by John Batman, who had previously “purchased” 600,000 acres of land from the Aboriginals in exchange for a range of trinkets. Batman’s group included William Buckley, who had escaped from a convict settlement at Sorrento some 32 years previously then lived with a group of Aboriginal people who mistook him for a recently deceased relative returned from the dead.

The settlement of Bearbrass was renamed Melbourne two years later, in honour of the then British Prime Minister, the Viscount Melbourne. After another ten years, Queen Victoria issued letters patent declaring Melbourne to be a city, and four years after that, in the same year that the gold rush commenced, the colony of Victoria became a separate colony from that of New South Wales. Three decades later, the city was the richest in the world and the second largest in the British Empire.

In the fourteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says: “If lifeless things which make sounds, such as pipes or harps, do not produce distinct sounds, how would anyone know what music is being played? If the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare for war? Likewise, unless you speak words which are easy to understand, how will people know what you are saying? You would be talking into space.”

Paul specifically encourages people not to speak in tongues in church unless someone interprets the message, so that the listeners will understand clearly what is being said. Most contemporary Western churches do not have big problems with too many people speaking in tongues, but many of them do have problems because of a failure to communicate the gospel message clearly, instead producing uncertain, indistinct sounds.

In order to help people understand how the gospel message relates to their everyday lives, it is helpful to refer to elements of contemporary culture. However, in many churches the gospel message gets squeezed out as a result of the desire to be seen as relevant or to avoid offending anyone, or because the church becomes ritualised so that ceremonies are performed but the meaning is lost.

Our daily encounters with others are the arenas in which our relationship with God becomes incarnate, and most of us need a little help in this area, according to James Bryan Smith in his book The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love. The book attempts to offer ways in which followers of Jesus can have healthy relationships and become blessings to the world around them.

As the King James Bible asserts, Christians are a “peculiar” people, or at least they should be. They should obey earthly laws but live by higher laws. They should be living lives that are so winsome that others want to have what they have. They should live in a hopeful, serving, Christ-centred, reconciling, encouraging, generous, worshipping community. To help readers work towards this, the author provides soul training exercises at the end of each chapter.

I tend to regard spiritual disciplines are something that is good for me, rather than something I find exciting. Nonetheless as I read the book I found myself resonating with and attracted to the “good and beautiful community” that the author portrays. The soul training exercises may not suit the theological inclinations of all readers, but the essential characteristics of the Christian community that the book describes are compelling.

In the past 60 years, many Asian countries have defied economic logic and ascended to the forefront of the global economy. Business correspondent Michael Schuman gives his explanation for this in his book The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth. To read my full review of the book, please visit my business blog.

This is the fifteenth in a series of posts discussing themes from The Trouble With Aid by Jonathan Glennie. In chapter 7 the book speculates on the future of aid. The author says that, as the rest of the book has demonstrated, aid has had a series of profound and often unforeseen consequences in Africa. Not enough people have taken these problems into consideration in their analyses, and this needs to change.

The author suggests that once the full range of effects of aid are taken into account, more people will agree that it is time to begin reducing aid to most countries in Africa while at the same time starting to fund development from other sources. The impacts of aid that really matter, the ones linked to policy choices and institutions, are, according to the author, unlikely to improve with more aid and will probably get worse.

While the book’s pessimistic outlook seems reasonable based on historical data, it does not seem to account for the more recent success of African economies. Aid to many African countries has been increasing over the past decade, and if the author’s analysis is correct this should have resulted in the economies of those countries going backwards. Instead, most African countries have been experiencing moderate levels of economic growth since 2000. In my view this growth is probably attributable not to aid but to the introduction of new technologies, particularly mobile phones, in a manner affordable to Africans.