Being connected to the battle against poverty involves touching, smelling, being closer. Photo: Reuters/Kamal Kishore

“Never tire of doing what is right,” urges Paul in 2 Thessalonians, but how can we not tire of battling the enormous, amorphous, problem of global poverty?

I know I was most energized to battle poverty when I saw, touched, and smelled it in Dinajpur, Bangladesh. I was sent alone on this trip-one flight and a good day’s drive from my office in the capital-to visit a community suffering from seasonal food shortages. I stepped out of my air-conditioned van and immediately, a crowd of about 40 men and women surrounded me. You could count the children’s ribs. The men were dark and bent from years in the fields. The women’s saris were torn and dirty. “Can you give us food?” they asked. “What will you do to help us?”

Two years have passed since that raw encounter, and whenever I hear about “global poverty” I crane my mind to see this moment again, on the muggy afternoon of May 8, 2006, when I felt connected to the men and women of that village. I glimpsed the depths of their suffering and wanted to help. This sense of connectedness was foreign, horrible, powerful.

We are over halfway to the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and we continue to struggle not only toward the eight specific targets, but against the deadening abstraction of “global poverty” that’s slowing down the rich from helping the poor. It’s built-up blasé from child sponsorship commercials, disaster relief drives, and a thousand distractions in our own backyards. Even those of us with motivating memories-of AIDS victims, street children, prisoners-find this fuel used up too soon.

Of course there are many practical ways to keep energized when doing good work: pick a cause (or MDG) to focus on, keep informed, and stay spiritually and physically healthy. But it’s impossible to go very far without needing some connected community to sustain you.

Many MDG campaigns have worked to create this kind of community, through strategies like “Make Poverty History” wristbands and rock concerts like Live 8. In the heat of these cultural moments, we feel connected with a worldwide family.

Anglicans have a unique resource for a motivating connectedness, and it’s our currently broken and bruised Anglican Communion. On its best days, this family ties us in solidarity to the joys and sorrows of people far away. It’s our own globalized web, one not dictated by corporations’ interests or aid obligations, but hopefully, in this postcolonial era, one sustained by our shared faith and tradition.

If we look up just slightly from the busyness of our local ministries, we see the richness of these global Anglican connections: companion diocese programs, theological student interns, study grants, longstanding development partnerships, international commis-sions and conferences.

At one of these recent conferences, Towards Effective Anglican Mission in South Africa, Professor Steve de Gruchy noted that our connection through globalization and the global church are irrefutable facts. Christians, however, should be working to transform both connections into something more life-giving.

There are a million ways that global Anglican ties are and can be life-giving. For one, they help us move past deadening abstraction. Uganda isn’t just another part of an AIDS-ravaged continent. Our churches pray for each other through the Anglican Cycle of Prayer, and a Canadian Anglican volunteer, Dr. Carolyn Langford, is teaching animal health in Kabwohe. And Taiwan isn’t just a name on a shirt label, but a diocese in a lively partnership with the Diocese of New Westminster.

How else can we use this gift of community to “do what is right” in the world? Can our connectedness in the Anglican Communion motivate us to achieve the MDGs out of solidarity? Can it give us a broader perspective, one that presents the MDGs as one step in our larger, more holistic mission to share the liberating gospel? And what can we do through the partnerships already in place?

I hope this relaunched MinistryMatters inspires you along these lines. Many of the articles speak to the richness of our global connectedness: Keith Knight writes about the longstanding work of The Primate’s Relief and Development Fund; Maylanne Maybee reflects on the theme of “mission” in two Communion conferences; and Archbishop Fred Hiltz, the Primate, shares his thoughts on recent MDGs marches, in Canada and England.

Any professional Western resource about the MDGs can often seem inadequate, since it’s removed from that powerful face-to-face contact with poverty. But we send this publication out knowing that after our words go so far, it is God who breathes life into dry bones, gives fuel to the burnt out, and ties us closer into life-giving, connected community.