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Today I am imagining officials from a dozen different nations waking up in Washington DC, queuing to negotiate with anyone who might have access within the Trump administration. And meanwhile the list of global market losses grows.

What does this mean, for any of us – what should we do, and what can we?

In his 18th century sermon on ‘the use of money,’ John Wesley advised people to ‘…Gain all you can, save all you can, and then to give all you can.’ He could not have imagined the complexity of global finance or trade policy today, but he was in favour of profitable business and even of paying ‘lawful custom’, that is tariffs to the Crown. He thought money could be used for a just society, so profitable trade could be ‘…a defence to the oppressed and means of health to the sick.’

Wesley died in 1791, but his teaching about the right use of money suited an expanding Empire that wanted to think of itself as moral, and an entrepreneurial, expanding Church. Many Methodists profited individually even as Methodism planted schools and hospitals alongside churches across the globe.

But saying ‘gain all you can,’ Wesley excluded any business that caused harm – he was specific in his examples – do not make profit from a worker having to breathe toxic fumes, or by undercutting a market price to ruin a competitor.
By ‘save all you can,’ Wesley meant living very simply – he actually told parents to disinherit children who would ‘throw it away’ on fancy living.
And by ‘give all you can,’ Wesley didn’t mean ‘…give to charity what you can afford.’ For him all meant all – both what I keep and what I give away is meant to serve God’s purpose.

One consequence of contemporary globalisation is that I have become much more dependent on production done wherever labour is cheapest. Meanwhile the effects on those who do the labour are much less visible to me. How does my ‘earning, saving, and giving’ impact on the lives of those who have picked the food I eat or made the clothes I buy, for good or ill? Unless I go out of my way to find out, I may never know. And yes, market volatility will affect us both, though almost certainly not equally.

Perhaps now is a moment not just to look for ‘shelter from the storm,’ but to offer it: and to lean again into the Wesleyan notion of earning, saving and using money wisely – if not because we are moral, then because we do want our children to inherit. Money maybe, but a safer more stable and more peaceful world for certain.

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