If generous amounts of
financial support were allocated to help fledgling pastoral ministries, and — bearing in mind that
financial resources, while
necessary, are neither the
only nor the most important means at the Church's disposal — if these issues really and truly became the focus of our petitionary prayers, I believe that many congregations would be overflowing rather than dwindling.
In particular, there is little reason to believe that technological and
financial support of the
necessary scale will be delivered by a regime that sees
only the countries that inhabit Annex I (a far from perfect rendering of world's high - responsibility and high - capacity nations) as having quantified commitments, and the rest of the world as a mere source of «offsets» designed to reduce the cost of meeting those commitments.