Small-scale

What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realisation, fulfillment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.

E.F. Schumacher

Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

A tiny difference

Amidst the vast scene of the world's problems and tragedies you may feel that your own ministry seems so small, so insignificant, so concerned with the trivial. What a tiny difference it can make to the world that you should run a youth club, or preach to a few people in a church, or visit families with seemingly small result. But consider: the glory of Christianity is its claim that small things really matter and that the small company, the very few, the one man, the one woman, the one child are of infinite worth to God. Consider our Lord himself. Amidst a vast world with its vast empires and vast events and tragedies our Lord devoted himself to individual men and women, often giving hours and time to the very few or to the one man or woman.

Michael Ramsey

The Christian Priest Today

Bigger isn't better

Bigger is better, so we hear.  We live in a world that wants things larger and larger.  We want to supersize our fries, sodas, SUVs and church buildings.  Cities build bigger stadiums and conventions want to draw the biggest crowds.  Amid all the supersizing, I want to make a modest suggestion:  our goal should be not to get larger and larger but to get smaller and smaller.  I think of the kingdom of God as bubbling up from the bottom rather than trickling down from the top.  Contrary to the pattern of the world, it is like a mustard seed.  To enter it, we must become like a little child.  God is indeed taking over the world, but it is happening through little acts of love.

Shane ClaiborneThe Irresistible Revolution

Trees

I'm no tree-hugger. I'm a tree-leaner, and a tree-sitter, and a tree-seeker.... The trees do not speak to me. But I am pleased to take their shelter, pleased when they reinforce my smallness, pleased when they give me separation from the everyday static jamming my head.

Michael Perry
Population: 485