ABSTRACT
The society was the means through which Conference administered the Overseas Districts, and the channel through which the social concerns of Methodists abroad were communicated; but those concerns were widely shared. The Barbados and Trinidad District ruefully reported in 1964 that 'when the results of a recent Roman Catholic raffle were announced, the winner of the first prize was a leading Methodist layman'. The sheer scale of human need, the ever-widening gulf between the incomes of the richest and the poorest, and a succession of disasters, 'natural' and 'manmade' given publicity as never before by the ability of television journalists to speed images into every British household aroused the Methodist conscience. Because work for economic and social justice and development were widely seen as integral to God's mission, many Methodists found the structural division between 'mission' and 'development' unhelpful and confusing. Mission was understood to be holistic Douglas Thompson, in the 1930s, used the expression 'life-inclusive'.
