Moral message should perhaps include money The BIG idea Justin Welby: Archbishop of Canterbury. Jesus kicked the money men out of the temple, and now the Archbishop of Canterbury wants to bring them back. He wants credit unions to work out of church buildings with the help of church volunteers. For divine inspiration on how to put his organisation in the public eye on a social justice issue of contemporary relevance, Sydney's new Anglican archbishop, Glenn Davies, might look to his Canterbury counterpart, Justin Welby. Four months into the job, Welby (below) has set the financial pages ablaze by taking on the "payday lenders" who charge desperate people astronomical rates (such as 5000 per cent annually) for loans. The archbishop told Total Politics magazine he had confronted the head of one such moneylender, Wonga, saying: "We're not in the business of trying to legislate you out of business; we're trying to compete you out of business." Welby is a former oil company executive who is a member of the British House of Lords and sits on its Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. He reportedly came up with the credit union idea after being struck, when working in struggling communities, by how hard it is for people in poverty to access the kind of financial institutions that can help them. The Financial Times quickly discovered the Anglican Church in Britain had indirectly invested £75,000 ($128,000) of its pension fund in Wonga via a US venture capital firm. Welby said he was irritated and embarrassed by the revelation: "We have to find out why and make sure it doesn't happen again." According to Newsweek: "The unusual combination of moral authority and executive experience makes him a formidable figure." One critic lambasted him for "kumbaya capitalism," but he was also likened to Richard Branson for entrepreneurship. Davies, the former maths teacher and Bishop of North Sydney who has just been elected to succeed Peter Jensen as Archbishop of Sydney, has nominated lobbying the government for more humane asylum-seeker policies as an early focus for his attention. He says his is not a "fuddy-duddy church" and one of its challenges is to "allow people to realise that we actually have a message which is worth hearing."