There is a reason that the SJW infest state churches. It is not that they want to subvert the gospel (though they do). It is because they have a secure salary for which they have limited accountability. In particular, they do not have any accountability to the few believers left.
To be fair to the church, it has to walk a difficult tightrope between sweating its assets and providing reasonably priced housing for its parishioners. And it has to pay its employees and their pensions out of its own portfolio. Few vicars can rely on the collection plate alone to pay a living wage.
The Church Commissioners managed to pay vicars’ stipends out of income until the early 1990s, when they made a series of disastrous property deals. In 1992, they lost £800 million of their £3 billion port-folio. They had taken out vast borrowings to finance speculative property developments. Those borrowings rose from £4.7 million in 1987 to £518 million in 1990 as interest rates soared. For the first time in history, the Commissioners’ expenditure on vicars’ stipends and pensions exceeded their portfolio income. The church took another hit in the 2008 financial crash and these losses meant they had to raise the retirement age for the clergy.
Over the past decade, though, as property and equities have soared in value, the Church of England’s bank balance has swollen again. In 2014, it sold its share of the Pollen Estate in Mayfair — land around Savile Row and Cork Street that the church had owned for centuries — for £381 million.Today, it has nearly £8 billion in assets. It runs 4,700 schools and owns 16,000 churches in England, along with tracts of land in cathedral cities such as Canterbury, Ely, Peterborough and York. In 2014, it bought 50 acres in Peterborough, 121 acres in Carlisle, 765 acres in Kent and 17,000 acres of forests in Wales and Scotland. Its tentacles spread abroad, too: in 2014, the church bought retail and residential land in Michigan and California, 27,000 acres of forest in Virginia, and land for sandalwood plantations in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Harry Mount
The same thing applies to the mainline Protestant churches — those initially established within the 13 colonies that rebelled — in the USA. They care more about the property than the parishioners, so when the parishioners revolt they want to keep the land.
They can always sell it.
In doing so, they demonstrate the third stage of David Burge: they have killed the church, gutted it… and now wear its authority as a skin suit. But such will not be part of the Church Invisible, against which the gates of Hell will fall.
And for the remnant of faithful within the Anglicans, may they grow, and may they remove these false prelates, so that their branch is connected to the living vine, which is Christ.
For the clerical SJWs want the fate of the Shakers and Unitarians. They want the church silenced. Provided they get paid.
The old church buildings are a blessing of beauty and grace.
HOWEVER my church got its start in a house, then moved up to a slot in a strip-mall, then mortgaged up to the eyeballs to build the place it’s in now. Which is ugly – but used every day of the week. And we have a large staff, who get paychecks, not just one pastor. (I am pretty sure the mort is paid off).
Mystery how that works, without a denomination footing the bills… -cough-cough- Y’think it’s preachin’ the Word? Nah, too easy.
My church also started in a house (before I attended) and has progressed through a couple of halls and now uses a very nice Anglican chapel within a school. At this point there appears a view that the “borrowed” arrangements are both flexible and practical while avoiding a layer of complication or distraction that property ownership would bring about.
An example of the danger of assets is the the big issue within Anglicanism as the divide between liberals and conservatives appears likely to see the liberals with the property. That it will be generally empty property doesn’t alter the facts about who will have the assets. The conservatives will have the Gospel which surpasses anything else but I suspect it still annoys some that what they worked to provide and maintain will be pinched by those who care little for God’s word.
Yes, that’s what’s happened here to the Episcopalian churches. The conservative crowd lost their buildings when they converted their allegiance to the African Anglican church instead of EULA. I believe that our old church-in-the-mall spot is used by an Anglican congregation, as a matter of fact!