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WHY THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND CANNOT SURVIVE AS AN ESTABLISHED CHURCH MUCH LONGER

WHY THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND CANNOT SURVIVE AS AN ESTABLISHED CHURCH FOR MUCH LONGER

By Roland W. Morant
Special to Virtueonline
April 4, 2010

Disestablishment for the Church of England is a topic that periodically and regularly comes up for discussion in the mass media. So I make no apologies for focussing on it now. For reasons I shall make clear in the following paragraphs, the subject is one that deserves airing, and this is what I shall now do.

I do not want to rehearse all the arguments in favour of disestablishment that have been used in the past. But I do want to single out two that seem particularly relevant just now.

The first of these involves the money that is presently given by faithful churchmen and churchwomen to support their parish priests. In earlier times and indeed until quite recently, the cost of providing stipends (and pensions) for nearly all the clergy - bishops, priests and deacons - was born by the Church Commissioners (and before them the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and Queen Anne's Bounty) who invested the money that had been given largely as endowments by previous generations of church people. It could be argued quite convincingly that it was right and proper for such endowments to be used for providing a pastoral service to all people living in a parish, were they members of the Church of England or not, or even whether they were Christians or not.

Since the sixteenth century the Church of England has been "by law established" and therefore has had a pastoral responsibility to all people, most obviously in baptising, marrying and burying parishioners. It is a responsibility that has been held tenaciously by C. of E. leaders as it is today.

Because of inflation which has drastically reduced the value of these endowments and because of several recent rash investment strategies, the combined effect over the last thirty or forty years has been to reduce severely the income that has been available for supporting the stipendiary clergy. At the present time of writing, only the stipends and pensions of bishops are paid for by the Church Commissioners from the money accruing from these historic investments.

The other clergy, i.e. the priests and deacons, now have to be supported financially (via the "quota") by the money given by people attending their churches Sunday by Sunday. And herein lies a profound difficulty. We call to mind a well-known saying: "He who pays the piper, calls the tune". We have to ask how long faithful laymen and women will be prepared to bankroll an antiquated system in which some (perhaps much) of the time and energy of stipendiary clergy is used to provide pastoral services to people many of whom have no interest whatever in what the Church is proclaiming.

At face value it might sound an admirable purpose for the Church to continue to provide these "establishment" services for all the non-churched people who live in this country. After all, the command of our Lord - "Go ye into all the world and preach the good news to all creation" - still holds good and cannot be ignored. But there are times when in order to win the final battle, a tactical withdrawal becomes necessary, and this is certainly one of those occasions.

Here then is the reality of the present situation: Whether the church leadership like it or not, many active members of the Church will become increasingly unwilling to permit their hardly-earned donations to be given as quotas to be used for purposes that they regard as inappropriate. Leaving aside all the greater issues involving the British constitution with which the established church is inexorably bound, it is inevitable that at some point in the near - not the distant - future, the members of General Synod will be forced to bite the bullet and withdraw the Church's pastoral services in their present form that have been - and technically are still - available for the whole population in England.

This brings us to a second valid reason, linked to the first, why the Church of England cannot remain established as it has done in the past. And this is concerned with the deployment of stipendiary priests in the parishes. Until very recently - certainly until the ninety seventies - it was normal for most parishes to have their own resident rector or vicar, a practice with which many older readers here will be familiar.

But this practice no longer holds good. In many rural areas of England, parishes are often linked into groups of six or more, where the total population of each group on average cannot be more than a couple of thousand souls at most. There is no way that the full-time parson in grouped rural parishes of this type in England, requiring an annual financial outlay of perhaps £30,000 (if we include salary, pension contributions, parochial expenses and parsonage dilapidations), can be permitted to operate, as if the present policy of aggregating small parishes together provides the solution.

In his recent book "Last Rites: The End of the Church of England", Michael Hampson pointed out that the Church had in effect drastically subsidised these rural parishes by providing them with full-time stipendiary clergy, rather than deploy such clergy to places where they could exercise their ministries to much greater effect, for instance the burgeoning suburban areas round towns. The hitherto wasteful use of stipendiary clergy like this, we might well say, is a luxury in which the Church cannot continue to indulge.

Support for the Church of England generally is draining away except in a relatively few go-ahead progressive - mainly evangelical - parishes, and mass closure of many rural churches - let alone town centre ones - seems inevitable over the next few years. With the best will in the world it may indeed be impossible for the diminishing faithful few not only to dig down deeper in their pockets to find larger sums of money to fund their priests, but also to maintain their churches often attended by half a dozen or fewer worshippers. Active givers in the pews are known to resent being asked to give more and more, and yet see their priests less and less with maybe one service in church per month (if they are lucky).

The established church was founded and operated for several centuries on the principle that there was a resident vicar or rector in each parish who was available to minister to all his parishioners. Clearly this system is breaking down and should be ended forthwith. For the Church to survive in any remotely recognisable form, it needs to adopt new strategies for winning souls to Christ in a multicultural England. The longer it fails to act resolutely, the more its established status will appear to be a bygone irrelevance and the less impact it will have on people's lives.

---Roland W. Morant is a cradle Anglican who has spent his professional life as a teacher, and latterly as a principal lecturer in education in a college of higher education, training students as teachers and running in-service degree courses

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