Plans to divert £5.5 million from Church of England cathedrals and bishops into mission work were postponed indefinitely today by the General Synod after a series of attacks by senior clergymen.
The Synod, gathering in central London, voted to adjourn a debate on a report on the future use of church commissioners’ funds, which includes proposals for a £5 million cut from support of bishops and a £500,000 switch of funds from richer cathedrals.
The money would be used to contribute towards a new £9 million six-year new mission development scheme to help the Church of England reach non-believers.
Under the proposals, Church of England dioceses would make up the shortfall in the bishops funding in a manner which least affected the poorest areas.
First Church Estates commissioner Andreas Whittam Smith said major changes were necessary and the Church of England needed a “jump start” in order to halt declining attendance.
“Aggregate church attendance continues to decline, as the figures released last month prove yet again,” he told the Synod.
“One estimate of what this will mean on present trends which we quote in our report, foresees a total membership of 500,000 in 25 years time and I quote ’the Anglicans of 2030 existing in a myriad of tiny congregations, struggling to maintain their buildings in a thinly-spread church crushed by the weight of its own heritage’.
“Not a pretty picture. That is why a jump-start is called for.”
But the plans were attacked by the Bishop of St Albans, Rt Rev Christopher Herbert, as “clumsy and inept” as well as “brutal”.
He said the report treated bishops with “disdain”.
“To have to justify ourselves in public is a degrading and humiliating exercise, it is brutality with a smirk,” he told the Synod.
“It is brutality because it seems to want to set one part of the church against another, cathedrals against parishes, bishops against cathedrals, the centre against the local.
“There seems to be very little aspect of Christian solidarity at its heart and very little sense of mutual reciprocity.”
Sir Patrick Cormack, a member of the General Synod, opposing the plans, said the Church of England cathedrals were a “real symbol of mission”.
He told the Synod: “Depleting resources of the cathedrals which in every dioceses are a beacon, not only the mother church of the diocese, but places to which people look for inspiration, where services are by and large beautifully conducted every day, where people go with school parties and others to learn the story of Christianity and Christendom in this country – to deplete the resources of the cathedrals is a counsel of despair in an affluent age.”
Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, also questioned the effect of the proposals upon the church.
He said the report was “very, very challenging” and had been very carefully sought out.
But he said the plans as they stood could “subvert” the very goals they intended to fulfil – by destabilising effective existing local initiatives.
The report was defended by Michael Chamberlain, an appointed member of the Archbishop’s council.
He said: “The one thing the report does say is that if there is a reallocation of money then less well-resourced dioceses and cathedrals will be protected. We are not talking about a blanket reduction.”