The light shone by Earl Spencer, brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, on the financial threat to Britain’s historic churches is significant. But it is noteworthy that his article in the Financial Times did not mention the £100 million the Church of England aims to spend on slavery reparations, which could have been going on frontline parish ministry instead.
Historical author Earl Spencer wrote in the paper on August 25 that many UK churches are “struggling to survive, often with tiny congregations unable to contribute much to capital costs”.
The situation in Scotland is so “severe” that a third of the Church of Scotland’s churches were earmarked for closure in 2023, with matters made more difficult by the end of a Heritage Lottery Fund for churches in 2017 and the introduction of VAT on church repairs earlier this year, he observes.
Earl Spencer pointed out that “the Church of England’s finances are much better run than in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Church Commissioners lost about £800mn of its £2.2bn investment portfolio speculating in commercial property”, with its endowment fund increasing to £11.6bn this year.
“But the church has many causes to fund, beyond the fabric of its buildings - £150mn is earmarked for the Redress Scheme to compensate victims and survivors of Church-related abuse; £7.5mn is set aside for the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse; and £190mn will be invested in achieving net zero carbon by 2034,” Earl Spencer said.
“There seems never to be enough to sustain the fabric of all the churches that are in urgent need of repairs.”
He noted that while a new £23m Places of Worship Renewal Fund has been established by the government for the next four years, he believes that “well-meaning amateurs find the scheme hard to navigate on behalf of their churches”
“The fund will only support an estimated 100-150 listed places of worship a year, awarding grants of between £10,000 and £1mn. Capital works and minor repairs will be considered, but not discrete ongoing maintenance tasks or work on facilities (such as loos or kitchens),” he said.
He is right, but why he did not mention the Church Commissioners’ Project Spire scheme to pay out £100 million in slavery reparations to entrepreneurs and government agencies in Africa and the Caribbean is unclear. Was he reluctant to weigh into a controversial political argument?
The scheme is subject to a legal challenge and may not get the go-ahead from the Charity Commission for England and Wales, which may well deem that monies originally donated for the Church’s ministry should not be going on a different cause.
The press should be highlighting the need for transparency over the scheme. If Project Spire goes ahead, will the Church Commissioners make clear whether there are financial or personal links between any of its 27 board members and the beneficiaries of the funding?
Following Earl Spencer’s intervention, the cost of net zero to struggling local churches was highlighted in an article in the Sunday Times on August 30. Headlined “A flock of 20 and a hellish net zero bill”, the piece featured the Church of St Leonard’s, which has been serving the Fens village of Southoe, Cambridgeshire, for almost 1000 years.
The paper reported: “The Grade I listed St Leonard, Southoe, was reliant on an oil boiler for decades because, as in many rural areas, there is no gas in the village. Six years ago the system needed to be renewed and the idea was to replace it with a heat pump in line with the Church’s net-zero goal.”
But the whole project would have cost £500,000, which the congregation of 20 could not afford. Eventually St Leonard’s went for an electrical system with solar panels. Though it amounted to less than a quarter of a total bill of £400,000 to renovate St Leonard’s, this project still cost the small congregation many thousands of pounds.
Despite the Project Spire omission, Earl Spencer’s intervention is greatly beneficial in shining a light on the fact that the power-brokers of the established Church are prioritising fashionable Left-wing causes, such as net zero, over struggling local churches in the frontline of Christian ministry.
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
