reparations
The recent commitment of £100 million for slavery reparations is a significant and morally serious undertaking.
Project Spire, the plan to endow a new charity with £100 million of Church money as “slavery reparations” epitomises this futile thinking.
Of particular concern, are proposals involving large-scale financial commitments for apparent historical slavery-related reparations.
There are a number of familiar and very sensitive ‘hot potato’ topics (not least around marriage and sexuality) and news stories that grab the headlines from time to time (including safeguarding, climate change, and slave trade reparations), and yet I remain convinced that the CofE still has a precious and unique place in our society.
If you don’t think the church of England is still institutionally racist, then you should listen to the objections to Project Spire that come up in every Synod question session (Project Spire is a charity set up by the church of England to put £100 million towards reparations for chattel slavery).
Project Spire - £100 million or more for reparations?
Project Spire is a well-intended but unworkable initiative to make reparations for the slave trade.
I am opposed to Project Spire (the proposal to spend £100 million on ‘slavery reparations’) when we cannot even fund parish ministry – and it gives the impression to outsiders that the Church is awash with money, so why should they help us pay for a leaking roof?
In addition to this, as part of the lay awkward squad, I have been involved closely in additional and intensive private discussions and negotiations with churchycrats ( a word, which I invented ), parliamentarians and regulators on: Getting central Church and diocesan funds redirected towards the parish; cranking up the recruitment, retention and redeployment of clergy and thereby addressing the chronic dearth of vicars; stopping in its tracks a dangerous centralisation of Church governance and control of funding; achieving diocesan structural reform ( there are too many dioceses and their overheads are roughly twice what they should be ); helping to influence the Diocese of Salisbury in some of its decision making; attempting to save two churches in Southampton, which were threatened with closure under the Mission and Pastoral Measure; undoing the ruinous policy of trying to achieve net zero by 2030; and dismantling Project Spire, the Church Commissioners’s endeavour to pay slavery reparations of £ 100 million, whereas such funds should be redirected towards parishes.
The paper substantially debunked the Church Commissioners’s historical case, which underpins Project Spire and their proposed payment of £ 100 million in slavery reparations.
Finally, during the last quinquennium, I asked a total of twenty-one written questions at General Synod ( the equivalent of Parliamentary Questions ) on the following subjects: The folly of closing the churches at the beginning of lockdown; the imbalance of power and resources between diocese and parish when a church is threatened with closure under the existing and proposed Mission and Pastoral Measure ( in parallel, I sat on the Reference Group for the revised Mission and Pastoral Measure ); the eye-wateringly high staffing and refurbishment costs of Lambeth Palace; the paucity of spending on training of new ordinands; the amount of time wasted by bishops in the House of Lords; the ruinous cost and lunacy of trying to achieve net zero by 2030 and the burden, which this places on parishes; the fact that so few dioceses use Total Return Accounting ( thereby increasing the financial burden on parishes of parish share ); the non-validity of the Church’s Vision and Strategy ( it was never voted for by General Synod and yet it is depriving principally rural parishes of vicars and stipendiary boots on the ground ); what percentage of the Church Commissioners’ total assets come from parochial endowments, which were seized in 1976 ( for the first time, the written answer to this question established that it is 19% ); concerns about increasing centralisation of Church governance and control of funding; how significant amounts of money are being diverted away from the parish in order to finance episcopal vanity projects; and seven questions about Project Spire and slavery reparations.
In addition to these, I orchestrated, and arranged for, a number of fellow members of General Synod to ask a further thirteen written questions, which related to Project Spire and slavery reparations.
I am also frustrated that GS hasn’t had the chance to debate and vote on Project Spire (so-called slavery reparations) which is proving a massive and avoidable own goal.
The careful study of scripture and prayerful consideration will need to underpin all that General Synod has to consider be that Safeguarding, Racial Justice, Reparations, Climate Change or any of the many other matters that are likely to come before it in the next quinquennium.
Furthermore, I am committed to the support of Project Spire, which represents the delivery of social justice in paying slavery reparations to those whose persecution selfishly and wrongly benefitted the Church.
We have no financial means with which to make reparations (nor to fix the hole in our tower!) but it is more important that we choose to act with integrity and transparency at all levels of our decision making now.