Pennies for Heaven

It's nearly always a mistake to understand religious disputes theologically. The Church of England has lived for centuries with huge theological disagreement. To that extent the liberals are entirely right to be bewildered by the zeal for schism among the Foca types who have always thought they were surrounded by heretics. What the church has always been up till now, however, is tolerant and solvent. It is the threat to solvency which threatens tolerance. In the last 30 years, the church has turned from an organization largely funded by dead Christians to one funded almost entirely by live churchgoers; looking at the age profile, one is tempted to rewrite that sentence as "funded by churchgoers almost entirely alive".

About a third of church-going Anglicans are over 65 and this proportion has been steadily increasing in the last 30 years – in 1979, it was less than a fifth. During this time, the number of retired clergy, and their cost, has also risen; at one stage, in the early 90s, the Church Commissioners, who manage a considerable fortune, lost around £800m in property speculation that was meant to cover the increasing cost of pensions. The consequence was a reorganization which meant that the greater part of their assets were devoted to paying pensions, and the costs of running the church and paying clergy salaries, was to be raised from the collection plate.

Not a lot would be needed to do this, but the way that the money is raised makes it seem like a tremendous imposition. Individual churches are "taxed" by their dioceses to pay into a central pool, from which salaries are paid out to all the churches in the diocese. The dioceses in turn have to pay for the central administration of the church, including the synod that meets in York this weekend. The consequence is that people don't feel they are giving to their own church, but to some remote central bureaucracy and for the most part they just don't give. Only five or six of the 43 dioceses in England are actual net contributors to central funds.

This wouldn't matter too much if it were merely the case that there were salaries to pay. But the church is also lumbered with a gigantic stock of old and sometimes wonderful buildings which cost a fortune in upkeep and which are seldom what anyone now would choose to worship in. Jesus said nothing about central heating, but even traditionalists now consider it a central part of their faith.

The consequence is that people who go to church find themselves asked not just to pay for their own priest, and their own church, which they might be very willing to do. They are also expected to pay for those heretics down the road, and for their church too. Especially among evangelicals, who believe (without much evidence) that all their churches are growing and all the liberals are dying off, this is a powerful argument for the evils of heresy. Why, they ask - sometimes out loud - should they have to subsidize the very people who are dragging the church down? This is a really hard question, but without a convincing clear answer, the Church of England is doomed.

It was the discovery that the payment to diocesan funds - the Quota - could be withheld without consequences that really got going the movement which has become Foca in this country. The challenge for the central church authorities is somehow to find a way to fund the church's clergy and its buildings which seems fair to everyone. This may seem arcane nonsense to secularists. But the Church of England is of value to the outside world entirely because it doesn't just consists of evangelical zealots.

I would urge all cultural Christians, the ones who want the church around without actually believing or attending, to look for the most boring church they can find and drop a fiver a week in the collection plate. You won't have to stay for the service or anything, but you can be confident that you are supporting the right sort of religion, and exasperating the more exciting kinds.