Disgusted Of

'Never read the comments' is of course sound advice in almost any corner of the Internet (not here as all the comments are informative and kind). So I can't recall what led me to take note of some letter to the Telegraph lately in which a gentleman in where else but Tunbridge Wells opined in the following terms:

SIR – Although there are social and demographic reasons for the Church of England’s decline, a major contributory factor must be finance. The wasteful pursuit of woke causes by both the central Church and dioceses, as well as the unnecessarily large number of bishops, are putting huge burdens on the parishes. ... It is not clear to me why there are nearly twice as many now as there were 200 years ago, and four times as many bishops, while the number of parish clergy has fallen by three quarters.

As soon as anyone denounces 'woke causes' their views should very largely be put carefully to one side, but apart from that I bring this up only to mention that I don't recognise any of this picture. I'm not sure about the decline in numbers of parish clergy, but there are about 13,000 ordained people in current ministerial roles (as opposed to retired priests still doing stuff) and just over 100 bishops, which doesn't seem all that top-heavy a structure. And bishops don't really cost all that much either, certainly not enough for cutting their numbers by, say, half to make any material difference to the funding of the Church of England. I have questions as to what bishops do - at least ours, who we barely see from one year to the next - but there's little reason to think that their existence is pulling the rest of the structure down. I also struggle to think of a single 'woke cause' that might be imposing any burden on the parish of Swanvale Halt. Race, sexuality and gender identity - no, there's absolutely nothing that our diocese has demanded we campaign on or develop a position about. I think the hearing aid clinic run by Sally our Pastoral Assistant is the closest I can come up with. Special treatment for the hard of hearing? It's political correctness gone mad!

That's Full of Holes

Talking of money, it’s easy enough to be outraged by a report that ‘Rishi Sunak bought a £1.5M sculpture for his garden with public money’ which is what friends of mine were sharing the other day. As this relates to the museum/art world I was especially interested, and thought it would be very unlikely that any such purchase for the PM’s own garden would get through. What seems to have happened is that someone from The Sun saw Henry Moore’s Model for Seated Woman being carried into the front door of 10 Downing Street a few days ago. It’s quite impressive that a tabloid journalist might recognise a sculpture by Henry Moore, but if it’s for the Downing Street garden rather than Mr Sunak’s own personal home it will be the responsibility of the Government Art Collection, an organisation most people know nothing about: I knew it existed but had given it no special thought. The Moore was, as reported, definitely sold at Christie’s in October and the quoted price is roughly what it was expected to sell for. But did the GAC buy it?

The GAC is run by an advisory board consisting of leading art gallery directors who sit on it ex officio, curators and academics, and is chaired at the moment by Sir David Verey, a banker by trade with a long record of involvement in the arts world. It’s the curatorial staff of the GAC who draw up lists of items for acquisition, which the board then approve. The board members aren’t paid and no politicians sit on it, so there’s no obvious political influence on what the GAC does.

It's slightly unsatisfactory that up-to-date information on the GAC’s budget isn’t easily available, as the latest report on its website is only from 2018-19. But then, and in the year before (I have looked back no further than that) it spent some hundreds of thousands of pounds on a wide variety of artworks, the great majority by contemporary, living artists; the cheapest cost a couple of hundred pounds, the most expensive about £70K, and the average in the few thousands. Model for Seated Woman would have cost about four times the GAC’s usual annual spend on acquisitions, and it would be exceedingly unusual for it to buy a piece by one of the world’s most acclaimed and expensive (and dead) artists, rather than the relatively humble purchases it seems usually to make. It already owns a Henry Moore, albeit not a very spectacular one, which sits in the garden of the British Ambassador in Seoul and which it bought in 1965; and it therefore seems very unlikely that it’s added another, far pricier example, of its own choice or at the insistence of someone in Downing Street, even maybe the Prime Minister.

The official line is that the sculpture was not bought by the GAC, but has appeared in the no.10 garden as a result of ‘a longstanding charitable arrangement’. If accurate, that would suggest that the actual purchaser was a private individual who has then loaned the figure to the GAC for display as part of some tax scheme or something like that, meaning that neither public money nor political influence was involved. But of course Christie’s doesn’t reveal who the buyer was, and if the loan was made to set against tax, no official body can comment on it either: it could be Mr Sunak himself, though it's unlikely. That outrage-provoking headline clearly isn't true, but it hides a far more complex process which mingles public and private interest that few people pay any attention to.

Paying for the Right Things

The 5% rise in stipends planned by Guildford Diocese for its clergy was not something I asked for or even anticipated, but it made me remember that our own church staff here in Swanvale Halt – Sandra the office manager, Chloe the bookkeeper, and Debra the cleaner – should be considered too. Sandra and Cally languished for years on the same pay rate because we simply forgot to do anything about it, when we ought to have reviewed their salaries annually. Anyway, I worked out that raising all their wages by 5% (which is below the average rise at the moment) would only cost the church £600 over a year, and if it was controversial I could use my own rise to cover that.

When I proposed it at PCC, Grant the churchwarden was beside himself with rage, saying it was ‘disgusting’ that the clergy were ‘lining their own pockets’ when people were suffering. I rather limply tried to say that a) the Board of Finance had decided it, not the clergy, and b) what we were talking about was not me but our own church emlpoyees, but he didn’t think they should be ‘rewarded’ either. The rest of the PCC tried to be as objective as possible. I eventually said we weren’t going to reach a consensus so would have to have a vote. Grant was the only dissenting voice, and immediately packed his bag and left the meeting. It is the first time anything of this kind has ever happened here, and it’s a testament to the quality of this church that several PCC members tried to contact Grant the following day to check he was OK. He wasn’t really as he was already annoyed about various things before we started on pay, but he and I were corresponding about other matters before long.

Leaving aside the question of whether clergy should have their pay raised in hard times, I still think I was right regarding our employees. There are, I suppose, two models of justice here. The first is that many in society are suffering, so the Church (and that means those who work for it) should suffer in solidarity: it is those very people who pay its staff, after all. The other is that justice must start with those the Church has closest responsibility for, namely the people who work for it, and if it can’t treat them fairly it has no right at all to speak to the rest of the world. I see the force of the first, but I come down on the side of the latter. I don’t dismiss Grant’s anger, and have put the Director of Finance’s details in this week’s pew-sheet, in case anyone else wants to make their feelings known.

It has made me reflect on the nature of the parish ministry, though, its pay and status. I’ve wondered for a long time what priests are for. A traditionalist Catholic account would insist that sacraments require priests and that’s why you have them, which is true but doesn’t get you very far because it remains unclear why you should have a special caste of people who earn their living from priestly ministry rather than do it as part of a largely secular life (as many now do).

Instead I find myself thinking this way. All Christians are called, by virtue of their baptism, to carry on the mission of the Church: living the spiritual life, proclaiming the Gospel, and serving their brothers and sisters. That’s what we’re all supposed to do. But the Church has found from long experience that that is not what happens unless you positively set people apart who both structure their whole lives around doing those things, as opposed to fitting them into their secular existences, and, very importantly, promise that they will do so. The business of promising is at the centre of what the Church calls sacraments, the signs of our promises to God and his to us, so it makes sense for the person whose life is organised around the publicly-made promise to carry on the work of Christ also to preside at the other sacraments. And, lo and behold, you then have eucharistic communities with priests at their centre. Of course this is only the sketch of an argument it would take a book to fill out!

The Church of England has chosen that its priests should be ordinarily comfortable; not wealthy in the context of the society that surrounds them, but not, usually, having to worry about putting a meal on the table or paying their taxes. A hungry or anxious person finds it hard to pray beyond the basics. The typical benchmark is that the entire remunerative package of a parish incumbent – not just their stipend (at the moment mine is quite a bit below the average full-time UK salary), but their allowances, expenses and housing too – should be roughly on a par with that of the headteacher of a small primary school. I think that’s quite generous, truth be told, as I’m sure the headteacher of Swanvale Halt Infants works far harder than I do. But then a good chunk of my 'work' consists, externally speaking, of sitting with my eyes closed concentrating on the presence of an unseen being, and you just have to accept that or get rid of the whole thing. Perhaps you think a separate group of people should not live ‘ordinarily comfortable’ lives basically off the contributions of others, and I could not really argue against you except to point to the purpose of full-time clergy which can hardly be provided for any other way.

Neverthless, you have to guard against the self-serving materialism that can, and universally does, creep into Church structures. The Church of England, riddled as it is with the standards and understandings of the World, has been notoriously grasping at points in its history:

In the bare ‘30s, bankrupt farmers

Blew themselves from barnlofts

While you whinnied at the door for tithe.

Your bloodied hands slide around the chalice.

Again, when monasticism began it was a hard and ascetic life to choose, but gradually as the faithful piled monasteries with gifts the lives of their inmates became more and more relaxed and ‘ordinarily comfortable’ or more than comfortable. That does not mean they did no good. Religious houses ran schools, fed the hungry, looked after travellers and the sick. In medieval Europe, they were one of the chief means of making a monstrously unjust society humanly palatable, and when they were abolished it didn’t make that society any less monstrously unjust. But they softened the injustice (when they did) with the very same resources they drew from it. I am no revolutionary, and you could argue I am in no different position. Perhaps one day I, too, will be expropriated, and if so will I be gracious enough to see in it the hand of God?

Smelling the Coffee

‘I don’t think it’s worth it’, was Margaret’s conclusion from our discussion about restarting the coffee mornings we used to run at the church every couple of months before the pandemic. The trouble is that in the meantime we’ve let the church hall to a dance academy on Saturday mornings, and they run for a couple of hours from 9am to 11am. Give them (optimistically) 15 minutes to clear out, and that’s the core of any Saturday coffee morning gone, so running one probably isn’t realistic.

Every church I have ever been connected with has found itself grappling with the conflict between making money from its facilities and having them available for church use. At my old church in High Wycombe, like many churches, we let the hall all week to a nursery; now and again a member of the congregation would express resentment at this, to be told firmly by the vicar that they were welcome to find £15,000 a year (as it was then) so that we wouldn’t need to rent the building out. There is no escaping the absolute necessity to pay our way.

The church coffee mornings might be seen as providing a particularly useful service when Swanvale Halt didn’t have a nice café of its own, but even in those days we barely ever had any trade from people using the Co-Op or meeting friends, and now they prefer to have expensive coffee and cake from the café – or even the coffee stand at the railway station – than come to the church for a cut-price versions served by Margaret and company. Our consumers were people we knew, congregation members or their friends, users of the Day Centre which is usually closed at weekends, and the like. That meant it was really doing something different: providing an occasion for fellowship and interaction in a way that bigger churches mediate by means of home groups. Perhaps this means that the default time of Saturday morning isn’t really important, and we could think in a different direction. 

Who Will Count the Cost?

It was Dean, the Treasurer, on the other end of the phone. First, he wanted to ask some details about the ecumenical service we're hosting tomorrow for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and how to manage the collection. Dean has a stammer, and when he said he had something else to mention and his stammer got noticeably worse, an angel whispered in my ear what he was going to say before he said it. He would quite like to stop being Treasurer, if that was all right.

Dean has been Treasurer for more than ten years: he moved across from being Churchwarden not long after I arrived in Swanvale Halt, and has been brilliant as the role has gradually expanded, grappling with budgeting (we didn't even have a notional budget to measure ourselves against at one time) and the ever-changing requirements of HMRC. He is a gentle and Christian soul who I know would always do anything I asked him to, so I was careful not to ask too often. Ten years and more is enough for anyone.

Now of course people very rarely want to do any role in church and usually take a lot of persuading, but of all those reluctant tasks Treasurer is the one they seem to want least, and once you get someone willing to take it on you tend to grip them as tight as you can. It isn't only churches where this is true: the rule applies to every voluntary organisation I've ever been anywhere near. When I was in the Liberal Democrats at Oxford there was only one occasion when an officer served more than one term, and that was a very special case when we were undergoing a particular episode of chaos - but the exception was the Treasurer's role. Both then, and after I left, there were three Treasurers who served a year each, and Oxford time being different from everywhere else's, even a term can seem an eternity. It wasn't as though being Treasurer of the Oxford University Lib Dems was a very onerous task, as incoming and outgoing funds hardly amounted to a king's ransom. It was the title that scared students off - the worry, perhaps, that they might get something wrong that would have actual consequences, rather than just get up the noses of students like the other officers. 

It isn't as though Dean has any special financial expertise: he's a computer programmer. I suppose you might argue he is the possessor of a tidy mind, but that's really his only qualification aside from being a Good Egg. So I shall be looking through the box to find another one, and trying to persuade them that's what they are.

Marx Was Right

Lady SteamThreader alerted me to the strange circumstance that my blog post from last year about Slimelight and the death of its founder Mak MaYuan has, as she said, ‘been screen shot to prove something in the feud over Slimelight’. I wasn’t aware there was a ‘feud’, and I can’t see that anything I wrote can possibly be of use to anyone as all my information came from a modicum of Googling, but angry people clutch at straws, perhaps.

There’s little to be gained by delving deep into what seems to have been happening, but in brief Mak MaYuan ran Slimelight (the Goth club), Electrowerkz (the music venue) and the Islington Metal Works (the ground floor of the same property, 7 Torrens Street, a broader events location) as businesses with his wife, even after they separated and he found a new partner with whom, as the newspapers reported at the time of his sudden death, he’d recently had a baby. Whatever may have been said or not, he doesn’t seem to have updated his will or maybe had one at all, so said partner has no rights over anything other than what said wife chooses to concede, except perhaps the baby. As said wife was a bit older than Mak, she would be very unwise indeed not to have a will, and said baby might stand to inherit a profitable business and chunk of real estate in the middle of London. Even though Mak, wife and partner rubbed along relatively amicably while he was still alive, you can see how this had the potential to get very grubby now he’s gone. Given that so much of London Goth life has now retracted itself into Electrowerkz, whatever happens to that site and business also has an impact on the entire community.

Part of the point of my earlier blog post was to argue that Goth is now an accepted part of British cultural life, recognised by the Arts Council grant to keep Slimelight afloat during the pandemic. The current Slimes situation proves that Goth is normal in a different way: as much as the Goth world thinks of itself as alternative, once personal rivalries get overlaid by money and property, it turns out to be subject to the same strains and conflicts as mainstream society. You can read the longstanding frictions afflicting Whitby Goth Weekend in the same way. It takes more than a bit of black leather and lace to deflect the iron laws of capital, it seems.

Coals to South Kensington

It isn't often that museums get into the news and when they do it tends not to be for positive reasons: museums doing their job happily and uncontroversially isn't news. It seems to me self-evident that the mighty Science Museum shouldn't be going to fossil-fuel companies to fund its exhibitions, but the matter doesn't appear to be quite so clear-cut to its leadership, no matter how many of its trustees or advisors resign, or prospective trustees refuse to go near it. Director Ian Blatchford's argument that taking money from Indian energy conglomerate Adani is somehow about 'editorial balance' is, I think, risible. The Museum could mention their viewpoint without being paid to do so. Am I missing something?

Mind you, were I still in the museum world I think I would be resisting any attempt by donors of artefacts, no matter how I agreed with their outlook, to determine how they might be used and displayed. You give something to a museum and it enters into a different conceptual space from yours. It becomes an interpretive device, an element in other stories than you might have imagined. You don't control it any more. 

One Door Closes

A busy churchyard scene today with most people, most of the time, more distanced than they appear to be here and those that aren't either unshakeably convinced that their vaccinations make them invulnerable or as nonchalant about the chances of death as ever. We were saying goodbye to Marion the curate by coming out into the churchyard to sing for the first time since the pandemic started, encouraged by many other churches doing the same. We will, I suspect, get some guidance from the Church as to what we might do or not do from July 19th, but while I don't expect much to change, finishing the service with a single hymn, outside when weather permits, is one relaxation that seems reasonable. At least the grass has been cut, one of the factors that I was concerned about.

When I have told people about Marion leaving the next question is invariably 'will you get another curate' and I draw in my breath to explain why we won't. It was only an accident that Marion was with us at all, as she could neither serve in her 'sending parish' of Hornington nor move due to her husband's work, so of the various available surrounding parishes we got the benefit of her ministry. I have endlessly reminded her that while she may owe God much she owes the Church of England nothing, as it doesn't even pay her; a stipendiary curate would have to occupy the curate's house, currently rented out, and attract an increased Parish Share, so to have one we would need to find an extra £20K or so per year - not much of a prospect when money is as tight as it is. 

But I am also able to tell people that the Lord seems as dismayed as I am by the prospect of the good folk of Swanvale Halt being subjected to a constant diet of me henceforward, and has nudged a clutch of helpful people in our direction - two retired priests moving into the area, a lay reader shifting her allegiance during the pandemic to us, a family from the Colonies with some very useful experience, a teacher who has done some preaching in his school - so while some of the things Marion did will have reached a natural conclusion, there is the chance of good new things. Once we are allowed some of the good old things again!

Mobile Funds

A former parishioner with whom I Zoom from time to time makes mobiles as a hobby. We agree that the appeal of mobiles is that they're completely superfluous and innocent. There's something childlike and contemplative about them, probably because we think of them as things that hang over babies' cots. Mind you, he made one at a very dark time that was composed of black bats-wing shapes and spikes, and that was far from restful: very Gawth.

He was inspired to start by the mobiles of Alexander Calder and decided to see how much they cost. He saw one up for auction at $18K: that's ok, he thought, I'm not going to buy one, but it's not *impossible*. Then he realised he'd missed the decimal point and the work in question was on sale for $18*M*.

(I know this is nothing much as a post, but it was that or 'Vestments of Ebay'. It's quiet)

An Age of Delusion, Yet Again

You might have thought, given what I’ve said in the past and my interest in the interior arrangements of church buildings, that I am a steadfast defender of the stone and brick steeple houses we Anglicans inhabit. I mainly am, but I also recognise that they are burdens as well. The Body of Christ needs somewhere to meet, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be so large, so old, or so expensive as it often is. While at theological college I remember writing about the notion of ‘cell church’ which had a vogue at one time – a form of Christian community in which small groups become not adjuncts to the church which allow greater discipleship, but the basic structure in which people live their Christian lives, only gathering together in larger numbers on special occasions. Some evangelical Anglican churches went for that, although I don’t know that any actually disposed of their old church buildings; they did, after all, still need them, and might not have been allowed simply to abandon them anyway. I heard a story of a church in Coventry diocese which, driven from their old building after a fire, found their new home in a school hall so congenial that they refused to return once the church was repaired. The diocese didn’t like that at all. But ‘selecting cell’ (as Mission-Shaped Church – remember that? put it) would shift the focus towards a different way of doing things in which the building becomes less important. I remember writing an essay on ecclesiology at Staggers and musing how historic parish churches might turn into ‘network cathedrals’ linking a variety of forms of Church life into the Apostolic structure. Certainly that might mean not needing as many of them.

I’ve long thought a reckoning was coming, driven by strain on resources; not even I think that decades of numerical and therefore financial reduction can go unrecognised indefinitely.  In our diocese the line is now that if a church can’t cover the costs of a stipendiary clergyperson, it won’t get one unless the diocese decides there are special circumstances, and had it not been for the unnecessarily punitive and capitalist language our bishop used when introducing the new policy (‘we must move away from a system that penalises success and rewards failure’) I wouldn’t have minded so much.

This is also the strategy adopted in Chelmsford, where Stephen Cottrell has been bishop for ten years. Becoming Bishop of Reading by accident in 2004 when the Oxford Diocese’s evangelical powerhouses played merry hell at the prospect of celebrity gay parson Jeffrey John taking up that post, +Stephen’s first episcopal task was coming to St Stephen’s House for our Founder’s Day. He comes from the Catholic tradition, but most of us don’t practice being bishops before the pointy hat drops on our head and it was most amusing to see him being pointed in the right direction by the House Sacristans who knew more about being a bishop than he did.

Now in the process of being translated to York, future Archbishop Cottrell is, we learned over the weekend, being charged with running a commission to restructure the Anglican Church. The Sunday Times had spoken to ‘a source familiar with Cottrell’s thinking’ and reported them as saying ‘The crisis is going to lead to a massive shrinkage in the number of cathedrals, dioceses and parish churches … [the COVID emergency] has vastly accelerated a dramatic change in the way the Church of England will do its stuff because of declining attendance and declining revenues.’ The photograph of +Stephen shows him looking unconscionably smug, which he never used to be, unless sixteen years of bishoping have made him so. It was a shame we had to find out this way, and shows yet again that the bishops really have very little idea how to manage the system of which they are in charge or the people who make it up. Bishop Philip North (him again) Tweeted that he didn’t recognise the report, and that discussing closing dioceses ‘would lead to years of pointless debate and introspection at a time when we need to be looking outwards, naming injustice and addressing a nation with a message of hope’. The cynic in me whispers that, this being the Church of England, ‘years of pointless debate and introspection’ is presumably just what we will opt for.

‘We are at a crossroads,’ an unnamed bishop told the Sunday Times, ‘everything’s a blank sheet of paper. It is allowing us to get back to that question of first principle, what it means to be the church. People haven’t stopped gathering for worship. They’ve been doing it over Zoom or over YouTube’. I want to scream, This isn’t ‘gathering’! It’s a replacement for gathering, a weak, etiolated stopgap, a plug in the hole left by the shutting-down of genuine Christian community. People hate it, and they only do it because it’s the best they’ve got. Getting back to first principles is fine, but you wouldn’t have thought that one of the principles in question would be that of human beings actually physically being together.

What I think ‘the Church’ means is something like ‘the community called into existence by the saving work of Jesus Christ, organised around the sacraments and gathering to proclaim his coming Kingdom’. There is no 'new way of being church' which doesn't include those things. No, you don’t need lovely old buildings to do them, but I wonder what the Body of Christ here in Swanvale Halt might look like without the Steeple House. It’s worth thinking about, but, I suspect, far from a panacea. We would presumably meet in houses or pub rooms. Instead of the infants school and other institutions coming to us for their celebratory events, we would have to beg use of their facilities when they’re not using them, the same as Slimming World or a pilates class. We would instantly lose our visibility; and I’m far from convinced that a lot of reticent Anglicans are suddenly going to become the Durutti Column of guerrilla evangelists that the theory envisages. We know that even the most outgoing evangelical churches rarely bring any new souls to faith, but largely shuffle them around between each other, or breed them. I worry that I am deluded in thinking I can have much effect through my work to communicate the Gospel, but if I am I’m not alone. Bishops keep talking as though our current situation is something wonderful rather than a mutilation of what we are supposed to be: ‘Now’s our chance to reimagine church’ that article Bishop Graham Tomlin Tweeted the day the churches were locked to the communities in which they sit. I think the bishops are in for a rude awakening if they think that shutting that inconvenient Gothic building in the centre of the estate is going to revive the Faith in England any time soon.

In this mood I sat with my early-morning tea and read John 22. ‘It is the Lord!’ cries Peter, and leaps into the water of the Sea of Galilee to swim to the beach where he’s glimpsed Jesus. It is indeed, I found myself thinking, and that’s what matters. As Jesus speaks to Peter over breakfast, joking whether he loves him more than he does the fish – that’s my take on the text, anyway – I thought of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and other desperate atheist attempts to shut the experience of the apostles into a box they can understand, and to defuse its danger. Christ is risen and everything else is relative. I will carry on doing what I can do here to tell everyone that, to proclaim the Kingdom, to make sure Swanvale Halt Church makes its contribution to its parish and the wider Church as long as it can. Sometimes I weary of it; sometimes I think I’ve barely started. 

Two slogans for you:

Is It All Worth It?

There is part of me that itches to reject anything that mainstream opinion endorses, but when someone I know posted on LiberFaciorum a link to an interview in which Peter Hitchens denounces hysteria over COVID19 I found my initial weary reaction justified. I knew what was coming: Mr Hitchens is an intelligent man, of course, but thinks that intelligence can replace actual knowledge. ‘You don’t have to be an epidemiologist to come to a conclusion’. No, you don’t, but it might affect how anyone else regards your opinion, and explains why you feel so ignored and marginalised.

That doesn't mean he isn't right. I know no more than anyone else does whether the policies followed by the UK, and so many other countries to different degrees, are the correct ones. At the moment it’s all more-or-less informed guesswork. Even at the end of this, we may be not much the wiser. If the policies work, and we manage to get away with a modest number of deaths, there will always be those who argue that there was never a problem at all. In a way, scorn will be a sign of success.

But that seductive question, ‘Is it worth it?’ sounds challenging but turns slippery when you try to get a conceptual grip on it. What does worth mean in this context? If every human life is unique, you could argue with some point that a single life weighs heavier in the balance than the entire global economy, but most of us would feel uneasy pushing it that far. You might contend, conversely, that putting the economy into a protective coma will cost more lives than the sickness (and Mr Hitchens and Lord Sumption do), but either side of that equation sits a nebulous and indeterminate number. Do nothing, said the Imperial College modellers, and half a million people will die. Shield the vulnerable, and you take that toll down to a quarter of a million (about the number of British people we think died in the flu epidemic of 1918); lockdown and social distancing stand some chance of reducing it to a tenth of that or less. Yet it’s not that simple, because what we’re trying to do is increase the ability of the health service to cope with the extremely ill people who come its way, and the number of people that increased capacity/decreased demand is likely to save – in the sense of deferring their deaths a reasonable time, and to a different cause – is very hard to calculate. On the other hand, working out how many people would be saved by allowing more economic activity to carry on, and not be killed by murders, suicides, unemployment, malnutrition, or lack of resources available to spend on health provision over the next two decades or so, is a completely impossible task for any human agency. And can a life be worth more, or less, than a particular quantifiable amount of distress or suffering short of death? You’re left with a value judgement, nothing more.

‘Life or economy is not a choice’, while ‘economies can be rebuilt, lives can’t’. I can’t say I disagree much with either of these contrasted rhetorical statements. Businesses aren’t just businesses, not just methods of producing money (as some of my left-er friends seem to think). They are the way a community is bound together: they provide context and value to human lives, as well as funnelling creativity, albeit sometimes of a pretty basic character. It’s not a matter of choosing between life or money. But equally we should not forget that despite its power, money is a fiction. It always fascinates me that something we all use every day, something which is fundamental to keeping society functioning, is also a thing whose historical origins are unclear and whose exact nature and workings nobody can convincingly define. Globally, we all agree this stuff exists and that it works in a particular way, because it suits us; we give it its power, by tacit consensus. Money’s laws are not like natural laws, not like gravity or oxidation ratios; we determine them, and we can rewrite the fiction (the chapter on debt, or the chapter on borrowing) if we choose. We need to remember that, provided we all work together, we are in charge and not it: we need not be dazzled by its glamour. But I think that's a harder job than dealing with the pandemic.

Rood Returned

Mr Mahoney the glass restorer came back to Swanvale Halt yesterday to replace the damaged panels from the Rood Window. I greeted him, and went away to do other things - until anticipation, and the remembered warning from a parishioner, 'of course it's never as good as the original', got the better of me, and I headed back down the hill to see what was happening.

The repaired glass looks almost exactly the same as the old: there is one area which appears slightly cleaner, but that's it. It seems to my untrained eye to be a beautiful job. My relief could barely be described.

We would quite like to have guards installed over this particularly vulnerable window (as the green copper stains in the wall around show that it once had) but the price is eye-watering. Mr Mahoney says he might be able to come up with a less painful quote. Not far away is another church that recently suffered some vandalism and launched a Justgiving campaign to help with the repairs, and ended up raising enough to pay for a new CCTV system and exterior lighting as well. Apparently the incumbent was kicking himself for setting a £5K limit to the sum. I'm not sure Swanvale Halt can come up with that, but we could have a go!

Counting the Cost

As the rain pounded Swanvale Halt yesterday morning and an unfortunate glass restorer removed the damaged panels from the east window to repair them, someone else had come to visit our humble place of worship. In all my nearly ten years here, Ecclesiastical Insurance have never done a proper site visit. Now here was Jerry, with folder, calculator and bag of surveying equipment, come to measure the building, and draw up a report on what we are not doing, and should. I copied the electrical survey and the report on the lightning conductor, and discovered he didn't actually need the paperwork itself. I showed him the vestries ('Does the church have any specially elaborate or valuable vestments? I mean apart from any that may belong to you'), the kitchen, and the cupboard which houses the fuse box. Here he winced. 'You're not really supposed to have cleaning materials in this area,' he said, meaning clearly that there was no question of them remaining, 'the cupboard is supposed to isolate the fusebox ...' He also suggested that our bins should ideally be kept in a locked enclosure in case anyone decides to set them alight. 'That might not be very easy to do, but think about moving them away from where a fire might cause damage.' 

Sally our office manager arrived and made me and Jerry a cup of tea. We went back into the office to check whether the photocopier was covered by the insurance of the company we lease it from, or whether we should include it in our own policy. Jerry described how Ecclesiastical was changing the way it calculates the value of a church building.

'Up till now we've used the standard estimates produced by professional architectural bodies for replacing fire-damaged buildings,' he explained, 'but that doesn't take into account the fact that when churches catch fire, you tend to lose the roof and interior, but not the walls, and of course when rebuilding a church you want to retain those. Reconstructing a church from scratch hardly ever happens, and the old methods of calculating replacement value were too dependent on the ups and downs of the building market. Our new estimates will take into account the real circumstances involved in rebuilding a church.'

'Well, just so long as our premiums don't go up,' said Sally brightly.

Jerry regarded her almost with pity.

Quo Vadis

There are times in parish life when everything seems to move smoothly and even swiftly, and there are times when they don't. I have more of the latter, or at least that's how it feels - the projects which don't come to anything, the discussions that prove fruitless, the undertakings made that are never followed up, the people who seem about to be useful to the life of the church who then disappear for various reasons. 

There are two major initiatives in my mind at the moment. I would like to install a new audio-visual system in the church to allow more flexibility in the presentation of worship, so people don't have to go outside the parish to find that if it's what they want, as increasingly they seem to. And there's the matter of a musical director, which we've talked about for years, someone to take a haphazard group of singers and turn them into a choir, and to recruit young singers and musicians and increase the presence of music in the life of the community at large. There is someone I would dearly like to take on that role, but I have to present them with a credible package to stand any chance of detaching them from the prominent London church they sing with at the moment. 

Both quotes for installing and screen and associated projection system in the church are now in, and they hover around £20K, which is about twice what I hoped. We could find that, especially with a grant, perhaps, from the diocese's growth fund, but it's something that we need to decide consciously that we really want to do. As for music, I had a tip-off about what might be a helpful trust run by a business figure from within the Anglo-Catholic world, but can't seem to contact them, and this may be (as the bishop who is on the trust's board told me) because they've disbursed all on their grant money on a big youth project at present. So I don't know where to get the cash from for that.

I suppose we should think about getting the windows repaired first!

Storm in a Teacup

The Bishop has said more than once that he would like to see every church in the diocese abandoning the practice of putting out a plate for donations at refreshment time after services. He's adamant that it gives the wrong impression. 'You don't charge your family for coffee at home, do you?' he asks. I see the point, but I have never come across any church that charges. I've never heard a newcomer or non-churchgoer say anything about the custom and, though I have no strong feelings in its favour (some do - I have known people actively seek out a way to pay for their tea when no plate has been offered), I do think there are bigger fish to fry, like the quality of the refreshments themselves. I still find it a battle to get people to make filter coffee rather than instant (and some eccentric souls prefer instant, though I can't imagine why). 

After the celebration of the great and holy feast of Pentecost today I found this on the counter in the hall, made by Jim who has turned out a variety of pleasing wooden goods over the years. I think that's rather fun. I suppose, though, that the bishop could have more damaging bees buzzing around his mitre: this one is fairly harmless.

In Financial News

My annual leaflet from the Church Commissioners shows that they haven't done hugely well over the last year. The 30-year growth trend is down half a per cent and the yearly return dropped from 7% to under 2.

How that relates to the Commissioners' attempts at ethical investment I'm not sure. All the stuff about disinvesting from companies that don't take their carbon-reduction responsibilities seriously is all well and good, but the Commissioners still have plenty invested in fossil-fuel extraction firms. They quote examples where 'active engagement' has helped encourage ExxonMobil and Shell to put concrete carbon reduction targets in place. They argue this provides 'greater leverage and influence than by acting alone or by forced divestment', in line with a decision in General Synod two years ago that they should be threatening complete disinvestment by 2023 unless the fuel companies complied. 

I'm sure it does, but that doesn't change the fundamental truth that we need these industries to cease. Basically, they can't be 'fixed'. The Commissioners probably said the same sorts of things about cigarettes and arms manufacturing, but they eventually got out of them, albeit kicking and screaming.

No One Expects

So far, the Diocese hasn't posted anything on its webpage about the Clergy Conference. From its Twitter feed you would certainly discover that one of the speakers was Dr Ellen F. Davis of Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, who took us through a passage of 1Kings and the book of Ruth, and you can find a picture of Fr Malcolm Guite, the poet, who spoke about the interrelationship of poetry and faith. There is a reference to the third speaker, Bishop Philip North of Burnley, but it comes from a retweeted tweet from a priest attending, not from the diocese itself. We'll see how eventually it gets reported.

Bishop Philip turned up on Wednesday morning and began unremarkably enough, talking about finding grace in unexpected places. He led us through Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem 'Felix Randal' and pointed out how the people to whom priests minister also minister grace to them, and we all smiled and nodded. We recognise that. It made us feel good.

Hopkins discovered grace among God's poor, went on Bishop Philip. That's the way God always works. Renewal and revival starts with the poor, the marginalised. It doesn't come from the centre. Neither does cultural change more generally. The poor are where creativity begins.

So isn't it a shame, a scandal, that the Church of England seems to exercise an option for the rich? It's churches in poor areas, on the margins of cities and towns, that are allowed to run down and get shut. It's those areas that can't fund clergy. Some dioceses sit on hundreds of millions of pounds of inherited assets while the newer ones - which are mainly the ones in poorer parts of the country - have pitiful resources in comparison. The diocese of London is pointed to as a model of church growth, but so it should be, not just because of immigration but because of resource: 'if you've got a church hall in London, you've got a children's & families worker because your rents will pay for one. If you've got a church hall on an estate in Stoke-on-Trent all you've got is a headache paying for its maintenance.' Our practices suck initiative and leadership out of poor communities, making them dependent recipients of charity directed at them from outside. The Church's recruitment procedures make it especially hard for working-class candidates to find their way through unless they get converted into middle-class book-learners in the process; 'we're producing a monochrome institution of white evangelical graduates'. 'God will renew the Church. Renewal is inevitable. But if we want to be part of it rather than looking in from the sidelines, we have to alter the balance fundamentally in favour of allowing the experience of the poor to penetrate to the centre.'

Well. You must bear in mind that most of the audience listening to the bishop were, er, white evangelical graduates. What he was saying was also diametrically opposed to what the Diocese of Guildford is doing: its new Parish Share system will penalise small churches in favour of large ones which are all, funnily enough, evangelical, and which will in future have a far greater role in 'helping' small churches develop - which is what else but enforcing the sort of hegemonic church culture he was complaining about. But he still got a lot of applause. Morally, it couldn't be argued with, and for the rest of the conference people wanted to talk about little else. In a Q&A session Il Rettore, attending his last conference before he retires, stood up and told Bishop Philip how his speech had redeemed his previous 34 years of conference-attendance to that point, unreconstructed Corbynite as he is. And the little knot of Catholics felt a bit less isolated. At the final plenary session our diocesan bishop set his face into a grin and chose to refer not to Bishop Philip's case in as many words but to his insistence that renewal was inevitable and people shouldn't talk about the Church 'declining'. That's a message everyone likes to hear.

I like Bishop Philip's vision of what the Church should be; my issue is that it never has been that, it's never been a place where the experience of the poor has been the organising principle. That evening I lay in my bed reading about how some of the Cistercian monasteries of medieval England and Wales, rather than setting up in wilderness and waste and colonising them as the cliché is, actually achieved the spiritual 'solitude' they craved by simply clearing away the existing inhabitants of an area. I thought about the sudden upsurge in Christian adherence in the Roman Empire after Constantine converted, or the Slavs being mass-baptised at swordpoint by Prince Vladimir of the Rus. God may well always bring spiritual renewal through the poor, but where the Church has most spectacularly 'succeeded' it has often been precisely where it sits lightest to what it says it believes. It has always, always absorbed and institutionalised the organising principles and assumptions of the world around it at the same time as preaching the exact opposite.

The miracle - and it truly is that - has been that the Church also always holds within itself the radical contaminant of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, forever subverting, calling to account, and undermining its own practices. Perhaps we heard an instance of that at The Hayes this year. I don't hold out much hope that the experience of the margins can become the framing principle of the centre, and it may be that the Church of England has actually served God's purpose for it: 'renewal' may well pass us by in the end. But it certainly will if that marginal experience is stifled. It can only be kept alive by acting counterintuitively, by exercising an option not just for the poor, but for the unexpected, the irrational, what does not make immediate best sense.

Boundary Lines

My relationships with my most trying pastoral cases tend to develop in a predictable fashion. I try to help, which often involves giving out a bit of cash, lay down guidelines, eventually refuse to hand out any more, and risk the accusations and attempts at persuasion which usually form the final stage. As I’ve said here before, I’ve given up trying to fight my way through the thickets of people’s stories: I simply set boundaries to what I will give. That seems less judgemental towards them, and less stressful to me.

We’ve been through this cycle now with Karly. I gave her £200 over the course of a month, and at the last instalment I warned her that would be the last until over a month had passed. I got another series of tearful requests for money by text a couple of days ago, which I refused. Eventually I worked out Karly’s mum was demanding £25 to allow her to stay in her house. Karly told me she might as well be dead: she denied she was playing the suicide card, just ‘thinking out loud’, which may well be true. I put the cash through her mother’s letterbox, so I was, technically, sticking to the line of not giving it to her. ‘Woman kills herself because priest refused £25’ is not something I want to read in the Surrey Ad. I tried to be firm and straightforward in what I said to her, not dressing up my refusal to give with phrases like ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I can’t’, because neither of them were true: I’m not sorry, and I could. But some of my absolute rage almost certainly bled into that straightforwardness. 

Yesterday I had more requests for money – long-distance ones, as I was in Dorset on my day off – and responded with absolute refusal which Karly clearly didn’t believe. She spent the night out of doors. This morning I called the social services about the situation and dropped a note round to the mental health team office, who social services said they’d inform. When I told her, Karly said she’d never trust me again and that I’d ‘made everything ten times worse’. I tell myself I just want to help, but perhaps I’m deceiving myself. God knows.

Why was I so very angry? I try to tell myself that what I do, whether I give or not, is what I choose to do and so I can’t blame anyone else, no matter what I might feel are the attempts to manipulate my reactions. Perhaps I am angry at being forced to face my own self-regard and meanness; perhaps there is anger at myself for going against my word. I am very far from being a ‘cheerful giver’: Louise Brooks’s words resonate with me, ‘I never gave anything away without wishing I had kept it, nor kept anything without wishing I had given it away.’ Either way, my internal conflicts aren’t Karly’s fault. I did what I chose to do, and Christ never raged at the poor and weak. Yet I do it all too often.

I don’t draw a clear line between me and these ‘vulnerable people’. The mingling of sentimentality, pleading, anger, and inability to help oneself, counter damaging patterns of behaviour or distinguish reality, isn’t all that far removed from traits I observe in myself. What I should perhaps do is to insist on first encountering somebody that I also interact with the statutory agencies dealing with them, and anything else is just laziness, a refusal to summon up the mental energy to do the hard work. 

All Flesshe ys Grasse

On another day, Reg’s funeral would have dominated my thinking yesterday (as it did until the evening). It’s not every funeral service that begins with a preamble from the departed laying out his thinking behind how it’s put together and the spirit with which we should all approach it. His outline notes include the instruction ‘Eulogy (if deserved)’: I have no idea what one does to ‘deserve’ a eulogy, and it’s not my place to decide anyway. The love and honour in which Reg was held was palpable, as was his sense of gratitude and joyousness – though shot through with the extremity of the way he died. I spoke to one of my predecessors as Rector for whom Reg had served as churchwarden in the 1960s: his predecessor had told him how ‘this is such a good parish. You’ll love them into heaven.’

As an antidote, in the evening I went with our treasurer to a meeting about the new Parish Share system the diocese is proposing. Now, this is all a bit complex, but bear with me. The Diocese of Guildford derives more of its £11.7M income from its parishes than any other Church of England diocese, 94% (in Lincoln it’s just over 40%), because it lacks the historic endowments and landholdings the older dioceses have. This means that if churches are subsidised for any reason, the money basically has to come from all the other churches, essentially reallocating resources from a handful of larger evangelical churches to smaller ones. The distortions arising from this system have in recent years been mitigated by a complex arrangement of caps and floors on the annual changes in the sum the diocese demands from each parish. It all means that how the figure for any parish is arrived at is opaque to say the least. The diocese also reckons that the actual cost of each stipendiary clergyperson has been significantly underestimated. ‘It’s not fair!’ the Bishop outlined at the start of the meeting: the system should not ‘penalise growth or reward decline’.

So there is to be a new system. Each parish’s quota will be calculated on what it gets (a vicar, for instance, calculated as costing £55K per year), a share of the common costs of the diocese, and an adjustment based on the relative prosperity of the parish. There will continue to be cross-subsidies, but they will be apparent and transparent rather than covert, and seen explicitly as ‘an investment for growth’. In the future, if a parish in Guildford Diocese is subsidised, it’ll know it.

Well. It struck me that this shift marks another stage in a huge process of centralisation which has gone on for decades. Once upon a time each parish in the Church of England was a virtually independent unit, financially and administratively; occasionally a bishop would turn up to confirm people or to discipline a naughty Anglo-Catholic clergyman but that was basically it. Then in the 1960s clerical incomes were standardised as the parishes handed their historic endowments over to the dioceses to be put into a central pool, possibly the greatest single act of Christian charity in this country’s history and one that nobody really talks about. Gradually clergy also began sending their fees for marriages and funerals into the diocesan pot as well. This financial centralisation should be seen alongside the long effort by the bishops to get more control over the patronage process, that is, who has the right to present a candidate to be incumbent of a parish; and the abolition of the Parson’s Freehold, the incumbent’s absolute security of tenure which is now (except for those who, like me, were already in place) replaced by licences for a term of years. Freehold gave clergy the freedom to innovate without worrying about being slapped over the wrist, but it also gave them the freedom to be alcoholics, depressives, oddballs, or plain idle buggers. Put all this together and the picture that emerges is of a massive and decades-long process in which the parish ceases to be the strategic unit for the mission of the Church of England, and is replaced by the diocese. The diocese’s hand may still be relatively light and respectful of the traditions of each parish, and bishops certainly tend not to behave with the brutal high-handedness that some once did, but the striking thing is that it has a hand at all. This is a shift from a situation in which parishes are given a priest and then left essentially to get on with it, to one in which strategic direction is set centrally and then implemented locally.

I said this, and the chaps from the diocesan offices didn’t like it at all, which suggests to me that I’m on to something. I didn’t at the time take the further step of summarising the proposed change, which I characterise – possibly caricature – as a shift from saying ‘every parish needs a priest and we will provide one’ to saying ‘every parish will have a priest if it earns one, and, if it can’t pay, we will decide what “earning” means’.

The change probably won’t cripple Swanvale Halt church. I and the treasurer guess that, when the new system comes in, we’ll have to find another £5-10K per annum, a challenging but not impossible amount. But far worse and more depressing than the shift in balance from parish to diocese, which is perhaps an inevitable process, is the managerialist and results-driven ideas behind the bishop’s statement about ‘penalising growth and rewarding decline’. What morally pejorative terms those are. The assumption is that a church can grow if only it tries, and therefore if it’s not growing it must be complacent and idle. This new model is very much ‘salvation by works’ rather than ‘salvation by grace’ – payment by results, rather than needs. It works entirely against everything we tell people about their essential value, about God valuing the lowly and weak. Whether centrally-directed strategy and incentivisation will ‘work’ better than hands-off universal provision, or will just accelerate decline, is an open question.

And it’s on God that I try to focus. Ultimately my value comes from him, from what I am in his eyes, not in the eyes of the Church of England. It doesn’t make me feel that good, though.

How to Close a Cathedral

A couple of years ago I was on holiday in Norfolk and went to a village called North Elmham. In the eleventh century this was the seat of the Bishop of East Anglia, before the conquering Normans decided that it was a ridiculously small place to be the episcopal residence and moved the bishopric to Norwich, as they did elsewhere in England too. The Anglo-Saxon cathedral eventually vanished, to the extent that all that remains now are its footings. Nowadays, however, we invest rather more in the maintenance of cathedrals – financially, socially and emotionally as well as spiritually – and the idea of closing one boggles the mind a bit.

That, apparently, is what faces our diocesan cathedral at Guildford.

A few days ago the cathedral chapter’s application to Guildford Borough Council for planning permission to sell off a portion of the land around the building for housing was turned down, and turned down decisively – only three councillors voted in favour. Despite worries about increased pressure on local roads and facilities that might be caused by the 134-home development, the real issue lay with the balance between social housing and more commercially-priced property and housing density within the proposed estate – the ‘Cathedral Quarter’, as the chapter grandly refers to it – and the overall idea of developing the green if rather overgrown slopes of Stag Hill. This presents the cathedral with a problem: it runs at a loss each year which varies between £50K and £100K, and without the endowments that older cathedrals enjoy there’s only so long this can go on. Selling the land for development would provide a fund that might, given a favourable wind and stock market situation, make up the difference. Bishop Andrew told the planning committee meeting ‘the cathedral faces the real possibility, in fact probability, of financial failure, of closing its doors, if this planning permission is not granted’. 

Not many people are very sympathetic to the cathedral’s plight. There were allegations that the cathedral was being allowed to plead special treatment for a development which broke the provisions of Guildford Borough’s Local Plan: the word ‘blackmail’ was thrown around. The chairman of a local residents’ association said 'The Church of England has assets of almost £8bn, and in 2013 they made more money than McDonald’s. It is for them to bail out their own institutions'. Others doubted that the threat that the cathedral might close was a realistic one. ‘Are we really meant to believe that they are going to bolt the door and walk away?’

It seems unlikely, but we live in an age of the monstrously unlikely coming true. The new Diocese of Leeds was created in 2014 out of the previous dioceses of Bradford, Ripon and Wakefield, essentially because the Diocese of Bradford was bankrupt; once upon a time the idea of an Anglican diocese actually ceasing to trade for lack of money would have had archdeacons and bishops blinking in disbelief, but those days are past. In Leeds, all the previous cathedrals were in fact retained, stripped of their chapters and administration, but then they are historic buildings: Guildford’s history goes back to the 1930s, and that’s it.*

One correspondent to the independent online newsletter The Guildford Dragon commented: 'So what was the plan to fund the continuing maintenance and running costs of the building as a place of worship [when it was built]? It’s inconceivable that there wasn’t such a plan.' Well, in fact it’s completely conceivable. The Church of England in the 1930s was on the rise, confident, embedded in the establishment and national life. Guildford Cathedral was started then and completed and consecrated in 1966, just as the great 1960s collapse in organised religion which changed the spiritual face of Britain began. The idea of not enough money coming in to support the place just wouldn’t have occurred to the people who built it. Nobody would have imagined that £1.5M per year would be needed to run it; nobody would have thought it would need to be stripped of asbestos and re-plastered inside within fifty years.

It must have looked like such a coup, the Earl of Onslow giving Stag Hill as the striking location for the new and last cathedral the Church of England would ever build. It dominates the landscape for miles, even if its redbrick exterior is hard to love; architecturally it’s the very last flower of the Gothic Revival. When the foundations were first laid, and half the building completed before the outbreak of the War, it stood in isolation on the hilltop. But, after 1945, the tide of building began to lap closer and closer, leaving it an island in a sea of houses. To the north, the 1960s blocks of the University of Surrey occupied acres more. It’s actually an awkward position to be in, however grand it looks.

Couldn’t the cathedral charge its 90,000 annual visitors a fee of say £2 a head like other cathedrals do, asked one correspondent to the Dragon? But I doubt that figure: it’s the kind of thing institutions claim when they want to emphasise their importance to the local community, but Guildford Cathedral isn’t the greatest tourist draw in the country. Its interior is striking, but Il Rettore once astutely described it as looking ‘like a set for Wagner’s Ring’- matching the somewhat Wagnerian politics of its architect, Sir Edward Maufe – and it has none of the warmth and detail of its older peers. A lot of those 90,000 visitors attend as part of civic and other functions such as the University degree ceremonies the cathedral hosts each summer. Ask the staff, too, and they will tell you how many ‘visitors’ arrive in coach parties – who come, not to marvel at the architecture, but to break their journey down the A3 to the Isle of Wight, and who very commonly pile off the coach, have a wee in the restaurant toilets, pile back on again, and drive off without so much as darkening the door of the cathedral itself.

I’ve been told in the past that when the cathedral was built the original plan was, indeed, to set aside some of the site for housing; but it never happened, partly because it never needed to happen, and partly because the green land around the building seemed more useful to the town. Holy Trinity church in the town centre fulfilled the cathedral role before the cathedral itself was built, but it’s much too small to house many of the events which now take place on the top of Stag Hill; so here we have a cathedral which, realistically, can’t survive, but which must.

In the 1960s, the Church of England rationalised the income of its parishes. In each diocese the parishes agreed to pool their endowments and revenues and clergy were paid from that central pot, whereas before the income of different parishes had varied massively. Is it time to do that with cathedrals? Would the cathedral chapters – none of whom are exactly rolling in money – agree to it? Particularly, would the medieval cathedrals which cost so much to maintain be willing to bail out redbrick Guildford?

[*And, while it occurs to me, the three demoted Yorkshire cathedrals are in fact overgrown parish churches that were bumped up to cathedral status in the 19th century: they had an existence before they were cathedrals, and can potentially revert to that. Guildford was purpose-built.]