Investing in the Church's Growth

 'How is the Ordinariate managing financially?' I was asked the other day. 'Surviving', said I. But then today I read the Church Commissioners' results in their annual report subtitled "Investing in the Church's Growth".[H.T. to 'Thinking Anglicans'] They made returns of 17.1% last year. The Church Commissioners manage, the report tells us, investable assets of some £7.9 billion - yes, billion. If you prefer to see the figures written out, that is £7,900,000,000. Well done the Commissioners. In my little way I helped contribute to that fund, by getting a local Agent to handle the sale of our Parsonage (for about £2.6k more than the Diocese was quite ready to accept) and then getting the same Agent to act for us, rather than the Diocese's man, when we sold off some other small parcel of land. Eventually the diocese profitted from that parish by about half a million pounds - which the diocese persisted in referring to as our 'windfall'. All the clergy who joined the Catholic Church after 'Anglicanorum Coetibus' had done similarly, if not through land deals then by running numerous Planned Giving campaigns.

Now I am very glad still to be in communion with the C of E Pension Fund, if not with the rest of Anglicanism. But I do wonder if the Commissioners might not do some little thing towards assisting at least with life insurance for younger members of the Ordinariate - and perhaps even encouraging the Anglican hierarchy to share some of its church buildings.  Had a clergyman died while still an Anglican his widow and family would have been greatly assisted from the Commissioners' investments. If one of these same former Anglican clergy, now a Catholic priest,  should die (absit omen )  the Ordinariate will have to bear the entire responsibility for those they leave behind. Yet the fund which the Commissioners manage, formerly Queen Anne's Bounty, derives very largely from the Catholic sources which were nationalised at the time of the 'reformation'. Even those little plots of land which I sold when a Vicar had come ultimately from the Religious House which provided a Vicar and Church for that parish. Queen Anne graciously endowed the Church of England with a little of the money which had come to the Crown from such pre-reformation Catholic sources.

I suppose it is too much to expect there will be any such generosity. After all, the Ordinariate seems not to be seen by Anglicans as a generous Catholic gesture towards those Anglicans who really believed what the C of E consistently said, and still says, that the it is part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Instead we Ordinarians seem to be thought of as somehow renegades, denying our birthright. Yet many of us found it increasingly impossible to remain in an Ecclesial Community which allowed itself to be blown about by every new wind of doctrine - or of fashion. Surely Christian Mission might very properly be funded from the ancient endowments set up in large part by our Catholic forebears? How good it would be if we separated Anglicans could be drawn into conversation and fellowship with the rest of the Anglican Communion - or at least with the Church of England - while there is a recognisable part of that Church of England yet surviving. For as a commentator in "Thinking Anglicans" has said, in response to the Commissioners' Report, 'many congregations advance towards extinction' and 'we will soon have the paradoxical situation of an impregnably flush fund providing periodic subventions to the tattered remnants of a Church'. Together we could make a future, genuinely 'investing in the Church's growth'. Kept apart our situation in England becomes ever more like that in Ireland - where one church hangs on to ancient buildings, with everyone at least called 'Very Reverend', while Christianity can mostly be found in a quite different part of the vineyard.