AN WILSON: Right-on CofE bishops have vowed to offer £100m in reparations for historic hyperlinks to the slave commerce. Now they’re going through the nice anti-woke revolt within the pews

Is it any wonder that a majority of churchgoers are keeping their hands in their pockets as the collection plate is passed around, when the causes they cherish are increasingly diverging from the progressive political agenda of the Church?

In a survey earlier this month, the majority said they feared their money would not help repair crumbling spires or fund the food banks many clergy now host, but towards a fund ‘for communities adversely impacted by historic slavery’.

This is since the disgraced former Archbishop Welby had decreed £100million should be given in ‘reparation’ for the Church of England’s historic links with the transatlantic slave trade.

With the appointment of a successor to Welby, we might have hoped this ludicrous waste would be halted and the money given to the many parishes in need.

Unfortunately, Dame Sarah Mullally has already indicated she intends to press ahead with her predecessor’s grotesque exercise in virtue signalling. Indeed, she shows every sign she wants to be Welby Mark Two rather than the new broom we need, sweeping clean.

I doubt whether there is a single churchgoer in favour of slavery. Most would abhor that a fund established by Queen Anne in 1704 to support poor Anglican clergy had been invested in the repugnant trade in humans, which is the basis for Welby’s ‘Project Spire’ fund.

But 81 per cent of Anglicans polled said Church money should be used to support local parishes rather than atone for 300-year-old sins. 

Some 61 per cent felt so strongly that they’d rather donate to other charities if the Church Commissioners – the institution’s financial arm – are going to hand it over as reparations.

These people see through Welby and the Anglican hierarchy’s gesturing towards those of the Guardian-reading class who’ve long forgotten what the Church stands for, beyond hosting candle-lit carol services at Christmas.

They see through the notion that these vast sums would improve the spiritual lives of people in the Caribbean and West Africa, by building schools or funding missionary workers. 

With their heads screwed on, they suspect the money will go astray into unscrupulous hands, as so often happens in badly run charities.

Yet money is needed to help deprived parishes, here. In many of the toughest city areas, the church plays a pivotal role in keeping communities together, in offering support to the homeless and the truly poor. Money is needed, too, to keep church buildings in good repair.

This brings me to the story of St Mary’s Somers Town. The small church is not far from London’s Euston station, and the nearest church to the British Library where I work most days, and some years ago I took to popping in occasionally and attending the short weekday service under its handsome rib vaulting.

St Mary’s sits among a cheap cafe, a dry cleaners and council flats, and its parish has always been poor.

In the years after the First World War, an inspirational young curate there, Basil Jellicoe, was so shocked by the levels of poverty – families sharing one room in rat-infested houses, children near starvation, suffering from rickets and lung diseases if not dying – he determined something must be done.

This was before the days of the nanny state. Jellicoe, a relative of a famous admiral, approached his posh friends, even royalty, to raise funds to clear the slums and give its denizens the dignity of a housing association home.

Jellicoe inspired similar enterprises all over the kingdom, and eventually abroad. I have known people whose grandparents and great-grandparents remember being rescued from absolute poverty. 

Thanks to Jellicoe, they were rehoused in decent tenements, with flush toilets, their own kitchen, even ovens.

Their lives were transformed. And everyone who saw the miracle realised it had happened for one reason: The Church. The Church knowing what it was for.

It had been founded by a poor man from Nazareth, who preached the good news to the poor. He said anything you did for a person less fortunate for than yourself, you did as it were to Him also. 

That is the function of the Church and these ‘good works’ were nourished by Jellicoe’s Anglo-Catholic convictions.

It’s not very difficult to grasp, is it? But the people who have been running the church for the last few decades just don’t get it. St Mary’s Somers Town was consecrated 200 years ago, in March 1826. 

It was built just a few years after the young Charles Dickens, from a street round the corner, walked down to the blacking warehouse in the Strand to earn a pittance. 

There have been many celebrations in Somers Town to mark the role the church and housing association have played in this gritty, crime-ridden part of London.

Imagine the shock, then, when the Diocese of London announced it had decided the church was not ‘viable’.

An archdeacon arrived for the Sunday service and bluntly told the congregation that hundreds of thousands of pounds would be needed to repair the building, so the authorities had decided to demolish this fine place and put up an office block instead. 

An unintentionally insulting offer of a ‘worship pod’ in the new building underlined how out of touch the Anglican hierarchy had become.

This vandalistic idea was, luckily, nipped in the bud. The community of Somers Town rose up. The Victorian Society, led by the valiant Gryff Rhys Jones, protested, as did other excellent organisations.

Money was found from the Heritage Lottery fund and other sources to make a start on the failing masonry, brickwork and joinery. 

While the congregation of St Mary’s is not as large as it once was, its marvellous parish priest upholds the Jellicoe tradition. He works to improve the lives of the homeless, the dispossessed, and junkies and oddballs, who hover near London railway stations, as well as serving the old, the housebound and schoolchildren.

What was so shocking about the diocese’s willingness to close a parish and destroy a fine 19th-century building was their indifference to the suffering it would cause.

At the worst moment of the crisis, when it looked as if the building might actually be demolished, I met a man who had just resigned as a Church Commissioner.

He told me the Commissioners have no right to hold on to their huge cash reserves, which were always meant to help poorer parishes. He asked me to guess how much money the Commissioners possessed. The answer was £50billion. Not million, billion.

The Church easily has enough money to spend wisely, if only it had wisdom. It has forgotten that its duty is not to wring its hands over historic wrongs, which it can never right, but to perpetuate historic virtues – preaching and living the Gospel among the poor of Jesus Christ.

Not the imaginary poor of the past, but the actual poor of the here and now. The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.