Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
Professor Richard Dale writes: KICKING IN THE CATHEDRAL DOOR How the Church Commissioners relied on bogus history to denounce their predecessors and vilify their own Church It is over three years since the Church Commissioners published their controversial report on the Church’s links to the slave trade. Since then critics have challenged the Commissioners’ historical …
Is the Church Commissioners’ proposal for a ‘reparations’ fund (Project Spire) for ‘Justice, Healing, and Repair’ based on historical facts? Will it ‘repair’, or in fact divide us further? Is there a clear ethical argument, and have they followed clear and transparent processes in proposing this? The two videos here comprises four addresses given at …
The Church Commissioners’ response to what has allegedly been learnt about the involvement of its predecessor, the Queen Anne’s Bounty (QAB), in the slave trade was first called Project Spire, and has been relabelled the Fund for Healing, Justice, and Repair. General Synod has been meeting this week, and in Questions, the first section pressed …
Lord Nigel Biggar is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, and a well-known author on moral and ethical issues. He has just published Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Swift, 2025), challenging the current narrative within and beyond the Church of England about the need for reparations …
Regular readers will know that I have been concerned for many years at the gradual erosion of the clergy stipend, and both the corresponding decline in the clergy pension, together with the major changes made in 2008 and 2011, reducing the pension to 1/2 of the stipend from 2/3, and extending the qualifying period of …
Project Spire is the name that has been given to the Church Commissioner’s decision to put aside £100m of their investments to be directed to working with and for communities affected by historic transatlantic slavery, with the intention that it creates a lasting legacy. The £100 million, which will be built up over the 9-year …
Bishops and dioceses are finally rebelling against the central control of decision making imposed by the Church Commissioners (and the Archbishops’ Council) upon them. At least that is the impression you might get from reading the Church Times this week. Dioceses ready to take back purse strings from centre, Dr Gibbs tells Rochester synod The …
Robert Tombs and Lawrence Goldman write: The Church Commissioners have pledged £100 million over nine years in reparation for what are claimed to be their eighteenth-century predecessors’ involvement in and large financial gains from slavery and the slave trade. They argue that the Church, through Queen Anne’s Bounty (a corporation created by statute in 1703-4 for ‘the …
The session of General Synod this February 2024 contained a large number of contentious issues, so there was a general sense of dread as the sessions began. But there was an outbreak of unanimity when it came to discuss my Private Member’s Motion on clergy pensions. I had been concerned for some years at both …
The Church Commissioners have published their investment result from 2022 along with their annual report for the year, and both can be found online here. The investment results are quite remarkable. Although the headline return last year was only 5.0% last year (compared with 13.3% in 2021), which means a real-terms reduction in the value …
The Church of England finds itself in a very odd situation. On the one hand, it is facing continued decline in attendance, and I think in influence and reputation in our culture. The decline in attendance has been calculated with mathematical precision at John Hayward’s Church Model website; if nothing changes, then he calculates that …
