Technology1 min ago
Church and raising funds
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No best answer has yet been selected by pilgrim3661. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.No the Church is not made of money and the churches are falling down.
Vicars are paid a pittance and RC priests even less.
Archbishop Scrunty (or whomever) in 1913 (ha ! so must be a prot) declined to take part in the historic buildings legislation, which seemed a good idea at the time (churches were not museums) but has been a disaster as over the next 100 years the old churches fell down in increasing numbers.
If you feel bad, buy a disused church and do it up. Serve altar wine at your parties.
a) swimming in money and
b) willing or able to spend it on its buildings.
Church buildings of any age or size are frighteningly expensive to run and maintain and many only survive on the generosity of its parishoners. I cant see pilgrim's problem because as far as i know they dont knock on just any old door begging and like i said parishoners are usually more than glad to support their church.
Yeah they are dead poor! The Church of England for example is only worth about �4 billion and is the biggest investors in the stock market with over two of the billions invsted including a �158,000,000 stake in Vodafone & �164,000,000 in GlaxoSmithKline. The last figures available show that in 1999 Churchgoers gave �330,000,000. This is no myth, this is fact! As for poor vicars the yearly pension bill alone is a cool �100,000,000 which hardly suggests they are on income support level .....?
For precisely the same reason as the Catholic Church continues to tell people in the poorest countries of the world to keep breeding - so they can become richer and richer.
'The Church' - in the form of organised religion - is a huge money-making organisation. The Catholic church is the largest landowner in the world.
As for pay, Church of England vicars are paid a little under the average earnings for England and Wales. However, they still earn more than twice the minimum wage and most have lovely homes which they live in rent-free. Their council tax, water charges, buildings insurance, external decoration and maintenance are also paid for by the church.
All i see is a huge organisation which a lot of responsibilities and as many outgoings as income. Granted they have lots of assets but that doesnt immediately mean they have access to those assets.
There seems to be a lot of clarity and no dodginess and i'm sure those parishoners who do give all that money dont begrudge it or they wouldnt give it - in fact i'm sure most would be glad to give more if they could.