LETTERS
Faith in the city
Sir: Your cover picture of a disappearing St George-in-the-East with the title 'The Church vanishes' (8 March) and the accompanying article are misleading. We are grateful that attention is being drawn to our problems, but we hope that those who attack us will attend to the facts. The Hawksmoor building of St George-in-the- East is not going to disappear. We are going to spend the next three years looking at its future and exploring several possibili- ties.
Neither the Bishop, the Archdeacon nor the Church in East London are defeatist. There is plenty of faith in our part of the city. We are trying to be realistic about the life of our church and, as far as we can, stand on our own feet. Several times a year, we receive the stunning blow that another of our churches needs £100,000 or more spent on it to repair and preserve it. We are already heavily subsidised by the rest of the London diocese — both in terms of the salaries of the clergy and of other expenditure. Your contributor's claim that parish quotas are determined irrespective of the means of parishioners is untrue, because we operate a system of assessment by potential.
In Tower Hamlets, the population has been halved since 1951, and is now a quarter of what it was in 1901. Within a quarter of a mile of St George-in-the-East are four other Anglican churches; within one mile there are 13 Anglican churches. In the Stepney area as a whole, the Church of England has 77 churches, compared with 28 Roman Catholic. Part of our problem is caused by the Pastoral Mea- sure, which does not allow us the freedom to do what we need to do. We do not make our proposals on the basis of numbers attending church, but on the perceived need in a parish area. The long-term responsibility for maintaining churches must figure in our calculations, otherwise we can be driven to close churches which we need, simply because there are no funds to repair them.
Our hope is that we shall be able to use St George-in-the-East's position near to St Katharine's Dock and the Tower to attract more people to use it. One of the possibili- ties we are considering is to find ways of communicating both the history of the Christian faith in Britain, and also raising the question of faith in our own day. If this can be achieved, I believe St George's could become a famous place again, with a use appropriate to its scale and magnifi- cence, without being tied up in simply surviving, vulnerable to any structural de- terioration. It is not easy for us to heat and insure and keep such huge buildings going, and maintenance takes up far too much of the churches' energy.
If, during this series of items in the Spectator, a reporter had spoken to me about the proposals, I would have been able to say something about our decision to bring to an end this reorganisation phase in Stepney, except in two relatively small areas, and to concentrate on mission. We are determined to be an outward-looking and participating, Church, and we retain our enthusiasm for the truth and love of Christ.
We believe that the Church will grow, and indeed in several of the areas where we have re-organised, including the closure of some churches and the repair of others, the Church is growing and flourishing in a new way.
In your report, you suggest that we have changed our minds, as though this was a sign of weakness. I always thought that was the purpose of real consultation. I shall never be ashamed of U-turns. I realise that repentance after consultation is unfashion- able, but I shall stick with it, and consulting with local people will continue to be a main priority.
I would like to make it clear that inaccurate, personally abusive articles in the press will not change the proposals; only the understanding we have of the purposes of God for the Church in our area will do that. Our ideas about the living Church are not 'dated and trendy', they are based on the New Testament, where we are called to be the Body of Christ.
r James Stepney
23 Tredegar Square, Bow, London E3
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