Talking Point: Value the traditions of the church

RODNEY CROOME: Property sale prompts reflection on the best of Anglican values and character

PRECIOUS: Sacred places matter. Picture: ISTOCK/GETTY

AFTER my mother’s father died in the mid 1980s she was unexpectedly stopped in the streets of Devonport by elderly people who thanked her for the help he had given their families when they were children during the Depression in the farming district of Thirlstane.

When times were toughest and their cupboards were bare, they would wake to find Tom Iles had left them a side of meat or a case of vegetables at their front door.

The sale of many Tasmanian country Anglican churches has prompted me to reflect a lot on my Anglican heritage, and stories like the one about my Anglican grandfather.

The Church of England has many negative associations: elitism, imperialism and snobbery.

But the North-West country church I knew as a child, and the Anglicans I grew up amongst, were nothing like that. They were, in general, gentle, patient and good-humoured people, less judgmental than others, possibly because their faith was less obsessed with guilt and sin. They were more moderate and wary of extremes, I assume because the Anglican Church was born of compromise.

Like my grandfather, they also had a strong sense of responsibility to the community, perhaps an echo of a time when the C of E was the established church.

Of course, these are characteristics of people regardless of their faith, or lack of it. But they are also values rural Anglicanism has fostered and firmly implanted at the heart of the Tasmanian character.

To sell the churches that are the physical expression of these values not only guts the Anglican community, it guts who we are as Tasmanians.

There are plenty of other reasons the sale of these churches should not go ahead.

The churches were built by local communities and belong to those communities.

When the Anglican hierarchy seizes control they are defying the long tradition of putting community at the centre of worship and instead taking a more centralised, Catholic approach by putting the institutional church first.

They are also drawing on the very modern ideology of managerialism, treating the church like a company with the bishop as its CEO, clergy as staff and parishioners as customers. Both approaches channel power to the top and devalue communal spiritual life for all Anglicans, not just those whose churches are for the chop.

I understand the Anglican Church needs to stay relevant in a competitive spiritual marketplace.

But Anglicans will never excel at happy clapping and rock bands.

Anglicanism’s competitive advantage over other churches is tradition: It was the faith of the ancestors of many Australians alive today, and embodies spiritual traditions going back centuries.

Insofar as country churches represent this tradition, they shouldn’t be sacrificed for the sake of the Church, the Church should make sacrifices to keep them.

Another concern I have is about the Church apparently dedicating some of the funds to missionary work.

Some Anglican bishops in Africa and Asia have campaigned in favour of laws criminalising homosexuality.

It would be unacceptable if money from Tasmania found its way into campaigns against LGBTI human rights in the developing world.

It was bad enough that the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney spent a million dollars on the No case during last year’s marriage equality postal survey, a vote he must have known he would lose.

Imagine how many Tasmanian country churches could have been saved had that money been spent on them?

My hope is that Bishop Richard Condie will reassure Tasmanians that no money made from selling our ancestor’s graves will be spent sending LGBTI people to an early grave.

Another purpose for the money raised will be redress for sexual abuse.

Like any civilised person, I want the Church to pay for its historical crimes against innocent and vulnerable people, but the church has other assets it should sell first.

Why should small, vulnerable, rural communities — those that are least able to afford it — be the ones to pay for the crimes of the past hierarchy?

Defenders of the church sale have said faith communities are about people, not bricks and mortar.

But if that was the case, instead of chasing the money-lenders out of the Temple, Jesus would have said “sell the place”.

He didn’t because he understood sacred places matter.

They connect us to each other, to all those who have gone before, and hopefully, to those who come after us.

I’ve also heard defenders of the sale refer to the small and diminishing number of parishioners in rural Tasmania.

Again, I refer them to the Bible, which makes plain that neither Jesus nor the apostles cared how tiny their flocks were.

What mattered to them was that their followers were faithful to God.

I’ve heard the church sale cheekily compared to the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII.

A more accurate comparison is the periodic waves of iconoclasm that have devastated Christian communities down the centuries, destroying everything valuable and unique in those communities.

Like iconoclastic outbursts before it, this one seems to be about making way for a new, narrow, moralistic puritanism which gives power to the “elect” few at the expense of the “sinful” many.

Much that is precious about Tasmania is at risk.

Rich farmland has been sold to foreign companies, there are proposals to diminish our grandest peaks with cable cars, investors propose skyscrapers that will mar our Georgian streetscapes and developers want to turn our rolling countryside into fake towns.

From the moment of European invasion, Tasmanians have been dispossessed again and again.

The sale of Tasmania’s historic rural Anglican churches is just another part of this history of dispossession.

It’s time for us to draw the line and say our land, our buildings, our communities belong to us and we will decide their future. Tasmania’s soul is not for sale.

Rodney Croome is a long-time human rights advocate and was named the 2015 Tasmanian of the Year.