CHURCH “PLUMS”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 December 1938, Page 8

CHURCH “PLUMS”

POSITION IN ENGLAND.

WIRE-PULLING METHODS

The Archdeacon of Northumberland, Dr Leslie Hunter, referred to “the unseemly wire-pulling for Church plums” in an address at the concluding meeting of the Church Congress at Bristol. He said that the wjde gap between the average stipend of the parochial clergy and that of dignitaries did not promote esprit de corps.

So far as was possible in so classridden a country as England, increase in spiritual responsibility ought not necessarily to mean increase in social status and income within the Christian fellowship. Inequalities between benefices resulted in livings often being considered “important” for- irrelevant reasons and being sought after for unspiritual reasons. These inequalities were gross, glaring and irrational. A system of pooling endowments was the most efficient and ethical economy for a ministry which ought to be a missionary body with a strong corporate sense. If £3OO were to be the minimum for every priest after 10 years’ service with a small increment every 10th year, and minimum additions according to the classification of the benefice, the clergy would be, in effect, on the same basis. The unseemly wire-pulling for “plums” and the undesirable distinction between beneficed and unbeneficed clergy would cease. The problem of clerical poverty was the problem of the married man with a family. If they wished to make it possible for the priest to give his children a good and complete schooling and did not wish him to reduce his wife to a domestic drudge, they must give family allowances. The amount and degree of clerical poverty ought to make the Anglican laity, who got their religion very cheaply, heartily ashamed, he said. A possible sign of the economic pressure in parsonage houses was the decline in the size of clerical families.