The Church of England is among England’s largest landowners. An estimated 105,000 acres of this is managed by the Church Commissioners of which around 85,000 acres is farmland. An additional 30,000 acres of “Glebe Land” is owned by the Dioceses – managed by individual Diocesan Boards of Finance, following the rules laid out in Church Property Measure 2018 Glebe Land, but basically working under instruction to “manage and deal with the diocesan glebe land for the benefit of the diocesan stipends fund”.
In this article, Tim questions the assumption that land held by Church of England Dioceses should have as its main end the diocesan stipends fund. And he looks to the heart of biblical teaching, to the radical vision held for the church, and to the original meaning of glebe, and asks what if. . . .
The term ‘quahal’ (translated into English as ‘assembly’, ‘congregation’ or ‘company’) appears about one hundred times in the Old Testament, mostly in rather late strata. According to Gottwald it is ‘an instrument by which Israelites come together to reach collective decisions and to carry out ceremonial activities’. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek the word used for ‘quahal’ was ‘ekklesia’ (though on about twenty occasions ‘synagoge’). ‘Ecclesia’ was a political word, used first for the assembly of free adult males in 5thc BC Athens to determine policy. By the First century most Hellenistic cities had ecclesiae, though they no longer had democratic power. In Matthew 16.18 Jesus says: ‘You are Peter and on this rock (petros= ‘rock’) I will build my ekklesia’. Since the Reformation this has largely been regarded as a Roman Catholic interpolation, to boost the Petrine primacy, but Jesus, who spoke Aramaic, could well have spoken of his twelve disciples as the new ‘Quahal YHWH’ as his programme seems to have been to re-boot Israel.
The person who uses the word most, however, is Paul, a Hellenistic Jew whose mother tongue was Greek, but fluent in Hebrew. What did he mean by it? I think we are misled by our understanding of ‘church’. Paul’s vision was not narrowly religious. There was the first Adam, from whom all humans came, but now there was a new Adam, Christ, who ushered in a new humanity. Paul said, ‘In the messiah (Christos) there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female’. The fundamental divisions of human society no longer counted in the new reality. ‘Another world is possible’ is the superscription of all Paul’s letters, and not only that but, ‘Another world is on its way, just around the corner!’. Of course in his vision of the new humanity people would pray, worship, sing psalms, but above all they would live in a different kind of way, in a way based on forgiveness, mutual love and respect. His vision was not of a new religion but of a new worldwide social movement in which everything was changed. Although the First century had a money economy a world where money was the universal arbiter of value could never have crossed his mind!
This radical vision was what inspired the growth of ekklesia in the first three centuries. Certainly people met for worship but they felt themselves to be, and were in fact part of, a profound social change. In the 4th century Constantine was converted and Christianity became religio licita. It did not become the religion of empire until 380 but on his death Constantine did give large grants of property to the church. Such grants greatly increased from the 5th century onwards. In the 6th century we find bishops giving beneficia to clergy which had three purposes: they were to provide a house and food for the priest, candles for the church, and to provide for the poor. These beneficia are what we know as benefices and these purposes remained throughout the Middle Ages. The system was essentially feudal: in a society where land was the basis of 90% of the economy gifts of land (fiefs) were made in return for services, for example providing the owner with food. The word ‘glebe’ originally just meant ‘land’; it has come to mean land given to the church for its purposes. The largest ecclesiastical landowners were the monastic communities and, though often corrupt, they did provide hospitals, education and care for the poor in a society where there was, of course, no welfare state..
Land was given to the Church by people who hoped to earn credit in heaven and by the 12th century it is calculated that the Church controlled about a quarter of Europe’s land. At the same time there were always critics of ecclesiastical wealth. Waldensians, Franciscans, people like John Wycliffe, all wanted a poor church whilst kings and nobles coveted church land. Already in the 15th century the French monarchy was taking back land for itself and in the next century Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in England and distributed their lands (for cash) to his supporters. All the same, at the end of this process the church in this country still had three million acres, 2.1 million acres of which remained in 1872. As of today this supposedly stands at 100,000 acres: quite where all this land went to is mysterious. The question however is what the land is for. The Church Commissioners believe that it is to support clergy, their houses and the upkeep of churches. In their view Charity law obliges them to get the highest return on their investment, including land, in order to do this. Now supporting clergy is obviously part of the original purpose, and maintaining buildings can be viewed as an extension of providing church lighting. But what has happened to support for the poor – not to mention the vision of a world made otherwise?. The Commissioners and their agents work entirely according to the laws of the market – continuing to invest in weapons, for example, which we cannot imagine Christ condoning. This represents both a drastic narrowing of the original understanding of ekklesia as the seed bed of a new society, but also sometimes (in views expressed by Commissioners and in their investment practices) a downright perversion. The purpose of ekklesia is to further life in all its fullness, to practise justice, righteousness and mercy, to live by the gospel of the kingdom. Here and there, as with the Apricot Centre in Dartington, we can see glebe land made available for such purposes but this is the exception rather than the rule. The Church of England has, for a very long time, been held in golden chains and what will renew it is not pious missionary practice but a recovery of the Church’s original radical vision, the antithesis of a world ruled by money, a world renewed ‘as on the starting day’.
Tim Gorringe is Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies at the University of Exeter where he taught (among other things) courses in “Food, Faith and Farming”. He has written on the Church’s response to climate change including how climate change affects our agricultural practices. He is an Anglican Priest and until recently and his retirement, was a smallholder.
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