to be really quite disgusted with the Church?

[CopperHandle]

Visited Norwich Cathedral and the place was plastered in begging signs asking for donations. They were boasting that it costs almost £4000 a DAY to run the building, not including major repairs which regularly run into six figures in a year.

For an institute that preaches charitable giving, putting others before self etc etc is it not massively hypocritical to run in such a way that is so incredibly costly?
£4,000 a day for a single building... so there are more than 80 cathedrals in the UK - just on this alone - how many people could be helped with this amount of money?!

AIBU to think this is massively hypocritical and, well, just plain wrong?

If you feel that badly about dying people raise money yourself. Make sure all of the things in your house and that you wear aren't made in appalling conditions. You remind me of the people at Occupy London, tweeting about the evils of capitalism from their iPhones. The irony is painful

Someone said upthread that the buildings could be given to the National Trust or another heritage organisation. It isn't that simple: the NT needs to resource it's work and generally won't take new buildings on without a substantial endowment. I used to work in the heritage world: "substantial" means millions. So the church loses its building and also has to part with a sizeable amount of money.

There is no solution to this, short of getting a time machine and persuading our ancestors not to build churches and cathedrals in the first place. One way or another, either the church or the taxpayer has to pay for the upkeep (once a building is listed, it's a criminal offence to leave it to decay, and as previously mentioned all repairs and works are more expensive and complicated than work to unlisted buildings).

They were boasting that it costs almost £4000 a DAY to run the building

Just like the RSPCA are 'boasting' about how many animals they have handed in.

Or Childline 'boasting' about how many calls they get.

I don't think you know what you're talking about, and clearly you don't know anything about historical buildings and how much they take to run. If you don't maintain them they fall apart - fast. Especially if the roof goes. The sort of daily repairs and restorations aren't 'major projects' but they add up.

If you're visiting as a tourist, of course you should donate. I can see people's point about the Church maintaining it themselves, but then they would be within their rights to close it to non-worshippers. You (and millions of others) choose to visit a place of worship as a tourist destination, you should be prepared to donate. It would be a lot cheaper for them to run it if they closed the doors except for services. It would still be expensive, but a lot of the cost is due to people like you.

The Church of England is one of the largest landowners in the country. They won't get a penny from me.

Errol can you please give some examples of church activities that are worthy, in your opinion, of tax breaks and those that are not.

And also tell us how we are not transparent with our accounts.

Voluntary donations are just that. Voluntary. Whether you or I choose to donate our money to a church or to any other organisation is our choice. It wont stop rough sleepers. Or pregnant school girls. Or floods in Asia. Or mosquitoes in Africa. Or any other cause the OP deems more important or more necessary than a cathedral.

www.cathedral.org.uk/about/support-our-future in case anyone wants to make a donation to preserving our history

As you can guess from my name, I am a confirmed atheist.
I actually like visiting churches in the UK and abroad, from a plainly aesthetic point of view. Some have fantastic art within them. I am also quietly amazed at the engineering that goes into them, built at a time when there wasn't the technology we have today.
They do contravene the New Testament, and I do find it ludicrous that they exist, because Christians can just as well pray anywhere (if their God is omnipresent as they claim).
They were also generally built for the ruling classes. The ordinary farmer would have had to worship at a local church or chapel near his land. In the main the samend now is true, to visit one you need a decent income.
I do think the cathedrals charge too much. I had a mini heart attack in front of the clerk at York last year. Westminster Cathedral and St Paul's in London charge a king's ransom to go in.
Generally, they are a silly anachronism, but they are here, they are expensive, they are a legacy of our Christian past, and what can the C of E do but, as custodians, try and keep them from falling down?
The CofE makes plenty of cash from chancel repair liability and all their estates, they are hardly slumming it, cash flow-wise.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that Norwich Cathedral's salary bill of around £650,000 per year, which is about 50% of their income from voluntary donations.

Add in energy and equipment/material costs, and it all adds up.

Catholic church has more money than it knows what to do with... they could fund their own restoration.

Did the Reformation pass you by?

If people don't believe in the religion of whatever religious building they are visiting I would imagine it's very much like visiting a museum so I have no issue with donation requests.

Plus how many stonemasons or stained glass experts do we all know. In my old job two of my colleagues had Fathers who had been in these professions, highly unusual and both these men are long dead now. I would imagine the scarcity of their skill set makes them rare and expensive to employ.

The churches in my local town set up a food bank a few years ago and before many were around its fed thousands of people. One has also had a free hot dinner over the summer holidays available but bills it as a community get together. The local homeless shelter is run by a religious organisation. Due to work I have done I have had dealings with them. They not only house and train people and try and help them with addiction problems they give food and clothes out at the door no questions asked, no conversion to religion required and no preaching.

As much as organised religion has many faults a lot of good work is still done to help vulnerable people. But like any organisation it will suffer because of individuals such as the poster upthread who mentioned someone demanded a donation.

Chancel Repair Liability ended several years ago. It was the duty of the trustees of each church to investigate this (imposed by the Charities Commission and nothing to do with the church itself).

I know for my church that we identified many people in our community who were liable to this tax, but pastorally, we made a pastoral decision not to pursue this. I am sure many churches up and down the land made similar decisions.

Afaik the accounts of the Cof E, and of other churches and charities are transparent - I don't believe I implied otherwise.

As to what your church may spend money on, whether it should be supported by taxpayers or not - I would encourage you to have an honest think about that for yourself.

It that an admission of talking rubbish through this thread. Sad. I thought it was quite a straightforward question.

I know exactly how we allocate of resources and the value of them to the community, btw.

Why bother keeping anything old which costs money then? Why not sell every valuable piece of art, architecture and preserved cultural or scientific item, and demolish all museums, monuments, galleries, preserved historical sites, and sell luxury flats there to raise money for the poor? Or why don't more people give up more of their own non-essential items, or downsize, to give more to charity? It's easier to point the finger at cathedrals I suppose.

Yes, we could worship in tents, but this is part of our heritage and part of what makes townscapes worth looking at. Plus quite frankly they are pretty inspiring buildings even for the non-religious. Converting them all into shopping malls and warehouse flats would be a bit of a shame to say the least. Then the whole world would eventually look like Scunthorpe or Kettering town centre.

I meant it genuinely- I don't know the details of your organisation. I have some idea about what churches in general do spend money on and it is most certainly not all of benefit to anyone outside the 'club'. Maybe yours is unusual.

TTtb

That's quite economical for a cathedral. Most that I have been to cost around £1[m] pounds a year.

£4K per day = £1,460,000.

When we moved, our solicitor picked up on a clause (that we needed to pay an insurance to avoid) so the local church couldn't come round and demand money for repairs from its parishioners (didn't matter if you did/did not go to church). Apparently it is true but I can't ever imagine a church doing that.

Well, I suppose because it's specifically the teaching of Jesus, Sequence, whereas it isn't the teachings of Art Collectors, say.

(Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.)

I'm not saying the Church should sell its cathedrals! But that's the reason it's different.

Unfortunately, joey, there were a few cases where churches did do this. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/not-very-christian-rural-communities-in-uproar-as-250-anglican-churches-use-ancient-rules-that-could-9289590.html . The diocese I'm in evidently decided it should find out which parishes might 'benefit' from this before it was abolished, unless doing so might adversely affect their fundraising http://www.blackburn.anglican.org/storage/general-files/shares/Resources/Church%20buildings%20land/Chancel%20repair%20liability/201211Chancellrepairliabilityyupdate.pdf

That's why I wanted you to give examples of the different kinds of activities you think churches do, and then we can discuss how worthy they are.

BTW, being part of a church is not a binary thing. You are not either all in or all out. It's a gradual thing.

Zoloh - and then theres Matt 6 5:7 www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+6&version=NIV ....

Trying to maintain glorious old buildings is actually one of the least disgusting things the church does, in my opinion!

The church did not initiate Chancel Repair Liability. It all came from the Charities Commission. As charity trustees, PCC have a duty to work in the best interest of the charity, and that includes raising money.

We were bound by law to find landowners who had this historical obligation. It took a lot of investigation. In our case, the pockets of land that were relevent are now covered in social housing. It would have made absolutely no pastoral sense to chase 200 households for this small amount. As trustees, we believed that going after CRL was not in the best interests of the charity.

CPL ended a few years ago, so no one need worry about this or take out insurance.