The quaint country church Patricia Stewart attends is one of her tiny community’s lasting landmarks.
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But now a cloud hangs over its future.
St George’s Anglican Church sits within Moriarty’s fertile farming landscape. The weatherboard place of worship is one of the properties earmarked for sale by the Anglican diocese to help pay redress to victims of child sexual abuse.
“It’s just a little country church and we love it,” Mrs Stewart said.
She has played the church organ for 69 years.
“It’s very old, in fact, I think it’s about the oldest church on the North-West Coast still used for worship.”
For parishioners like Mrs Stewart, her son Brian and the others who come here, the church is the heart of the community and it means so much to the past and present.
St George’s is among 78 properties, including 55 churches, on the preliminary sale list, released by the Anglican Diocese. For the congregants at several of the churches on the list a fight is brewing to save their’s from going under the hammer.
Mrs Stewart felt “very upset” after she left a parish meeting inside the hall at St Luke’s at Latrobe on Thursday. The meeting attended by about 40 people was addressed by the Anglican Bishop of Tasmania Richard Condie.
“I am absolutely devastated, Mrs Stewart said after hearing the Bishop speak.
“I feel as if the rug has been pulled from under my feet really,” she said. “We need a community centre … certainly our congregation has dropped, but we need somewhere for them to go.”
Mrs Stewart doesn’t think the diocese had a plan for people like her and her fellow parishioners, who felt somewhat abandoned.
“I think they expect us to trot along into a big centre, which it is not what country people need,” she said. “I’ve talked to people who say that’s not where they want to go they like to go to church to a spiritual place.”
Also at the Latrobe meeting was St Luke’s parishioner Harvey Fox. He said churches were places of inspiration for people to come to.
“We just love our church,” Mr Fox said.
“My parents were married here, I was baptised and went to Sunday school here.
“A gentleman with a very stressful job told me back when the doors were open day and night he used to come to sit in that church to give himself inspiration for the rest of the day.”
Mr Fox said their priest only left six weeks ago after he was transferred to King Island.
Latrobe’s Kem Perkins said it was being left to parishioners who worked to maintain the churches over many years to pay for something the church did.
“They need to correct their mistakes because we are paying for church errors,” Mr Perkins said.
Brian Stewart agreed.
“I just think there is a dark paradox here of the lack of pastoral care in the past leading to the lack of pastoral care now,” Mr Stewart said.
“There’s people that need the church for the pastoral care that’s going to disappear because of this … we’ve lost our banks and our schools, were losing other things and the last resort was our church.”
Mr Perkins said St Luke’s in Hamilton Street at Latrobe was built in 1903. The Latrobe Federal Band stalwart said it had magnificent acoustics.
“We’ve got a concert here on June 1 that will be a full-house,” Mr Fox said.
Mr Perkins said he was “very concerned” about several stained glass windows in the church, which his family donated for his father, mother and sister.
Mr Perkins said the diocese should have looked at what it could raise from land before selling community churches.
Bishop Condie said he didn’t want to close churches, but it was the right thing to do to provide restorative justice, recognition and support to survivors of sexual abuse. He said the long-term vision of the church meant change.
“We have to rethink who we are and rethink our mission,” Dr Condie said.
He said churches on the list for sale were not in a sustainable position.
”We’ve applied pretty dispassionately a measure of sustainability whether the ministry can be sustained in the long-run and those measures are around attendance, around finances and around governance capabilities, and if we can’t sustain the ministry in the long-term those properties are on the list.
“Parishes have an opportunity to make a case to us of why they shouldn’t be on the list, but that’s why they’re on the list.”
Dr Condie said the diocese was contacted daily by someone interested in buying a Tasmanian church, including a buyer interested to purchase a church to make it available for the Anglican Church to use again.
“We will look at every credible proposal people put to us for their churches not to be sold,” Dr Condie said.
“It’s agonising to be doing it, but we have to keep in the forefront of our minds the survivors of sexual abuse; that is the only reason we are doing this.
“I met one of the survivors last week he put his arms around me he said ‘thank you so much for what you are doing’.”
Dr Condie said in each sale 25 per cent goes to the redress fund and 25 per cent to new ministry development. He said 10 per cent of that stays with the diocese but 15 per cent of it is claimable back by the parish for a new idea.
“The remaining 50 per cent stays locally here,” Dr Condie said.
He said 65 per cent can remain in local hands and it’s hoped parishes can think of creative ways to finance ministries with the funds.
“If we took 100 per cent of this St Luke’s building that’s behind me here we would finish the ministry that happens at Latrobe. Last year during the flood Anglicans raised $40,000 for flood victims in this valley that was people giving money to people.
“If we can retain up to 65 per cent locally of the sale money we can keep a minister here - at the moment they can only afford a half-time minister. I can’t pay people half a salary so the money that remains locally can pay for putting the stipend on so I can employ a full-time minister.”
Dr Condie said the majority of the Christian world did not have a building to meet in.
“We need to create new spaces, new gathering places and probably not exclusive places. This building is only used for Anglican worship once a week and we probably need to be in places used for a whole range of other things. I think this is an opportunity for the church to be more embedded in its local community rather than closeted away.”
It was not what the congregation at St Paul’s at East Devonport wanted to hear. St Paul’s parishioner June Clayton said six children were to be confirmed in their church at the end of July.
“This is the church they have been nurtured in and the church they love coming to. I feel it would be very unfair to take them away from here when they are just newly confirmed and expect them to go somewhere else,” Mrs Clayton said.
The Devonport congregation is split between St John’s on the other side of the Mersey River and St Paul’s where services. There were usually 40 parishioners at services at St Paul’s and a few less in Devonport.
Molly Mundy wanted the Bishop to know every Christmas 500 people attended Christmas in the East.
After an arsonist set fire to the church it took a big community effort to rebuild it.
”It’s always been the volunteers that have worked very hard for what we’ve got,” she said.