"It costs £95 per day to maintain

St Ippolyts Church"

"The church is only after your money"

Perhaps we should come clean and when we hear that familiar lament admit it,

"Yes we are because we need it."

20 years ago, when I worked for a small charity which helped the homeless, the organisation was funded largely by grants and very low rent paid on behalf of our clients by the state. I cannot remember now the exact figures but our running costs were somewhere in the region of £2000 per week. Think for a moment of any organisation that you are involved with and think how much it costs each week to run and compare it with the figures published on these financial pages for the weekly
There are still many prevalent myths about the Church of England – that it owns half of England, that it wastes money by suicidal investment policies and that it is staffed almost entirely by chauffeur-driven bishops who live in palaces! The truth is that most of the Church’s income is split three ways – paying for the maintenance of parish priests, caring for church buildings and giving fair financial support to retired clergy. Most of the costs of the first two come from the parishes, for the last from historical resource. We all know that nothing comes for free and other things that the Church offers, the Sunday School, a warm building, courses for new and established believers, and of course music and worship need some financial backing. Rather than wasting money the Church tries to live up to its responsibility to bear witness to the Gospel and to give people pastoral and spiritual support on a shoestring. When you consider giving please remember this and help us to maintain a presence in the community.

"It has been estimated that if all those committed to their Church donated the equivalent of a bottle of wine and their weekly paper bill we would have no financial troubles at all ”.