We met tonight to discuss selling Bishop’s Court ( the house in which all the Adelaide Bishop’s have lived since the See was created in the mid 19th Century). The house is something of a liability given its age and its unsatisfactory nature for the modern Bishop. Lots more could be said!
What did happen tonight was that one quiet lady got up and said that we needed to know how much the house would bring and how much it would cost to house our new bishop. No, no the senior legal beagle remonstrated, the synod doesn’t need to know the details…just vote in principle and then trust us to work it all out.
Very patronising stuff!
Thank goodness that person after person got up and supported the original speaker.
4 comments:
I also thought it was a bit a cavalier(Spelling???) to suggest that not even a ball park figure could be given to compare what Bishop's Court might bring, and the cost of a suitable residence for the bishop, as described by John Collas 10 minutes from ACO.
A quick read of the real estate will show that a smaller property in Palmer Place was in the Saturday advertiser for high 2's , that's millions. And the only suburb mentioned seemed to be North Adelaide or Unley Park!!
I thought Prospect, or Hindmarsh or Parkside are only 10 minutes aways.
And I was so sorry that I did not have a hanky with me for the poor guy who couldn't find a suitable place to live in for under 2 mill!!!!!!!!
I think your spelling of cavalier is correct!
Yes...I suggested Blair Athol as a potential suburb! If you wanted to be more upmarket then I would have thought Unley was fine...lots of excellent houses in Unley!
Anywhere within the ring of, say, Cross Road, Portrush Road,Regency Road, South Road...even Woodville Road.
It's interesting to note that when the saintly Abp Faulkner moved out of West Terrace he moved to Plympton.
Well, if you think Blair Athol is suitable, I'd be willing to swap my house for Bishop's Court. Somehow I doubt that anything in that area, which is very substantially developed at present, would meet our new Abp's needs. I'm sure it would put him cheek by jowl with the common suburbanites though, and he would really enjoy the stench of the burnouts on the road outside the house (obviously too many young men have more money than they know what to do with) and the police helicopter circling overhead with their searchlight for hours on a Friday or Saturday night. The bin-burning gang would not bother sifting through his rubbish for anything saleable - they'd just set it alight like all the other wheelie bins in the street. It used to be a quiet suburb but these days the criminal and hoon element seems to be well represented. Members of my family have had to put up with police interrogations just because they were out walking and minding their own business.
I was personally glad that we defeated the motion to sell Bishop's Court. The Anglican Church has sold so much property that it is obviously running out of things to sell if we have to get rid of the "family home", and despite all those other sales, the Church is still in a poor state financially, from what I can tell. We should be rolling in it, but we're not!!! The press would have a field day with it because it would signal that we were unable to pay our compensation claims and we needed to have a fire sale. True or not, you can bet your boots that this would be the inference drawn and the way your average person in the street would put the two things together - given that these are the only things making the headlines for the Church at the moment.
What some of the lay people would like to see is a bit of lateral thinking as regards this asset. If the Abp does not want to live there, the property should be put to work to earn some money. With some site development, we could turn it into an Anglican Women's College like Janet Clarke Hall in Melbourne, it could be a conference/wedding venue for up-market conferences, or what about putting in a manager and making it into a silver-service executive B&B? It is worth far more actually making money for the
Church than selling it off, which can only be done once - like all our other property. Using the proceeds to house our bishop elsewhere and the remainder for youth programs or whatever sounds fairly unsatisfactory to me. Once the capital is spent there can be no more. It may give some small advantage for a short time but I cannot see that being sustainable over the long run.
I think that we have a stewardship problem here - we have been poor stewards of the property, which should have always had a regular budget for ongoing repairs and maintenance. What is not used in one year can be held over to the next, but it must not be diverted elsewhere. The same should apply to any building belonging to the Church.
It is all very well to say that the Church is not about bricks and mortar, but a fact of life is that we DO need to care for the bricks and mortar we use for whatever purposes to keep them in good condition. We should be more aware of the parable of the talents, perhaps.
Stewardship should not be restricted to property or money - it should also be about people and caring for all the people in our Church, and especially those who have been abused. The ones who are coming forward as having been sexually abused are not the only ones who have been damaged by the 'servants' of the Church. There is a lot of psychological damage that happens without any physical abuse. A case in point would be my own mother, who was stalked by one of our parish priests till his mental state in other areas caused him to be sent to 'St John of God', and when she was dying of cancer, one of his successors insisted on giving her tracts about repenting of her sins to be cured of her disease. She was no more sinful than any other good, ordinary person, and this approach was particularly inappropriate for someone like her. It's no wonder she was a bundle of nerves and needed her happy pills to cope with life. Some clergy are clearly not good at relating in a helpful way to their parishioners, but if they intend to be people set aside to do the work of God, they should be more cognisant of the messages they give to their congregations by their actions, attitudes and management style. All our people are important and need their priest to remember that Jesus came to be a servant not a master. All clergy have a stewardship responsibility to their 'flock'.
Ok - that's enough - I'll get off my soap box now.
I have nothing against Blair Athol, I cited it because I was once parish priest up that way.
It is interesting to note that when we talked about living in the N or NE...we didn't actually appear to get much further North than Tynte Street or NE than the ABC building.
I tried to give the Synod an opportunity to bring the more lateral proposal back in May, but it was not to be.
Now I think we will not be in a position to have the same tedious debate for three or four years....perhaps never.
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