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God’s work is an expensive enterprise

A £1 billion turnover? A pension problem? In the first of a series on the business of religion, The Times looks at the Church of England.

Full story at The Times.

Plus, 'Dosh and devotion are not exclusive', writes Ruth Gledhill.

Religion and finance have rarely been as comfortable bedfellows as they are in Britain today.

Despite its rising pension bill, the Church of England has turned round the management of its £5.3 billion assets since heavy losses in the early 1990s. For Muslims, Sharia-compliant finance is now commonplace. In the Jewish community, subscriptions for synagogue membership bring security and other benefits to religious practice.

To the non-religious public, mistakenly equating the devout life with poverty, merely to speak of religion and finance in the same breath can seem sacrilegious. Catholic priests and monks swear to a life of poverty, and Jesus preached that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

But scholars believe that this contained a joke. In Jesus’s time, the 'eye of the needle' was a small door in the walls of Jerusalem that was the only way to enter the city at night. Traders could get their camels through only by stripping them of all their baggage and making them go on bended knee. Jesus was reminding his followers that they cannot take material wealth with them when they die.

As St Paul makes clear in his first letter to Timothy, it is not so much money but the “love of money” that is the root of all evil.

Full story at The Times.