COVER STORY

While regional communities protesting church sales are reluctant to sacrifice their heritage to pay for church sins of the past, the bishop’s main concern beyond redress is the Anglican Church losing its flock

Bishop of Tasmania, Dr Richard Condie defends his position on the church’s redress sales

The two-storey building has good bones, but the stairwell and corridors through which one passes to meet the Right Reverend Dr Bishop Richard Condie in his inner sanctum at the diocesan registry of St David’s Cathedral are dark, dated and a little dreary. Comforting in a white tea and biscuits way, it is also disappointingly drab next to the stained-glass and polished timber glory of the cathedral interior next door on the corner of Macquarie and Murray streets.

As I wait for Bishop Condie to wrap up a staff meeting, my attention flits from a rack stacked with diocesan newsletters and disciple-making pamphlets to sketchy ideas on what I’d do, if I were in the property game, to turn a buck by turning this epic renovator in the beautiful sandstone heart of old Hobart into the city’s most elegant apartments.

Banish the thought! Or don’t, actually, as this idle fantasy of transformation is, in a way, not so far removed from the fate that may await some of Tasmania’s best-loved churches if they are sold, as intended, to pay for old sins of some in the Church and fund a change of direction aimed at attracting more Tasmanians to the Anglican fold.

The proposed “fire-sale”, as it’s been dubbed, of up to 108 properties, including 76 church buildings, was prompted earlier this year by the need to raise millions of dollars in compensation for historical victims of paedophile priests and other sexual predators of children associated with the state’s Anglican churches.

Exactly how many of these churches will ultimately be sold will be determined over coming months, but it’s quite likely we will see some of these traditional places of worship reborn as weekend getaways on Airbnb by this time next year. With photographs strategically cropped, of course – for, in the words of an historian who strongly opposes the church sales on heritage grounds, “I wonder how many people actually want a sweet B&B with a graveyard in the garden”.

After the staff meeting ends, Anglican Diocese of Tasmania communications officer Sonya de Lacey leads me in to meet the

bishop in his study. She is a calm presence who radiates compassion. Abundant natural light floods in from large timberframed windows overlooking Macquarie St and the Treasury Building, but overall the atmosphere is a little cool. Bishop Condie’s demeanour is not quite as equanimous as his reverential offsider’s.

Our interview is an opportunity for Bishop Condie to respond to many of the criticisms the Mercury has fielded relating to the church sales. And he does so, with vigour. He wastes no time in expressing his displeasure over some media coverage, including – perhaps especially – the Mercury’s, of the church sale controversy, and remarks how close to defamatory he believes some content has been.

We are not off to a great start. I tell him I think the vast majority of Tasmanians laud him for leading the nation in his decisive response to the National Redress Scheme, which started on July 1, but this appears to do little to soothe his troubled mood. He had thought so, too, he comments, but with the backlash lately, he is beginning to wonder. His personal bond with some abuse survivors, who express deep gratitude for his abiding support, means a lot to him through these difficult days.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Just months after being hailed for a redress response firmed up over a soul-searching Lent season of Lament and Repentance, Tasmania’s 12th Anglican bishop in 174 years finds himself on the defensive.

Is he surprised by the level of community criticism? “Yes,” he says. “The church has been criticised for sitting on its hands and doing nothing about sexual abuse. I’ve taken my hands out, I’ve done something about it and we’ve been criticised again, for the method we’ve chosen.”

How does that make you feel? “I’m not sure I want to be in the paper about how I feel,” he says, his eyes filling with tears and his voice beginning to choke up as he refers to the suffering of victims of abuse. “It is agonising. It is painful because local church communities are hurting and people are hurting, but [we must] provide redress and support and justice for people who have been wronged.”

His pain for the survivors of the catastrophic abuse of church power by paedophiles is clear. So is his conviction that the church should own its terrible history as well as its nobler past, and make amends however it can, including financially.

Getting slammed by sections of the community for his methods of raising the money for restitution “feels very unjust”, but there are no other ways to do this, he says. “I understand why it’s painful, but there’s an economic reality to it.”

Bishop Condie’s methods may be too “CEO” for some. He refers several times in our conversation to his need to be “a good corporate manager”, but his vision for the Anglican church is crystal clear. Furthermore, he is acting with the resounding support of the synod (assembly of clergy from the state’s 45 parishes).

From his perspective, it is primarily people in the broader community who oppose the sales, with the potential loss of heritage and family history, including access to graveyards, their main concern.

There’s a lot of angst out there, we agree. What would you do differently if you were starting this process again? “We’d communicate more,” he says. “We’d try to explain what we were doing better. Maybe if we had sat down with the rural mayors at the beginning …”

He says he has been asking for constructive engagement with the mayors from the start, to little avail. He was not invited to a protest meeting held in Campbell Town on August 26.

The gathering of more than 300 people from around the state was organised by the new Save Our Community Soul coalition of regional groups, which aims to form a legal entity to challenge the diocese’s right to force sales. SOCS is also asking for the submissions process to be slowed down, allowing time for hot heads to cool and parishes and communities to come up with the best way of raising money for redress while being able to keep their churches.

SOCS had its first formal meeting with the bishop on Monday, with members leaving the session more hopeful than when they arrived, and reassured that community input will be genuinely valued. This dialogue may well prove to be the breakthrough all stakeholders have been hoping for.

In our meeting, Bishop Condie indicated he would be open to to pushing out the sales decision deadline, if warranted, by taking the proposition to the diocesan council.

He says he also was reassured in a meeting with the Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman this month that changes to the Burial and Cremation Act (relating to ongoing public graveyard access to affected sites) would be finalised and legislated by November, before the diocesan council makes its decisions, which are expected in December.

During our hour-long conversation Bishop Condie emphasises the church sales are not a done deal. Each parish and community has until October 1 to make a case for keeping its house of God, with submission outlines provided by the diocese detailing various criteria by which a church could be saved from deconsecration and sale. (For guidelines and to submit feedback, email registrar@anglicantas.org.au)

The bishop says the current feedback stage is far from being a formality. On the contrary, it will influence the next stage of the plan, with considerations given to significance of the site to the community; historic/cultural heritage and importance locally and nationally; and the potential future need for a church presence in the area.

By last Tuesday, two formal submissions had been received. The Parish of Holy Trinity Launceston, which wants to keep St Matthias’ Church at Windermere, has raised the funds, with the help of its local community, to meet its redress contribution. The Break O’Day Parish Council will also propose to the diocesan council that it use funds held in trust to meet its redress contribution. If accepted St Michael and All Angels Pyengana will be removed from the sale list.

The church registry office has also received many emails from community groups and individuals, with that feedback to be shared with the diocesan councils. Through this process, the diocesan council will be in no doubt over what’s at stake in terms of heritage loss.

“This is important Australian history,” says cultural historian and Anglican Dr Caroline Miley, who grew up in Tasmania and now lives in Melbourne. “It is unconscionable that such a massive number of buildings, artefacts and precincts should be lost to the National Estate in one fell swoop. The single fact that 32 out of the 76 churches proposed for sale are already heritagelisted tells its own story of the recognised significance of these buildings. These premises, in the first instance, should be completely exempt from any sell-off.

“These are buildings built and attended by convicts and their jailers. They were built on land donated by early state governors, notable pioneers and state politicians, with funds donated by these colonials and opened by the likes of Sir John Franklin.”

As well, she says, they contain the honour boards, memorials and graves of those who fought and died in conflicts from the 19th century onwards. “In private hands, all this will pass out of the National Estate. Their significance is indelibly associated with their nature as a church, complete with its fittings.”

Dr Miley’s list of nationally significant architectural heritage at risk includes two churches by James Blackburn; four churches by Henry Hunter; four churches by Alexander North; three churches by Alan Walker and one each connected with William Butterfield and Robert de Little. “Some are in the rare (in Australia) Georgian style or in idiosyncratic Tasmanian Carpenter Gothic,” she says. Among other treasures listed are six heritagelisted organs by important makers.

Make no mistake, Bishop Richard Condie is a man on a mis

sion. In conversation, he comes across as someone who would be very hard if not impossible to sway from his chosen course, so resolute is he that his path is the right one. Thus empowered and heavily backed by the synod, he plans to use the opportunity forced by the need to fund redress to shake up the Anglican ministry in Tasmania.

This is Bishop Condie’s big picture. It’s not a secret agenda. He is as open and unapologetic about it as he is about being the national chair of a conservative orthodox strand of the Anglican Church that believes that there are only two expressions of faithful sexuality – lifelong marriage between a man and a woman and abstinence – and that homosexual practice is “incompatible with Scripture”.

He is part of global movement GAFCON, named after the Global Anglican Future Conference at which it formed a decade ago, splitting with the Archbishop of Canterbury over dissent regarding gender, sexuality, marriage and other issues. GAFCON’s Australian iteration, which Bishop Condie heads, calls itself the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Like other GAFCON leaders, he rebuffs its rendering as a one-issue pressure group that has promoted schism, countering that the breakaways are actually the Anglican groups who have departed from the Bible’s teachings and the church’s historic doctrine.

Bishop Condie’s plan for Anglican Church revival in Tasmania is ambitious. It plays out in the church sales through the plan to plough more than half of the church sale money back into the parishes from which it comes. This strategy is part of a multifaceted bid to increase congregations, especially where church attendance has dwindled, which is almost everywhere. A smaller portion of the funds will be channelled towards the creation of new ministries in the state, perhaps along the lines of Sandy Bay’s thriving Wellspring or the new contemporary Southern Beaches Anglican Church at Dodges Ferry.

For some Tasmanians the church sales affair exacerbates fears that Bishop Condie and GAFCON represent a type of Angli- canism they do not recognise or want. Their concerns are not just about mass church sales per se, but what they see as a related agenda to rapidly grow the “low” evangelical church at the cost of continuing support for Tasmania’s traditional “high” church ministries.

“It’s asset-stripping for Alt Anglicanism,” says freelance journalist Margaretta Pos, who received a rousing response when she spoke at the Campbell Town protest. Pos was the first to flag concerns in the Tasmanian media about what she calls “contemporary ultra-orthodox Anglicanism”.

Emeritus Professor Peter Boyce AO is a lifelong Anglican who has held several offices in Anglican governance, including as a lay canon at St David’s Cathedral, about which he has also written a history, God and the City. Prof Boyce believes Tasmania is well on the way to becoming a “monochrome diocese” dominat- ed by the kind of low-church evangelism already prevailing in the Sydney diocese.

While the Tasmanian Anglican Church’s return to its evangelical roots has been gradual under previous bishop John Harrower, who recruited clergy almost exclusively from evangelical Ridley and Moore theological colleges, Boyce thinks it is gathering pace under Bishop Condie.

“For me the essential issue is that the traditional balance that the Anglican Church has historically held between its broad high church and low church components [is maintained],” he says.

“It doesn’t have to be open warfare between these traditions. In the 19th century in the Tasmanian church, there were arguments between low/high [churchmanship], but the 20th century was almost free of that.”

It is not clear, he says, if the variety will be protected by the current bishop. And he has other concerns. “He is not at all sympathetic to liberalism within church doctrine or practice, yet liberalism has been a great strength historically for the Anglican Church (though not in an ‘anything goes’ way, of course).

“Another key word is literalism. Bishop Condie and the GAFCON crowd are literalists in the way they read the Bible. I’m sure the Bishop would not dispute that claim.”

Boyce says he is also concerned that in the current Tasmanian church climate a process of “dumbing down” is under way. Despite all of this, Boyce says “I feel a bit sorry for [the bishop]. He is probably worried … He has underestimated Tasmanians, their history of resistance and fighting for what they believe in.”

It is with a hint of exasperation that the bishop rejects the “monochrome diocese” assessment, saying he embraces the provision of both high and low Anglican service styles. He says he wants that diversity to continue.

At the same time, he is adamant the church needs to reach out to more people and adapt if it is to grow, which is his not-sosecret goal. “I want every Tasmanian to encounter Jesus,” he says. “I want you to do that!”

At last, he smiles warmly.

The conundrum is this: Condie’s use-it-or-lose-it approach clashes with the keep-it-at-all-costs mentality. But while some opponents of the bishop’s plan refuse to sell their church buildings, neither do they want to go to church regularly. They rather prefer just to gather on special occasions: baptisms, weddings, funerals and perhaps at Christmas and Easter if they are leaning towards piety. But the rest of the year? Well, a sleep-in, potter at home or cafe brunch of eggs benedict (but sans ministering) are pretty tempting on Sunday morning.

Much of the pressure and disquiet over church sales is in the Midlands, though there are other active pockets of dissent as well. Bishop Condie says that in the Midlands parish of Hamilton, some congregations have declined to unsustainable levels. “If we don’t do something in Hamilton, all those church buildings will be closed in five years, maybe 10 at the outside,” he says.

It is not feasible to deliver a Holy Communion church service every Sunday with a priest delivering the bread and the wine and hasn’t been for some time. “I can only do that if I can pay someone to go there,” he says. “Jesus said the minister is worth his wages. You need to pay them. I am running out of volunteer priests who are happy to work for nothing and drive around all the country churches of Hamilton.”

The parish, he says, “hasn’t paid their minister in decades”. His rationale is that selling some of its churches would allow others to consolidate and make improvements such as the addition of toilets and heating. In winter in one church, he adds, parishioners already meet in their community hall rather than the church because the latter is too cold.

“By having one or two stronger centres [in the parish], we can see that exact ministry people want … going on into the future much longer than five years. That’s what I am trying to do.”

He says he expects only two parishes in the state will lose all their churches. One of these is Evandale, where the congregation is down to three or four faithful. He says he lifted a burden when he announced its church was going to be sold.

“They breathed a sigh of relief and said ‘Hallelujah, it’s over’. They know they are going to get 65 per cent of the proceeds and so now they are thinking about how they will use [it] to continue to run their meals program and their loving service of the local community from their homes, or maybe renting a shopfront in the main street.”

It is time, he says, to rethink the church as “the people rather than the building”. Southern Midlands Mayor Tony Bisdee gives that approach short shrift. “God without a church – the people reject it,” he says. “That’s a philosophy of the current bishop and his philosophy comes out of GAFCON. I don’t believe that’s a philosophy of the Anglican community in Tasmania.

“The bishop has misread the community. Congregations are very small, I agree, but that doesn’t mean [a church] should become a private home or a gymnasium, an art gallery or a cafe. The bishop has alienated the rural Anglican community in Tasmania and I doubt if that trust can be rebuilt. Communities want to take possession of their local church and how it’s used.”

If that means breaking away from the diocesan council, so be it, he says, suggesting some Midlanders may hire their own priests and do their own thing if it comes down to it.

Alderman Damon Thomas, a former lord mayor of Hobart City Council who’s running for the top job again next month, is also part of the Save Our Community Soul group.

He predicts Bishop Condie “is on a hiding to nothing”, for two reasons: what he describes as the bishop’s failure to see the integral role of regional institutions in fostering connectedness between people; and by alienating country communities on which the diocese may rely for future support.

“If you cut that relationship off, you threaten very seriously the long-term funding,” he says.

“Don’t take the country on. They don’t go away. They are used to being out in blizzards.”

He tells TasWeekend there has been “a huge failure in communication” between the diocese and the community. He leftMonday’s meeting with the bishop hopeful, though, that the diocesan council and the wider community will find a way forward together and save some churches.

Marriage equality champion Rodney Croome has a respectful relationship with the bishop, despite their profound difference over who should and should not be entitled to marry (or join the clergy, for that matter). The pair has engaged directly in conversation and debate since the bishop’s arrival in Tasmania from Melbourne, where he was archdeacon in that diocese, in March 2016. Having agreed to disagree before, the men find themselves at another impasse.

Rural Anglicanism values are at the heart of the Tasmanian character, says Croome. “To sell the churches that are the physical expression of these values not only guts the Anglican community, it guts who we are as Tasmanians.”

For Steve Fisher, of Beyond Abuse, a group that provides support and advocacy for survivors of sexual abuse, nothing is more important than achieving redress for victims and he can’t speak highly enough of Bishop Condie.

“He has given hope to survivors and he has proven the Anglican Church in Tasmania is absolutely survivor-focused, and that he is, too,” says Fisher. “What that does for survivors is going to be monumental. And it’s something the rest of the country should follow.

“The way he has been working behind the scenes to help survivors is so refreshing. Survivors including myself find it inspirational. It is a unique feeling to feel 100 per cent supported by the church, because this has not happened before.

“So when I hear of detractors who don’t agree with his plan to sell off assets, my concern is that they are using survivors as political footballs for their own gain. And I’d like them to know that it is not on.

“Whether you like Bishop Condie or whether you like his vision for the church or not, you do not start playing politics with the survivors of child sexual abuse. I feel very strongly about this. We are talking about councillors and mayors who believe that if they come out in opposition to this proposal, they will win votes. To me that is a no-go way.”

It is important to note that everybody interviewed for this story supports redress.

The flight from the church in developed nations is by no means limited to the Anglican faith. Nor is the gulf in understanding between some, mostly elderly, parishioners in small communities over what they can realistically expect in terms of type and frequency of services, especially from a church that is being run along sound business lines.

“The community has been giving us feedback for 50 years [by] not coming to our services,” says Bishop Condie. “We’re responding to the community interest [or lack thereof] in Anglican churches. The media love to tell me about the decline in church attendance in Tasmania.”

Bishop Condie is excited by parishes that have embraced disruption as an opportunity for confronting that decline through renewal. The synod’s vote indicates it largely shares his belief that “buildings don’t make the disciples of Jesus, people do”.

A quick history lesson: for the first 300 years of the church, he says, there was not a single church building. “It was [Emperor] Constantine who built church buildings from 325AD or something. [Until then] Christianity was a movement of people and that’s primarily what I’m interested in.”

The Anglican Church, he says, has been “absolutely off-track” in recent decades. In his mind, falling attendances are “a commentary on our failure to do our mission”.

“When Tasmania was settled by Europeans there was a plan to make disciples of Jesus of the convicts who settled here. That’s always been part of our DNA … but we lost traction. When we built all the tiny church buildings across Tasmania, they were full of people.”

He rejects accusations that he is opportunistically promoting “an alternative ministry”. He says he wants high church ministries, such as All Saints in South Hobart, to flourish. “It is a beautiful liturgical expression of robes, candles and incense. Then there are places that are contemporary, low church.” The parishes that are growing best, he says, offer “the best of both”. “At Wellspring there is a traditional prayer book service at 8am on Sunday, which is full of people who are getting good preaching … and an hour later there is a contemporary [service] full of children and a band, and all the rest of it.

“We want to build confident, flourishing parish centres, regardless of style,” he insists. “We love the diversity and variety of Anglican churches in Tasmania.”

I descend the gloomy staircase after our meeting mulling over the Bishop Condie’s parting words. The church, he said, has always been out of step with society.

And that’s OK with him? ”Of course it is. Where is the prophetic voice if people aren’t out of step? The church is the one that’s been speaking out about refugees, injustice, slavery …

“The guy I follow was killed on a cross in Jerusalem because the religious leaders of his day and the society around him thought he was a bad guy. We’ve been part of this radical movement from the beginning.”