Synod rejects flat-rate stipend

The Synod of the Church of England last night rejected a uniform stipend for all its clergy, from the Archbishop of Canterbury downward, set equivalent to that of a vicar - currently £18,480 a year.

The proposal, though to have been phased over many years, was resisted by some bishops and senior clergy whose successors' pay would have halved. There was much talk of Biblical parables of workers in vineyards - but the synod was also told that the outside world would regard the church as hopelessly idealistic, romantic and naive.

Rowan Williams, as archbishop of Canterbury, is paid £62,520 a year - a decline in real as well as relative terms from his plutocratic predecessors. Bishops get £33,930, whereas their predecessors in 1835 were paid 16 times as much as parish clergy, and in 1939, still six times as much.

Proposing the uniform stipend, the Rev Chris Lilley, vicar of Scawby in Lincolnshire, said: "Can we say that the burden is greater on the bishop, dean or archdeacon than on the country parson looking after a dozen tiny rural parishes? ...

"If money is the motive, maybe people motivated thus are not the people we need as our senior clergy."

He was supported by the Rt Rev John Packer, bishop of Ripon and Leeds: "I am not sure whether my ministry is of more value to the Kingdom now than it was when I was a parish priest." But the Ven Robert Reiss, archdeacon of Surrey, said: "There is nothing immoral or unbiblical about paying senior clergy more. The wider world will see us as idealistic, romantic and naive."

Earlier in the weekend, the synod voted narrowly against introducing heresy trials for unorthodox vicars, despite an intervention by Dr Williams and by evangelicals. He told the meeting: "Certain things really are incompatible with Christian profession. It is 20 years since the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared a theological justification of apartheid was a heresy. It would be a very incredible and inadequate Christian church which did not have the resource to say something like that."

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, bishop of Rochester, told the synod: "Whenever there has been an absence of doctrinal discipline, the church has been brought into disrepute. It can't become a doctrinal free-for-all." Opponents argued that trials would be almost impossible to conduct, costly, and open the church to mockery. The Very Rev Christopher Lewis, dean of Oxford, said: "It would be like swatting flies with a hammer."