Scrapping slavery fund will diminish Anglican Church’s mission
Published:Tuesday | December 30, 2025 | 12:06 AM
THE EDITOR, Madam:
The BBC’s report on calls to halt the Church of England’s £100m fund addressing its historical links to slavery risks overlooking a crucial dimension of Anglican history beyond England.
The funds in question are not abstract gestures of guilt, nor are they a diversion from the Church’s core mission. They arise from the Church Commissioners’ own acknowledgement that portions of the Church’s historic endowment were shaped by investments connected to the transatlantic slave economy. To address that history responsibly is not political fashion, but moral stewardship.
Notably absent from the present debate is the fact that educational institutions within the Church in the Province of the West Indies (CPWI) were among the original intended beneficiaries of these reparative initiatives.
Many of these institutions were founded explicitly to educate the formerly enslaved and their descendants, often under severe material deprivation, while simultaneously serving the evangelistic and pastoral mission of the wider Anglican Communion.
To suggest that charity law restricts such funds solely to the maintenance of English church buildings or clergy stipends reflects an unduly narrow reading of Anglican trusteeship. Anglican endowments have historically served education, formation, and social repair, particularly in colonial and post-colonial contexts where the Church itself was both complicit in injustice and instrumental in reconstruction.
The appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury marks a moment of symbolic and substantive transition. To retreat from this fund now would signal not prudence, but institutional fear — a reluctance to face the Church’s own archives with integrity.
The Church of England stands at the heart of a global Communion. The moral credibility of that Communion depends, in part, on whether historic harms are acknowledged not only in words, but through tangible acts that strengthen communities long shaped by those harms.
If the £100m fund is handled transparently, lawfully, and with due regard to education and development within provinces such as the CPWI, it would represent not a betrayal of Anglican purpose, but a fulfilment of it.
To scrap the fund would not preserve the Church’s mission. It would diminish it.
DUDLEY MCLEAN II