Bajan Anglican Priests in North America Support Barbados Diocese's Plan to Convert Glebe Land Tenants to Property Owners

Several Bajan Anglican priests in North America, including a retired Bishop, are backing the Barbados’ Anglican Diocese plans to transform more Glebe land tenants into property owners.

And some of the clerics are describing the move as anything from an important social and economic “step” and a “tremendous” idea to a “responsible” action considering that the church was being firmly led by Black priests, a dramatic change from the days when the Glebe Lands in St George, St Philip and elsewhere in Barbados were acquired centuries ago during slavery and British colonial domination by an exclusively white clergy.

Bishop Peter Fenty, the first Black elected bishop in the 200-plus year existence of Canada’s Anglican church told Nation news that the Diocese and Bishop Michael Maxwell, were “going in the right direction” but suggested the church “exercise (even) better stewardship of its properties” going forward.

As Fenty saw it, church properties should be put to more productive use and he complained that Bishop’s Court, once the residence of the Diocesan leader, should not have fallen into its current state of disrepair.

The Diocese, he added, “had a lot of idle land languishing in the country and that represented poor stewardship”.

The cleric, an ordained priest in Barbados and Canada for decades, said that any sale of Glebe land today should be beneficial to the Diocese as a whole and not “any individual” in the country.

“It is good that (the sale of Glebe land) can benefit the church as an entity. The Anglican church in Barbados, even with the reality of slavery and colonisation et cetera, Barbadians have benefited from the contribution that the Anglican church has made to education,” said Fenty. “The church belongs to the people of Barbados and the people of the Anglican Church.”

As he saw it, the church should not seek to make “extreme profit” (from any future sale of the Glebe land to tenants) because the latter should be the chief beneficiaries.

Like Bishop Fenty, Canon Stephen Fields, sub-dean of the Toronto Diocese and Vicar of the historic St James Anglican Cathedral in downtown Toronto, endorsed the sale of more Glebe land, saying it was important for Barbadians who have been renting Glebe lands for decades to “own a piece of the rock”.

The move to sell more Glebe land to tenants, added Dr Fields, was “another example” of the Barbados church’s contribution to the country’s human development and its upward economic and social mobility, particularly black people who were now fully responsible for the management of the church, including its properties.