Anglican

In July 2020 the Anglican-run Clifton Boys’ Home rebuild in Westmoreland still needed about $10 million of its $60 million cost, even after an $18 million boost from the Sagicor Sigma Corporate Run.

The Anglican-run Clifton Boys’ Home in Westmoreland, burned out in 2017, needed just under $10 million more in 2020 to finish a $60 million rebuild, while its boys lived at a church in Caledonia.

A New York programme is teaching churches to develop their own land, including a 95-year-old Baptist church in Jamaica, Queens, planning 87 affordable apartments and a Bronx Episcopal parish planning 135 homes.

The Anglican Diocese of Ottawa plans to replace an ageing rectory beside Christ Church Bells Corners with a four-storey building of up to 40 mostly low-income rental homes, plus space for a food bank and community services.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church partnered with 19 Black-owned US banks under Black Wealth 2020, which aims to push Black home ownership above 50 per cent, and its bishops said the possibilities extend to its churches in the Caribbean.

Winnipeg’s St Matthew’s Anglican Church, facing a leaking roof and black mould, leased its building for $1 to a non-profit that turned it into WestEnd Commons, an $8.5 million project with 26 affordable homes and continuing worship.

The Anglican Church broke ground in 2019 on a $60 million, two-storey Clifton Boys’ Home in Darliston, Westmoreland, to replace the building destroyed by fire in 2017, with about $30 million raised and capacity rising to 40 boys.

A Westlands parish that bought its Nairobi land for Sh100,000 in 1964 says the Anglican diocese, which has used it since 2012, owes more than Sh9 million in rent on property now worth Sh500 million.

Sydney’s Anglican Diocese sold Bishopscourt, its archbishops’ 1841 Darling Point mansion, for $18 million because it was too costly to maintain; the buyer later transferred it to his teenage son.

Tasmania’s Anglican Church cut its redress sale list from 107 to 73 properties, sparing churches such as Evandale and Hagley, but the Southern Midlands still faced losing seven of eight churches.

US Episcopal parishes have helped Cuban congregations stabilise an unsafe church at Itabo, build visitor dormitories and install about 26 water filtration systems, while a Santa Cruz del Norte church still awaited roof repairs after Irma.

Jamaica’s historic denominations, Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, Moravian, have all lost significant land to squatters. Newer churches report almost none, and the reason traces to the size of the land they were given in the first place.

Falmouth’s St Peter’s Anglican Church, built in 1796, was restored in 2018 with money from the JNHT, Tourism Enhancement Fund, EU and parishioners. Work covered the roof, termite damage and limestone that acid rain had been dissolving.

Hurricane Irma blew out every window at St Mary the Virgin, Virgin Gorda’s only Episcopal church, collapsing its bell towers and destroying its organ; the congregation waited until July 2018 to return.

Rather than sell, the vestry of St Peter’s West, an Anglican church in St George’s, Bermuda, that closed in 2017, rented the building to the New Testament Church of God in 2018 and put 14 pews on sale at $100 each.