A price tag of $24 million was put on Bishopscourt at the end of last year by Collier International. Its sale was intended to yield the church up to $1 million a year. Future archbishops were not expected to slum it: $8 million was set aside to put a new roof over their heads.
Archbishop Jensen chaired the wide-ranging debate but did not participate. None of the speakers denied the urgent need of the church for cash. But Anglican sentimentalists teamed with critics of the church’s present financial administration to oppose the sale.
”Selling it now is a bad idea,” declared their leader, Reverend Craig Roberts, a former PricewaterhouseCoopers liquidator and now the rector of St Augustine’s, Neutral Bay. That was his view even though he admitted he badly needed cash to do Christ’s work in his own parish. ”Most of Neutral Bay is going to hell.”