BISHOPS, clergy and laity rose in rebellion yesterday, seeing off plans for a radical reform in the funding of bishops and cathedrals.

The General Synod forced church financiers to shelve proposals to land parishioners with another £5 million bill by asking them to pay for their bishops on top of clergy stipends, pensions, organs and church repairs.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, joined senior churchmen and women in challenging the proposals to cut £5 million from the Church Commissioners’ funding of bishops as well as a further £500,000 from cathedrals.

The proposals were set out in the report of a spending review group set up by the Archbishops’ Council and the Church Commissioners and chaired by Andreas Whittam Smith, the First Church Estates Commissioner.

The funds were to have been put towards a new £9 million fund for mission, to help the Church to put in place the new forms of worship set out in another report, Mission Shaped Church, and agreed by the synod on Tuesday.

Synod members voted to adjourn the debate after it became clear that the opposition to the proposals was so strong they had no chance of being voted through. Mr Whittam Smith, who put the proposals before the synod, said that he had been unjustly accused of failing to carry out an adequate consultation.

Dr Williams said it looked “seductively easy” to put on one side of the equation the costs of bishops and cathedrals and on the other the cost of exciting new mission activities.

The Archbishop agreed that the Church stood at a point where “very important decisions” were needed but cautioned: “Under the new proposals, we could find ourselves in a situation where the very goals we want to promote are subverted by the destabilising of effective existing local initiatives.”

The Bishop of St Albans, the Right Rev Christopher Herbert, said that he had once been advised to think of the clergy as his brothers and sisters in Christ but added that fraternal relations could be “pretty vicious” and that, in the case of these proposals, Cain and Abel sprang to mind. He said: “In medieval imagery and texts, Cain is frequently portrayed as beating Abel with the jawbone of an ass.”

He said that Mr Whittam Smith’s report had some similarities to that ass’s jawbone because “it is clumsy, inept and brutal”.

Mr Whittam Smith said change was necessary and the Church of England needed a “jump start”. Suggesting that the Church was “fighting for its life”, he said there was an urgency to “cure souls” to halt the decline in membership.

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