Letter: Threat to close City churches is a sacrilege

Sir: Could not your correspondent Marianne Macdonald (anticipating the Templeman Report) have found a more felicitous phrase than 'cheap labour' to describe the contribution of non-stipendiary ministers to the City churches ('Surplus churches await judgement day', 28 January)?

I agree our work is laborious, but we are not so much cheap (I hope), as free - free to serve and comment from our special position within the heart of the nation's commerce, which our brothers and sisters, the paid clergy (on whom we depend for much else), can never share.

Even so, we do not need one church for every 2.3 City pillarboxes to do it in]

Yours faithfully,

JOHN-HENRY BOWDEN

Non-Stipendiary Minister

St Mary-le-Bow,

Cheapside

London, EC1

29 January