A man of integrity

Warren Gatland has been head coach of Wales for 149 matches                                                                             Source: BBC/Photo Huw Evans Picture Agency

 On Friday 31st January 2025 France starts The Six Nations 2025 season kicking off against Wales. In the meantime Wales' head coach Warren Gatland awaits news of his fate with his customary humility.

Questioned after a record 11th successive Test match defeat he said he agreed "whatever the best decision is for Welsh rugby". 

Wales has had a disappointing run of results as have other teams over the years but let us put it into proprtion.

Country populations published for the 2023 World Cup showed Wales with a population of only 3 million compared with England's 57 million, Ireland's 7.2 million and Scotland's 5.5 million. Italy was 61 million, France 68.5 million and Japan a whopping 123.7 million.

When it comes to most registerd players France leads with over half a million compared with Wales'  83,120 registered rugby players. South Africa has the second highest number with 405,438 while England is third with 382,154 registrations. New Zealand comes 4th after Australia. Ireland is tenth and Scotland 15th.

Wales have punched well above their weight over the years and, like Scotland and Ireland, will do again.

Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) bosses have been reviewing the outcome of the autumn series and will determine if Warren Gatland will be in charge for next year's Six Nations season. 

The Review should be completed before Christmas. Hopefully it will be a happy one for a coach who has given so much to Welsh rugby.

Restoring the Value of Parishes

All Saints Bakewell, a parish church in Derbyshire                                               Source: Wikipedia. Photo: Bert Camenbert 

From CIVITAS

Restoring the Value of Parishes: The foundations of welfare, community, and spiritual belonging in England

Esme Partridge, November 2024

The parish church has been a foundational part of cultural life in England for hundreds of years. England’s 12,500 parish churches are ‘treasure houses’ of national history, containing the memories of our ancestors as well as the rich architectural and musical heritage of Anglicanism. Parishes also bring together local communities, providing charitable services – including food banks, childcare and counselling – worth billions of pounds per year.

Yet parish churches across the country are now in crisis. Crumbling buildings, declining attendance, and sharp reductions in clergy all pose a considerable threat to their survival. In the past 50 years, over 2,000 churches have been made redundant, with some 300 of these closing between 2016 and 2021 alone. Congregations have been shrinking in size since the 1960s, but fell by a further 19 per cent following the pandemic. Meanwhile, the number of stipendiary clergy in the Church of England has almost halved since 1959, leaving many churches without a priest dedicated to the parish.

Though this decline can to some extent be attributed to lower levels of religiosity and community attachment in today’s Britain, this report argues that management decisions made by the Church of England itself have also played a major role. These include moves to cut funding to local churches and ministers – in some cases merging up to 23 parishes into one ‘mega-parish’ served by a single team of clergy – and instead directing resources towards central bureaucracy: on average, the Church now employs one administrator for every three and a half priests. Hundreds of millions of pounds have also been funnelled into ‘strategic development funding’, intended to experiment with radical new ways of attracting people to the Church. These have mixed results and, according to some critics, often represent a departure from Anglican traditions and belief.

Restoring the Value of Parishes diagnoses what has gone wrong with the Church of England in recent years, and makes the case for returning to what works: supporting local clergy to continue serving their communities via parish churches. This will require Church management to restore its confidence in the parish as an institution that is uniquely placed to provide a refuge from the challenges of modernity. At a time when the public sector is diminished and invisible in many communities, the parish can be an ideal starting point for the renewal of civic life. If the Church wants to be more ‘relevant’, the author argues, it should stop trying to reinvent itself and instead embrace its unique position as a source of tradition, sanctity, and community solidarity in an uncertain world.

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Saving the Parish… now and for the future

Caption corner 6 December 2024

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