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.

Postscript 20.12.2024

Warren Gatland will remain as Wales' head coach for the 2025 Six Nations

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.

...

Saving the Parish… now and for the future

Caption corner 6 December 2024

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Assisted living, not assisted dying

"It’s assisted suicide, not assisted dying."               Source: Christian Concern

The assisted dying bill is to be debated by MPs on Friday. If the bill becomes law it will allow some terminally ill people to have a medically assisted death but as Christian Concern explains, it will be assisted suicide, not assisted dying.

The motivation is understandable. A slow, painful death from an incurable disease is a burden most would seek to avoid but a quick easy death cannot be guaranteed. With proper palliative care that is not an option people would have to face. 

Recognised as the founder of the modern hospice movement Dame Cicely Saunders said: "You matter because you are you. You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die."

A few months ago a relative who was terriried of dying was admitted to a hospice. She died peacefully under their loving care. Such care should be available to all.

If patients can be kept pain free, even if it results in death, that is a far better alternative than the slipery slope of assisted suicide with its added pressure of 'doing the right thing' to relieve others of the strain.

Postscript [28.11.2024]

Speaking ahead of the Second Reading of the assisted suicide Bill, crossbench peer Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson has discussed the potential impact of the Bill on people with disabilities.

Church of England in crisis

The Archbishop of Canturbery celebrating 25 years of women’s ordination to the priesthood in 2019                Source: CofE

Now, thirty years after the first ordinations of women to the priesthhood, one of their number, the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, is calling on Justin Welby to resign.

She has decribed the archbishop's position "untenable" following a damning report into abuse by a prolific child abuser associated with the Church.

She is not alone in her demand. The Revd Dr Ian Paul, a member of General Synod and the Archbishops’ Council, has, among others, initiated a petition calling for Welby's immediate resignation:

"Given his role in allowing abuse to continue, we believe that his continuing as the Archbishop of Canterbury is no longer tenable. We must see change, for the sake of survivors, for the protection of the vulnerable, and for the good of the Church—and we share this determination across our traditions. With sadness we do not think there is any alternative to his immediate resignation if the process of change and healing is to start now."

The archbishop is already under fire for making comments contrary to the doctrine of the Church of England after expressing his views on gay sex outside marriage.

One abuse survivor has demanded a “clean sweep” of senior clergy members. Allegedly, 7 or 8 bishops knew what was going on.

MPs are already considering a call to remove Church of England bishops from House of Lords, thus lessening their influence. 

If Welby does resign no doubt there will be fresh demands for a woman to become the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury providing feminists with yet another opportunity for celebration their success in the Church. 

Update

Archbishop of Canterbury resigns

BBC report here.

Remembrance

Two women were lost on D Day, Sister Mollie Evershed and Sister Dorothy Field, Standing With Giants.     Source BBC News

 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, 

We will remember them.

Church closures

An abandoned church in Newington, Gloucestershire. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/Alamy                        Source: Guardian

Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian: "The Church of England is panicking about declining congregations – here’s what it should do instead. Too many beautiful church buildings are going to ruin. Councils could run them better. Let them."

But could they? If uncut verges and weed infested streets are anything to go by, perhaps not. 

Church mainteneance, particulalry churchyard/burial ground mainteneance will become a serious problem as congregations decline and churches close.

Quoting the Bishop of Chelmsford, Jenkins writes: "The Church of England is in a state of “panic and fear”, of “deep anxiety”, and should stop being obsessed with numbers and face the reality of decline. So says one of its bishops, Guli Francis-Dehqani, of Chelmsford. It’s not hard to see why. Two years ago, as weekly worshippers re-emerged after Covid, church statisticians were desperate to see if they would return at least to their 2019 numbers, when about 854,000 people turned out to church. In 2023, that figure was just 685,000.

"Put another way, 169,000 weekly worshippers have vanished over a four-year period. Fewer people now go to their parish church than attend a local mosque or a Catholic mass. It is all very well for bishops to urge the church to stop worrying over “targets” and “growth” – to leave the planning to God and stick to praying. But the decline in attendance is relentless. At the turn of the century, 1 million people went to church each year; in 1980, the number was 1.3 million. Since cathedral worship is rising, something is clearly going wrong with parish churches, even under the present evangelical archbishop, Justin Welby. It cannot simply be that ever fewer Britons are professing the Christian faith, as is the case across Europe."

Church going can become a habit, hence Churchianity rather than Christianity. Covid broke that habit for many churchgoers while equality diversity and inclusion have replaced theology, scripture and tradition. Consequently minorities rule.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is the latest to succumb to secular relationship values commenting in a podcast "that all sexual activity should be within a committed relationship and whether it's straight or gay".

That is not to judge the sentiments expressed by the archbishop, that will be left to Another. Rather it is to uphold the principle of traditional Christian marriage.

Secular notions of equality have become paramount. Churches are closing. Welby is treading the same path as the Archbishop of Wales and the Primus of Scotland.

The Bishop of Chelmsford is one of the front runners to replace Just Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury which would tick all of today's important boxes

Church and state leaders appear impotent as the British landscape  changes before their eyes. 

While churches close mosques spring up blasting out prayers five times a day from 5 AM. 

With no churches to go to and an alien culture foisted upon them, Anglicans will be like foreigners in our own land.