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

Contempt triumphs over respect

The Cenotaph surrounded by pro-Palestinian demonstrators                                                                               Source: LBC

The Prime Minister has described the pro-Palestinian protests planned for London on Armistice Day as 'provocative and disrespectful'.

The government, the Metropolitan police and the majority of the British public are against it but the organisers insist it will go ahead.

What the march demonstrates is contempt for British values, values which many of the participants want to replace with an alien ideology so candidly admitted here. 

Closer to home, the Welsh Government recently paid out £300K Swansea's Sketty Mosque and Community Centre to aid Community Cohesion.

From the Swansea mosque on 17 October: " 'Victory to Islam'. 'Look after the mujahideen' in Gaza."

Pure contempt for British values.

A presence in every community

The Font, St John's Church, Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil                                             Source: Wales Online

Has Anglicanism run its course in Great Britain ending a Christian presence in every community? 

The sad sight of the font in the derelict Grade II listed building, above, stands as a sorry reminder of all the souls who will have promised to "fight valiantly as a disciple of Christ against sin, the world and the devil, and remain faithful to Christ to the end of your life". Since the Anglican Church has turned its mind to making sin respectable the consequences are plain for all to see, dereliction.

It comes as little surprise to read that the Church of England is considering a plan to abandon a legal requirement to hold Sunday services in parish churches thus changing their slogan "A Christian presence in every community" to "A Christian presence in some communities".

This is the inevitable consequence of declining attendances in the liberalised Anglican church. The Telegraph follows up its report on the plan with a question: Why is the Anglican Church in crisis? Its answer: The roots of the rift between liberal and conservative wings can be traced back decades but the current crisis erupted in 2003 when the US branch of Anglicanism – The Episcopal Church (TEC) - ordained its first openly-gay bishop, Gene Robinson.

Credit: Elinor Carucci for TIME

The baptismal dying to sin has become living to sin, a message eagerly proclaimed by too many bishops of the church. Tolerance of homosexuality and the gesture of remorse over the death of Alan Turing has been turned into an absurd clamour for equal treatment regardless of merit or circumstance. The 'victim' has become the oppressor. People demand 'rights' however bizarre the circumstances resulting in trans-sexual 'men' having babies. Eggs are being developed using skin cells. There are likely to be three parent families with every individual having "the right to reproduce" regardless of the effect on the children resulting from these 'unions'. How they may feel as they grow up is ignored. As women old enough to be great grandparents are helped to give birth it is increasingly likely that the child will be motherless within a few years of birth. In these circumstances the absurdity of gender neutral toilets looks almost comic.

Instead of "fighting valiantly against sin, the world and the devil", many liberal clerics prefer to excuse human weakness regarding it simply as part of life's tapestry, thus making it appear not only acceptable but respectable often in justification of their own lifestyle.

There is a certain irony in all this. Not satisfied with Civil Partnerships, the latest liberal push is to allow same sex couples to marry in church but sooner or later there will be no churches for them to marry in given the current rate of decline. Our churches will become derelict monuments to past glory or converted into mosques for the growing number of Muslims in our midst who worship regularly and already outnumber Anglican worshippers.

During his visit to the UK Patriarch Kirill, expressed his concerns about developments within Anglicanism drawing Archbishop Justin Welby’s attention to "the Russian Orthodox Church’s concern over the liberalization of the Church of England’s teaching on church order, particularly, the ordination of women as priests and bishops and on the family and morality", concerns previously expressed by Metropolitan Hilarion but ignored as were earlier pleas of the Catholic Church. We live with the consequences.

As Christianity declines and Islam becomes more prevalent in the UK we are more likely to have a Muslim presence in every community. One has only to look at the fate of Christians in Muslim countries to be aware of the dangers of aiding the expansion of Islam in this country. After Birmingham council's  'disastrous failure' over Islamism in schools there have been more recent worries over "extremism" and "twisted ideologies" in a Nottingham Muslim school.

The same pattern has been repeated many times in the greater sexual exploitation of children by Muslim men, often of Pakistani heritage. There are 'No-Go' Zones and there has been electoral fraud. Multiculturalism is a disaster.

Many church leaders show misguided Christian charity in pressing the Government to take more refugees regardless of the consequences. In a recent report "743 Christian refugees living in camps in Germany were attacked by Muslim refugees in 2016, pointing to big failures on the part of German authorities when it comes to understanding the role of religion in the lives of refugees". Meanwhile adult migrants pretend to be 'Calais kids' at the expense of genuinely vulnerable children to gain access to the UK.

Ignoring these challenges is not charity, it is complicity. A common trait among liberal Anglicans which is witnessing the death of Christianity in this country and the spread of Islam to be the new presence in every community.

Updates

[22.10.2016]

From Twitter:

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