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

Misery areas: a clarification from Lord Harries

Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop of Oxford                          Source: LGBTConservatives

 The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth, author of the 2012 Church in Wales Review has written to the Church Times about Maintaining ministry despite declining numbers. He wrote: "It was very good to read that the Church in Wales has made such progress in implementing the recommendations of the review that I chaired ten years ago (News, 11 March). At the same time, I can very much understand the frustrations of those clergy who have found that the new system has not worked for them (Letters, 18 March). 

Lord Harries goes on to "clarify" a few points:

"Our main recommendation was that the parish system as we have known and loved it is no longer sustainable. We recommended that every parish should continue to have a worshipping community, but that it should in most circumstances be led by a self-supporting priest or licensed lay minister. We envisaged really big ministry areas, with 20 or more parishes, which would have a small team of paid clergy, who would be appointed first to this and only then to one or more of the parishes, if they were large enough.

"We realised that there was a danger that clergy would just go on being asked to take on more and more parishes in a way that was unsustainable rather than be part of a structure that required a different mind-set. Obviously, the success of this new system depends on each worshiping congregation’s being able to raise up its own leadership team, and we did not underestimate the real difficulty in doing that in rural areas with tiny congregations.

"In their letter, the clergy who are not happy about ministry areas point to a lack of growth, even decline, under the new situation. But we did not believe that the new structure would by itself bring about growth. Our concern, quite simply, was with the sheer survival of the Church in Wales in what is going to be a very difficult period for a long time to come, for reasons that have nothing to do with the structure of the Church, but have to do with our failure to recapture the imagination of our culture for the Christian story.

"Congregations may remain small for some time, but they will be there, and 'A small church is not a failed church,' a lesson that I learnt from Tony Russell, a colleague when I was Bishop of Oxford.

"I believe that the Church in Wales is to be congratulated in facing up, ten years ago, to the seriousness of the situation and that there are important lessons to be learnt by the Church of England from our recommendations, particularly in rural areas."

Noted for his liberal views, Lord Harries believes in so-called 'equal' marriage and "warmly welcomed" the Marriage (same sex couples) Bill.

Also, from Wikipedia: "On 11 February 2017, Harries was one of fourteen retired bishops to sign an open letter to the then-serving bishops of the Church of England. In an unprecedented move, they expressed their opposition to the House of Bishops' report to General Synod on sexuality, which recommended no change to the church's canons or practices around sexuality. By 13 February, a serving bishop (Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham) and nine further retired bishops had added their signatures; on 15 February, the report was rejected by synod, plunging the Church of England into 'turmoil'."

Lord Harries does not comment on the 'do as we please' Church in Wales bishops and its top heavy structure.

Physician heal thyself!

God Save the Queen - and the CofE

Archbishop Stephen Cottrell. By Bashereyre (CC 3.0)     Source: Nation Cymru

Nation Cymru reports that the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, has called for Wales to sing God Save the Queen before international sports games.

He also complained about Scotland singing Flower of Scotland, the Scottish national anthem, before its Euro 2020 match with England.

Singing national anthems at international events has become standard practice but with no specifically English national anthem, England often chant the African-American spiritual song Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at international rugby matches.

The archbishop made his suggestion in a column in the Telegraph. He said many people in England feel left behind by "metropolitan elites in London and the South East".

Rather like the Church of England and its bishops.  

The Archbishop Cranmer blog puts it this way after the Archbishop of York called for the Church of England to be a church for England, rather than just ‘of’:
 "The Church of England tolerates you, but it isn’t for you. It is there for you to come and go in common worship and to feed on Christ by faith, but thousands upon thousands of its clergy (including 99% of Bishops) truly despise everything you believe and represent, and quite a few of them can’t wait for you to leave so the liberal new order might arise and their theology be consummated.

Having already alienated many with their current LLF obsession, Living in Love and Faith, the Church of England has created fury with "an ambitious target of planting 10,000 new, predominantly lay-led churches by 2030".

The recommendations come in a briefing paper GS 2223 [Simpler, Humbler, Bolder. A Church for the whole nation which is Christ centred and shaped by the Five Marks of Mission] issued by the Church of England’s Vision and Strategy group. 

The church-planting initiative’s leader, the Rev. Canon John McGinley of New Wine, touched off a firestorm of criticism when he labelled stipendiary clergy, church buildings, and theological college training as “limiting factors” for growth at a church planting conference.

The strategy was outlined thus: "Lay-led churches release the Church from key limiting factors. When you don’t need a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of a church . . . then actually we can release new people to lead and new churches to form. It also releases the discipleship of people. In church-planting, there are no passengers."

As reported in the Guardian, Traditionalists in the Church of England have launched a campaign to defend the centuries-old parish system against plans to promote innovative church gatherings in unconventional settings:

"At the campaign’s launch this week, Father Marcus Walker, the rector of St Bartholomew the Great in central London, said parishioners were facing the 'last chance to save the system that has defined Christianity for 1,000 years'.

"He said: 'In the last 10 to 15 years, particularly under [the archbishop of Canterbury] Justin Welby, there has been heavy skew away from traditional parishes with a relationship to a church building and local community, to a style of church set up in a cinema or barn or converted Chinese takeaway'."

Lay led 'house groups' within the parish system are one thing, groups set up outside traditional parishes are something else. 

With no properly ordained priests to administer the sacraments the Church of England will drift further towards nonconformity before she expires.