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!

Women bishops defy Governing Body

Jolly June          Source: Twitter@LlandaffDio

Within the Church in Wales, those who on grounds of theological conviction and conscience are unable to receive the sacramental ministry of women bishops or priests continue to be within the spectrum of teaching and tradition of the Anglican Communion. The Church in Wales therefore remains committed to enabling all its members to flourish within its life and structures as accepted and valued. Appropriate provision for them will be made in a way intended to maintain the highest possible degree of communion and contributes to mutual flourishing across the whole Church in Wales. (Principles. Women Bishops Code of Practice) 

It appears that the newly appointed women bishops in the Church in Wales are happy to defy their Governing Body in an act which can only be described as a visible sign of disunity, showing no regard for the procedure which enabled them to be appointed bishops.

At ordinations presided over by the first female bishop of Llandaff, as a mere gesture towards the agreed Code of Practice, arrangements have been made for a male bishop to step forward for the laying on of hands if the ordinand, on grounds of conscience, is unable to receive the sacramental ministry of a woman diocesan bishop.

I understand that similar arrangements have been made for ordinations carried out by the bishop of St Davids. The gesture is clear.

The rules were changed unilaterally by the Church in Wales to grant the wish of women who claimed to be 'called to ministry', even though the Church in Wales claimed to share the historic episcopate with other Churches, 'including other Churches of the Anglican Communion, the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, which continue to ordain only men as priests or bishops'.

No provision was made for those, who on grounds of theological conviction and conscience, are unable to receive the sacramental ministry of women bishops or priests. Instead the Governing Body voted for a Code of Practice.

Under the Code, "Individual members of the Church in Wales who, on grounds of conscience, are unable to receive the sacramental ministry of a woman diocesan bishop, shall not be required to do so against their conscience, and alternative provision shall be made".

For the Code of Practice to have any meaning it must be seen to satisfy the consciences of those for whom it was intended but I understand that the new female bishops are making their own arrangements, thus placing orthodox ordinands in an impossible position.

The procedure has become so far removed from when the Provincial Assistant Bishop presided at ordinations that it lacks any integrity whatsoever.

The minister in the Sacrament of Ordination is the Bishop. The celebrant presides over the whole service – the interrogation of the candidates, the laying-on-of-hands (assisted by other priests who are symbolically receiving the new priests into the presbyterium) and the celebration of the Eucharist.  Importing another bishop (solely because he is male) to step in and lay hands on any candidates who have conscientious objections to the sacramental ministry of women, far from being a gesture of accommodation, turns the whole business into a charade of misogyny.

The curious arrangements proposed in Llandaff and St Davids do nothing to solve the basic problem of conscience either, since it is a requirement in the ordination service that those being ordained receive Holy Communion from the bishop who is the celebrant.

It has been said over and again that we do not have a problem with women; our problem remains the unilateral departure from the practice of the undivided church and by far the greater part of Christendom whose orders we have always claimed to have shared.

Traditionalist Anglicans in Wales are not alone in their struggle to survive. In the Church of England specific provision was made for men and women who in conscience are unable to receive the sacramental ministry of women bishops or priests but there has been a constant chipping away at the agreement. For the latest developments see the Forward in Faith document Nomination to the See of Sheffield: Lessons Learned.

When it comes to women's ordained ministry there seems to be far more of the old Eve than the new.

+ Richard outlines his survival strategy

That is, a survival  strategy for the six diocesan bishops of the Church in Wales (CinW) whose membership can't stretch to 1% of the population of Wales and continues to shrink based on the CinW's own figures. 

From the 2013 Membership and Finances Report quoted in Highlights:
"The trend is down across the board. There is no set of figures which indicate a rise in physical numbers in any single category. There are no positive indicators—every field shows decline compared with previous years, and in some cases that decline is significant. Our core membership continues to fall year on year."

In senior manager positions implementing strategies for growth in a declining market the bishops are far more secure than they would be if considering the continuing need for six dioceses with six Bishops and an Ass Bishop, six Deans, numerous Archdeacons, etc, etc. Clearly top heavy but in management terms spot-on in mirroring society today which has become the primary aim of liberal Anglicanism

Bishop Pain explains that "as time has gone on we need to be more focused": There's lots of changes happening in the Church and in society and there are challenges which we are facing and I think any organisation needs to have a clear understanding about where it is going. The key message is to harness our resources...to develop ministry in new and exciting ways.

And here is the crunch, "but you need to have a plan for that. You need organisation. And you need resources for that. There are tensions I think between what parishes want and sometimes what the diocese needs and you need to hold all those together and that is what the plan is trying to do."

Without any hint of irony the bishop says that he would be very surprised if you didn't have any organisation which was working well that didn't have focused leadership. [My emphasis - Ed.]  Working well doesn't sit comfortably with the bishop of Bangor's comments when he introduced the Finance and Membership Report. He said, More money today is being spent on ministry than at any other time in the history of the Church in Wales. That means less on buildings, more on people. For a Church that wants to orientate itself towards mission, that is very, very good news. The bad news comes with membership.   

According to the bishop of Monmouth, because of the economic stringencies we are facing at the moment, we have to have a clear understanding of how we manage the money, so that we can have the right resources in the right place. This will mean cutting the number of clergy down but hopefully having good teams which will enable us to go forward in the future. 'Hopefully' being the operative word.

The Diocese of Monmouth's new strategy is headed: "Monmouth 2020: Becoming the people God calls us to be. The bishop says that the roots of the Church go back "hundreds and hundreds of years" but "plants go in different directions at times". He claims that the diocese is "going back to the roots of what the Church is about". But what "the Church is about" is not what the Church in Wales is about, or the Church of England for that matter. Plants which go off in different directions are often regarded as weeds to be plucked out or left to wilt after hoeing, a process already in evidence in England and Wales having spread from the US.

How much more deluded can our career focused bishops become? The "people God calls us to be" are those Anglicans who have remained true to the Catholic faith along with our brothers and sisters in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. 

What the Church in Wales fails to realise is that in departing from the Catholic faith they have set themselves apart from the Apostolic Church. The roots are in the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Any survival strategy which ignores that will protect only its senior strategy managers at the expense of their flock.