News & Articles
Church in Decline | Sir James Burnell-Nugent, The Telegraph
“This is beyond managed decline, it is driven decline.”
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“This is beyond managed decline, it is driven decline.”
“A 1,000-year-old system of parishes could be collapsed by panic.”
“But for now it is time to hunker down, and sit out this social and emotional winter. Those of us who want a return to what we had will have to keep the memory of it alive. Innovations will have to be survived and endured.”
The demise of the parish system is not inevitable. If the Archbishops are truly ‘passionate’ about the parish, they should tear up the Church Closers’ Charter. As it is, it’s as if they are denying that the revolution is coming, even as they build the guillotine.
“This is why thousands of grassroots laity and clergy met, in person and online, last week to plot a General Synod campaign to oppose this new plan and remind our superiors of the promises their predecessors made when they despoiled the parishes of their assets a generation ago. The election Read more…
“A quiet but unmistakable rebellion is taking place within the Church of England, a groundswell of anger bubbling up from that most British of institutions: the Parish Church. And support for it shows no sign of waning.”
“There is, surely, a legitimate question to ask, about how the church reduces its expenditure on buildings and people to make itself sustainable, but the Church of England is not a supermarket chain, where mangers look at the profitability of an individual branch, and decide it can close, or even Read more…
Why has Joanna Penberthy still not been sacked? Back in May, the Bishop of St Davids, the most heavenly small cathedral in the world, wrote a post on Twitter about perceived threats to the Welsh Assembly from the Conservative Party: “They say that this is not true, but we know Read more…
“And if we’re going to promise to ‘Save the parish’, let’s use those ‘limiting factors’ as our banners: ‘a building and a stipend and long, costly college-based training for every leader of the church’. !at sounds like an ambition worth having — and a more plausible and desirable one than Read more…
“Secularisation is indeed a catastrophe for the churches. But we won’t outlast this period of history by being more business-like or by adopting slicker models of evangelistic marketing. We won’t be saved by panicky spread-sheet evangelists, Indeed, we must be more of what we have been called to be – Read more…