Central location for all STP news and featured articles in publications.
“One solution to this issue is to take away all administrative and financial functions from the dioceses and put these into a slimmed-down central body accountable to the Church Commissioners. The bishops and archdeacons, thus unburdened from administration and finance, for which they are untrained and unsuited, would focus on Read more…
“But this rubbish is merely the tip of the iceberg. Let’s stand it up with some figures. In 1959, there were 13,075 stipendiary clergy and 250 diocesan support staff in the Church of England. In 2022, there are 7210 stipendiary clergy and 6500 diocesan support staff. There is the problem Read more…
“Much recent Cofe decline appears driven by a culture at the centre deficient in evidence-based decision-making. The result is that, perversely, parishes are neglected. “Following the money” (as financially trained volunteers from the campaign group I belong to, Save The Parish, have done) shows that the majority of 2021 COE Read more…
“The situation can be salvaged but, as with the NHS, a radical change of direction is required. The closure of churches during the first lockdown was a major error – a missed opportunity to help people in real distress . Now, amid a cost-of-living crisis, there is a similar opportunity.“ Read more…
This Christmas Eve, when people pour out of the pub and head in a delightful whisky-and-ginger fug to Midnight Mass to belt out their old favourites, they could get a shock. The church doors may well be shut, the vicar elsewhere, conducting a service in one of the other churches Read more…
“Thankfully, not so. In answer to a parliamentary question from Ben Bradshaw MP (PQ 26686) on 28 June, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, Andrew Selous MP, replied on behalf of the Church Commissioners that the 24 per cent of the English population who live in parishes classified as rural by ONS Read more…
This evening (Tues 15th Nov) over 100 supporters and organisers of the Save the Parish movement (STP) met with MPs to discuss the pressing issues facing parishes up and down the country.
“I carried on drawing. Slowly, I was noticing the world and finding the beauty in it – not seeing the beauty but actively finding it. A lot of that beauty was in the churches where I stopped to sit down – particularly Holy Trinity, Sloane Square decorated by the Pre-Raphaelites Read more…
“Bishop Richard Llewellin is right that amalgamating parishes into megaparishes is a disastrous strategy that, as the Church’s own research tells us, drives decline in church attendance and giving. There is now plenty of evidence that shrinking the C of E is the obvious outcome of choosing to de-fund and Read more…
“That vision of the Anglican Church as an inclusive institution, open to everyone and the priest’s cure of souls extending to everyone in his or her parish, no matter what their faith or lack of it, is increasingly under threat in Britain. This is partly through pastoral reorganisation and partly Read more…