“Like the Trust, the CofE seems to specialise in making things soul-destroyingly difficult for volunteers. Churchwardens and PCC members, like my mother, are expected to bear much of the local heavy lifting – fundraising, helping to maintain church buildings and dealing with endless diocesan micro-management along the way. Yet as Read more…
“How awful our townscapes and landscapes would look if parish churches were allowed to disappear.”
“The Church of England deserves to be preserved for our children. But it is clearly in decline, and those at the top of its hierarchy are only hastening its demise by pouring money- our money- into “growth” projects that are providing no visible benefit and simply adding to our overheads.”
“Christianity in general is under threat, but the CofE has exacerbated this by “leaning in” to secular managerialism and politically divisive issues, moving counterculturally away from localism and underplaying its “USP” (God). Behold three worrying shifts, which risk ruining its greatest assets.”
“The Anglican Church’s current strategy is hastening the demise of the parish church, which already struggling to survive in the context of a changed population….Those of us who are keeping our churches going, and trying to increase our congregations and buck the downward trend, are being burdened with additional work Read more…
“This is beyond managed decline, it is driven decline.”
“A 1,000-year-old system of parishes could be collapsed by panic.”
“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…