Save The Parish - Cornwall

Deaneries in the west of the Diocese of Truro - Kerrier and Penwith - have been struggling with controversial restructuring plans known as On The Way, introduced by the former Bishop of Truro, the Rt Rev Philip Mounstephen. After years now of heated and often painful discussion, Penwith deanery has abandoned its On The Way plan. Following a well-attended meeting last November , it is moving on and making a fresh start.  Details below, circulated in the February 2026 edition of Penwith Deanery News.... Deanery Plan Development   1.        Deanery Planning Day 1.1.        The Deanery Planning Day (November 2025) began with Eucharist as a visible symbol of our unity. Each person shared the Body and Blood of Christ with each other. This rootedness in worship was deliberate to help us all focus on the source and destination of our work for the day. 1.2          We...

Anyone who has been involved in recruiting a new vicar knows the challenges. It's a time-consuming process, to say the least. There's likely to be a long interregnum as extensive consultation takes place, a detailed 'parish profile' prepared and complex legal, diocesan and patronage rules negotiated. But does it have to be like this? A Save The Parish supporter in a rural Cornish deanery writes..... In our parish we’ve been in vacancy since the beginning of July 2025, and it would seem (from what I can deduce) that our vacancy is not likely to be filled any time soon. This situation (inexplicably to me) does not seem to be a matter of concern for the senior clerics in our region.  I should say straight off that I have no experience of recruiting for a parish priest job role, and I’ve had no direct involvement in this particular recruitment process. So I have no relevant direct experience. But I do have a career’s worth experience of recruiting for senior positions in th...

 A message from Save The Parish founder Rev Marcus Walker: This year is a defining year for Save the Parish. This summer there will be General Synod elections which will determine who speaks for parishes at the national level for the next five years. But your parish can only have a say in choosing those representatives if you have members serving on Deanery Synod. YOU CAN HELP! Every three years your parish elects representatives to Deanery Synod at your Annual Parochial Church Meeting. These Deanery Synod reps are the electors for General Synod. If you want your parish to have a vote, you need to be on Deanery Synod. If you want people to vote for Save the Parish candidates, you need reps who will do this. To ensure you have a voice here’s what you need to do at your APCM this spring: Check that your parish has its full complement of Deanery Synod representatives appointed - this is different for each Parish, so check how many you should have. Ask your current Deanery Synod membe...

  A message from Save The Parish founder Marcus Walker:   I hope you have been able to celebrate well, wherever you have found yourself this Christmas. There is something intensely parochial about this particular feast (parochial being meant entirely positively, as you would hope!) All the key moments are small scale: a child born to a mother; a couple needing to return to their family home; the risk of scandal. Christ is born into a family, with uncles and aunts and cousins; he is known to a community, who wonder how on earth Joseph the carpenter's son can possibly be preaching to them about the Eternal God. And yet overshadowing the whole story are questions of national and global significance: tax inspectors from a pan-Mediterranean empire, death-squads of a local tyrant, wise men from the East. The interplay of the intimately local and the powerfully global tells the story of Christianity - of the Word which is both in the beginning with God and becoming fl...

 Save The Parish co-founder Alison Milbank writes... This is a rather belated report on our 2025 conference.  Save the Parish welcomed over 120 people to           St James the Greater in Leicester for our conference on October 18th, on the theme, ‘A parish is for         life’. We are entering a new stage in our development as an organisation, as we have become part of the solution for the future flourishing of local ministry in the Church of England. The positive focus of the conference reflected this, though it comes after no fewer than four STP centrally supported events in Leicester diocese to protest against the radical removal there of local parish ministry.   This event was focused on reflecting on our gains in synod, which Marcus described, as well as the alliances with rural bishops in seeking to rebalance financial resources back to the parishes. Bijan Omrani, whose book about the Christia...

Dissenting voices emerged at today's Diocese of Truro synod over the eye-watering budget deficit planned for 2026 - nearly £4.5 million after a £3.4 million deficit in 2025. Supporters of the Diocese of Truro's 'strategy led' budget - which aims to support unproven and unfinished deanery plans created during the restructuring process known as On The Way - say that a total of £22 million of Diocesan reserves need to be poured into these plans over a ten-year period. On The Way envisages a model of Oversight Ministers managing teams of lay ministers and workers - often in large benefices - rather than priests in parishes. Others today counselled caution and called for firm evidence that the much-vaunted 'fruitfulness and sustainability' of this approach is provided before the financial situation of the Diocese is weakened yet further. Martin Saunders from Pydar Deanery regretted the fact that only 20 minutes had been allocated to such an important discussion.  T...