Save The Parish responds to Diocese of Truro's 'FAQ' document

Just before Christmas, Cornwall's Bishops issued an extraordinary document relating to their 'On The Way' programme - entitled  'Next Steps On The Way  - Frequently Asked Questions'. This document was distributed to Parochial Church Councils across Cornwall - to the bewilderment of many.  Click here to read it.

Why were people puzzled? Because this is a diocese-originated FAQ document simply defending a diocese-originated plan. Here is Save The Parish's response:

There is no mention of any specific parish or deanery in this document. It’s all coming top-down from the diocese.

·       On page 2, re closing churches, the threat is less the boarding-up or selling of church buildings, more the very real threat of churches being rendered moribund by infrequent use. A church that has a service once a month is hardly ‘open’ by most people’s definition. What does it communicate about the importance of a church, that a priest is only sent there once in a blue moon?

·       On page 3, re merging PCCs, it is suggested that difficulty finding PCC officers and difficulty conducting business might be a reason to amalgamate. We disagree and suggest both (a) to widen the net in searching for PCC members (many non-churchgoers care about their local church) and (b) to simplify the demands placed on PCCs. The Diocese should understand that, in the countryside, the only people interested in saving the village church are the residents of that village. PCC amalgamations are wrong because they destroy that linkage.

·       In the answer on page 4 about cutting vicars, the answer contains the statement “in every place it is for what the parish/deanery think will be fruitful and sustainable”.  Parishes should take note of this answer and take a positive message from it: they need to state clearly what THEY want, and if something contrary to their wishes is being suggested, they should make clear – in writing – that they do not want it. The representations should be sent to the diocese and, if necessary, to the Church Commissioners under appeal. It is important to make the parish view explicit. Official responses from PCCs, and individual responses from people who have shown commitment to their parish church: both are both valuable. There have been many cases where silence has been (wrongly) assumed by dioceses to indicate assent. So always be kind and polite, but don’t be silent if you don’t like what you are hearing.

·       On page 5, there is only half an answer to “If our parish can afford a full-time priest, why can’t we have one?”  Yes, wealthier parishes should be willing to help sustain less wealthy ones. But if a parish (or group of parishes) is clearly producing enough Parish Share income to fund a priest, they should on most occasions be given one – and the diocese should take a positive view of such parishes, encouraging them (for goodness sake!) so that, when supplied with a priest, they may support other churches. The Church needs to build from its strength.

·       A final point about pages 4-6 on clergy numbers:  STP looked at employee (FTE) numbers for dioceses and clergy, and for each of the 42 dioceses, calculated the % of the total represented by the diocesan staff.  Truro has one of the highest diocese percentages in the Church of England, being in 2021, 37 diocesan staff (33%) to 77 clergy (67%). Therefore could the diocese think of trimming down its own numbers, and using the headroom to deploy more to parishes?

·       On page 7, about clergy houses, many of us would define ‘need’ differently to the author of this response. If you believe, as STP does, that local presence is important, then we need to keep – and fill – as many of the clergy houses as we can. A ‘House For Duty’ arrangement allows an ordained person to minister to a parish without the cost of a stipend – but this is only possible if we retain the properties. Once they are gone, they are gone for future generations as well as for our own, and thereby we have diminished the C of E’s local imprint.

·       On page 8, “Why do we spend all the money on new things and not support the old things?” seems to carry an implication that the parishes are in some way ‘old things’. That’s a most strange way to look at it. The parishes are simply the Church of England’s ‘presence in every community’. (“A Christian Presence in every Community” is the C of E’s strapline, advertised on its website). Parishes are a precious asset that is neither new nor old, but which need the positive support of the diocese to be kept current. However, if making ‘new things’ means super-imposing a duplicate structure in competition with the existing parish structure, that is wasteful and needs to be challenged.

·       On page 8, “There are four key areas of spend, parish ministry, mission funding, diocesan support teams (Church House) and Net Zero.”. Surely the Church’s role is to promote the word of Christ and therefore the last two of these  ‘four key areas’ should be minimised, lest they distract us from our vital primary role? What is being done to minimise them? Frankly £5.3m actual spend on ministry out of a total budget of £9.5m is unimpressive. The comment “we spend far more on traditional ministry than on anything else” is unremarkable because, surely, that is the core business of the church and we should be 100% focused on it.

·       On page 8 and 9, there is evidently some satisfaction that there are Plans and Projects. But one comes back to the observation that these plans emanate from the dioceses and deaneries with no real consultation with the parishes. They risk being a top-down imposition, and the diocese needs to check carefully if there is a level of discomfort in parishes. The final answer is “Deanery plans were created by the local parishes and deaneries”: many people dispute this.  Very often such plans are an imitation of company plans, unsuitable for the church because they neglect that the Holy Spirit works through the inspiration of individuals, and not through the execution of ‘plans’.

·       What’s NOT in this document? It is quite extraordinary that only financial grants are described. What is the diocese actually doing to help parishes flourish in a practical way? Where is the sharing of forms of worship that have worked well? What ideas does the diocese have for making churches more attractive – better sound systems perhaps, for example? Leaving aside money, there is very little about what the diocese is going to do in a practical way to support the parishes.