Bishop - close our churches and you devastate communities
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The text of her latest letter is below:
Dear Editor
It would be easy for people to think that if a few parish churches in Cornwall close, it’s no loss.
Parish churches are not just places where a few people go to worship on Sundays. Their loss would leave significant holes in many more lives than might at first appear. Even the smallest congregations take collections for charities, whilst a great many host fund-raising activities for others, even when their buildings badly need repair, for example:
weekly coffee mornings attended by people for whom this might be their only contact with others, particularly the elderly,
warmth hubs
children's activities
hosting events for Cornwall’s church schools
mother/carer and toddler groups
youth groups
organising food collections and hosting food banks
fund-raising activities for outside agencies: e.g. Christmas fairs, collections for charity e.g. Harvest Festival services with collections to e.g. the Farming Support Network, and Carol Services at Christmas with collections to e.g. Water Aid or St Petroc's for the Homeless
Church halls host all kinds of activities. What happens if their church closes?
Bishop Mounstephen wants to sell vicarages/parsonages the minute he closes a church. This would make it very difficult to re-open a church, as housing is part of a vicar's stipend (salary) and the diocese wouldn't then be able to afford to buy another house.
Many of us who see the relentless work churches do quietly to raise funds and help others, think expensive action on climate change can safely be left to the unnumbered agencies and government departments which are there specifically to do so. Employing experts to advise a church with no money to install a ground-source heat pump costing anything between £14,000 and £45,000, when the roof leaks and the surrounding graveyard would need digging up, is hardly best use of diocesan funds. The Cof E should concentrate on its’ core function: living and spreading the Christian message, through the care of others within its’ parishes and in the wider world. Decide the diocese can’t afford its’ climate change work - £350,000 saved in one fell swoop. The Church has an amazing resource to use, everyone can do it and it’s free: it’s called prayer.
The bishop would say it is only the churches with tiny congregations which are at risk, but in his relentless drive to divert money from parish life to paying admin staff and external, expensively-salaried secular advisors, who knows?
Yours sincerely
Pam Dodd
Probus
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