Cornish curate speaks of Diocese of Truro difficulties

Revd Arwen Folkes, Chichester diocese (former curate in St Mawes),
Revd Tom Woolford, Blackburn diocese, Prudence Dailey MBE
Revd Daniel Valentine, Manchester, Revd Oliver Coss, All Saints Northampton

A panel of serving stipendiary priests - including a Rector who until just before the pandemic was a curate in Cornwall - has spoken out strongly in favour of Save The Parish at the campaigning body's national conference in York this week.

Rev Arwen Folkes was curate in St Just-in-Roseland until 2019 and said she loved living in the county but grew to dislike working for the Diocese of Truro.

She recalled: “The people in the churches were hungry for the eucharist every week, but increasingly the church line was that the people must be re-educated away from that. Instead the emphasis was increasingly on lay ministry, on communion-by-extension, and so on.”

She walked away and is now Rector of East Blatchington and Bishopstone in East Sussex, diocese of Chichester.

Incumbent priests are being weighed down by desk work instead of being able to use their time for pastoral support in their communities, Rev Folkes said.  The church has become “upside down”, with “theological pen pushers” rather than “curers of souls” increasingly seen as the way forward. That was not the kind of life of a priest that most signed up to be or congregations wanted.

Also on the panel was Rev Oliver Cost, Rector of All Saints Northampton and Rural Dean  in the diocese of Peterborough. He said £2 million had been spent on a new resource church model in the area but his churches got “crumbs from the table.”

Rev Dr Tom Woolford, vicar of New Longton in the diocese of Blackburn and a tutor in Theology at Emmanuel Theological College, said congregations in his diocese were growing - because his bishop believed in increasing numbers of ordained stipendiary priests.

In contrast, Rev Daniel Valentine, priest-in-charge of St Matthew with St Mary’s church in Crumpsell, one of the poorest areas of north Manchester, spoke with some anger. He said that despite the vast poverty of the community he serves an astonishing £7.5 million was being spent by his diocese in bankrolling a Transforming Mission-style programme in the city. This was happening as the city’s myriad traditional individual church-based parishes had been brutally reorganised into just seven “super-deanery mission communities”, he said.  It isn’t working but “no-one is listening”.