"Bishop Hugh and his diocesan supporters are absolutely denying the distress of church congregations"

 Save The Parish Cornwall supporter Pam Dodd writes about the despair of ignored Cornish churchgoers (and non-churchgoers)

"The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.” William Booth Founder of the Salvation Army

 Someone once said something along the lines of “The Church of England exists for those who don’t go” or words to that effect. I’ve always understood it, up to a point, but it’s only since I’ve lived in Cornwall for the last 13 years that I have really heard, seen and felt it. Read on for the details.

For the sake of argument, let’s do the unforgivable and include Cornwall in England. It’s accepted that Cornwall is either first or second in the “most rural county in the country” stakes. And not just rural, but a place which has only tenuous links with the rest of the country in so many ways. The sense of place here in this county is profound. The eastern side is arguably psychologically slightly closer to England due to its geography but it is definitely Cornwall. Whilst central Cornwall is definitely 100% Cornish. And the west is…….. well, it’s Down West. Basically, the whole of Cornwall is Different and as an incomer, the sooner Bishop Hugh understands this, the easier life will be.

After moving to Cornwall as Suffragan Bishop from the Home Counties just three years ago, Bishop Hugh now rules the Church of England in Cornwall as the Acting Bishop of Truro. And in that role, he has eagerly taken the lead for On The Way, (OTW)the project to revolutionise the church in the county begun by the ex Bishop of Truro Philip Mounstephen. Back in the Spring, I wrote two letters,  published prominently in the West Briton newspaper and The Cornish Guardian, to warn the people of Cornwall of the danger of OTW to our churches and to deeply held views about the role of the church in our communities. I hope the true Cornish will permit me to include myself in these views. I warned that churches were at risk of closure, by the intended drastic reduction of ordained clergy to run them. It would be difficult, I said, to find clergy to take funerals, to conduct marriages, to baptise children, let alone take services. This is already happening. Closed churches will be left to rot and collapse. Bishop Hugh has said he isn’t in the business of caring for mediaeval buildings. Most important of all will be the absence of a parish priest to be responsible for the cure of souls in the parish.

The voiced fury of the bishops towards me following a Deanery meeting was quite extraordinary. How dare I write to the newspaper? one of them asked me. They had no plans to close churches. It would be up to churches to close themselves. (A clever ploy, akin to the torturer making life so unbearable that the victim commits suicide, thus absolving the torturer of responsibility.) “There is no money, there is no money”, endlessly repeated the other.

And what has happened since? On The Way (OTW) has continued to be rolled out in Cornwall, supposedly with the agreement of its’ parishes, but what is more and more coming to light is the deceitful way in which the scheme has been sold to Parochial Church Councils and Congregations, ably set out in a chilling dossier put together very recently  by the organisation Save the Parish Cornwall – not the minority group the bishop’s supporters have alleged it to be. The dossier highlights the ways in which parishes have been misled by the Diocese of Truro, in a culture of fear and downright misinformation. Not one member of the clergy quoted in the dossier is named, for fear of their job. Some members of church congregations are quoted but not named, for fear of some kind of reprisal. The accounts of misinformation from the bishops and some senior clergy are staggering, whilst it is clear that in some instances there has been downright telling of untruths. PCC’s already in the new, huge clusters of churches are now finding out the true cost of agreeing to OTW, as they are coming under pressure to give up their independence and amalgamate their Parochial Church Councils into one, even to give up dealing with their own finances, losing control of their own funds.

The original cry of “There is no money” has been abandoned by the Diocese after publicity proving this is not the case. But the plan to have lay people running churches instead of ordained priests, numbers of these overseen by a manager known as an Oversight Minister, continues its’ relentless rollout across the county. It is remarkable how many people have expressed great concern about the loss of parish priests: in one example one ordained priest for over 20 churches. Bishop Hugh has been reported as saying dismissively ‘you don’t need a clerical collar to take a funeral’. Which just proves he knows nothing about the people of the county in which he lives, because that’s what ‘church’ means to a great many Cornish people. Just as ‘church’ means you want a proper vicar to marry you and a proper vicar to baptise your children.

And the other thing you want, if you live in a village, which includes a huge proportion of the Cornish population, is a church which is open. Not the church ten miles or more down the road, which is the next nearest one, not the opportunity to go to a 700 year old Christian building which has been turned into a community centre with its’ stained glass windows obscured by screens and not the opportunity to go to Sally Blogg’s house which holds church services on Sundays, or a football field which holds services on another day.

In this Christmas season, as a member of the Church of England who doesn’t go, what you want, Bishop Hugh, is a Church Christmas Fete so you can donate money to your parish church. You want a Carol Service, in your own parish church, led by a person in a clerical collar, with the proper tune for O Little Town of Bethlehem, and While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks sung to the tune Lyngham, with mulled wine afterwards and a raffle for church funds or charity St. Petroc’s for the Homeless. You want to take your children to see the crib with baby Jesus. And when it’s harvest time, at Harvest Festival, you know your elderly mother will receive a basket of produce, which has been blessed in the church where she was married.

And all year round, you want a building which you can slip into during the day, to sit and breathe in the atmosphere of centuries of prayer, while there’s no-one else there. You want to go into that sacred space and light a candle for your Mum who has cancer or for your Granny who has just died. You want to visit the church where your ancestors worshipped, reassured that it’s still there and grateful that it still stands guard over their graves. You write in the Visitors Book: ‘Thank you for being here.’ You are a lonely older person who goes to the weekly coffee mornings run by the church because you will feel welcome and part of a community. You want to write a prayer to put on the prayer tree at some time during a weekday, because your daughter was murdered last week and you are desperate and want to be sure the Lord is caring for her now and you want to sit in that building quietly and cry and pick up a prayer card as you go. I witnessed that heartbreaking plea on a prayer tree.  You want to see the flowers and think about God’s creation and how amazing it is that the flower arrangers have been doing this for generation after generation to the glory of God. You want to go in there where it’s more peaceful than anywhere else you know and..…...well, you’re not sure why, but you go anyway, just to be on your own to think and you might even pray and hope He hears you. All true.

And some of us people who don’t go to church services actually do, once a year, usually to the Christmas Midnight service which some of us still call Midnight Mass and we go as a family. We aren’t all old. And we want that consecrated wafer placed in our hands by the white-collared person who consecrated it a few minutes ago. Not last week, by a vicar we don’t know, and called Communion By Extension. Not by just an ordinary person wearing ordinary clothes but that white collar and some sort of religious uniform.

We want to know that even though we don’t go to services, other people do and somehow that means that everyone in the town or village is thought of and cared about and brought before God and prayed for. How do we know the congregation is there in church representing us? Our bell ringers tell us, faithfully ringing before Sunday services and for special occasions. They know themselves to be part of the Anglican Church in Cornwall and as churches fail, you our bishop, and your diocesan team soon to be enlarged by more cleric administrators, are preparing to throw them out with the baby and the bathwater.

The bottom line of all this is that you are a Christian, even though your bishop doesn’t see you as such. Every one of us who comes into a church building matters to God, Bishop Hugh, and we should all, every single soul of us, matter to you.

The person wearing that white collar, whom the bishop thinks of as some sort of expensive waste of space, is God’s representative here on earth, and that matters to a great many more Cornish people than he is even aware of, let alone understands.

The words coming from our bishop, and some churches which are happy to see the demise of church-led worship, are that they are doing as God tells them, but we should beware of this emphatic assertion. There are always two voices speaking to us. One is God’s, the other is the power of evil which would like us to think otherwise. To assert so vehemently that we are doing God’s will can be a kind of arrogance. The destruction of Cornwall’s churches and parish system is so drastic, its’ ramifications so serious, we absolutely must ask ourselves whether the unrelenting emphasis on non-church worship, led by non-ordained people is really God’s wish or is it the voice of destruction?

Describing Save the Parish as a “minority group”, openly published in a recent Diocese of Truro document, is an understatement. Bishop Hugh and his diocesan supporters are absolutely denying the distress of church congregations and those who don’t go to services, and their voices are getting louder.

We must no longer refer to On The Way but to On The Way Out, because that is exactly what it is.

Are Bishop Hugh and his supporters listening?

I fervently pray so.

Pam Dodd.