Save The Parish - Cornwall

Save The Parish Cornwall’s Neil Wallis this week told national campaigners about the duchy's fightback against Truro diocese’s radical On The Way restructuring plans. These plans, initiated by the Rt Rev Philip Mounstephen, threaten to change church life in the county forever.   "Church life in Cornwall faces irreversible changes – for the worse – due to restructuring plans known as On The Way being pushed through ruthlessly by Bishops and Archdeacons of the Diocese of Truro," he told the national Save The Parish conference in York.  Gone is the idea of priests in parishes. "The Bishops of Truro and St Germans' plans for “ Oversight Ministry ” aka Oversight Management will see ever fewer manager-priests tasked with running lay teams. New teams of Lay ministers are being encouraged and communion-by-extension will become the norm in some churches – to the dismay of many. "In one deanery – Kerrier - the final approved plan calls for just two priests to be in ch...

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 ...

 A senior MP called for parishioners to push back against senior clergy schemes that create giant benefices, overwork or cut parish clergy, and are likely to result in the closure of churches by default. Addressing the national Save The Parish summer conference in York this week, Labour's Rachael Maskell, a member of the House of Commons Ecclesiastical Committee, declared: “Why are we accepting this from the leaders of the Church of England?”. She said the Church of England decline didn’t just affect congregations, it affected the entire community. She called on the whole community to fight against the loss of priests in parishes and closure of churches. In rural areas “when the local shop, the post office, the pub, the village school all go, the church is often the last public building standing," she said. “And if that closes, is what is left a community or just a collection of people?" She warned against the physical and mental “breakdown” of overworked priests requir...