ACTING BISHOP OF TRURO WILL HALT THE DECLINE IN CORNWALL’S CLERGY NUMBERS, HE TELLS CAMPAIGN GROUP

The acting Bishop of Truro is committed to ‘halting the decline’ in numbers of stipendiary parish priests in Cornwall, he pledged to a campaign group pushing for 100 such positions in Cornwall.

Save the Parish Cornwall (STPC) had presented the Rt Rev Hugh Nelson and his senior aides with detailed costed plans demonstrating how the Diocese can significantly increase clergy numbers, currently at an all-time low. 

However, Bishop Hugh, tipped by his supporters to be the next Bishop of Truro, declined to say how many priests in parishes he envisaged, saying it would be in line with what was planned in the controversial On The Way restructuring plans in the county. These plans – rolled out over the past two years – however place an emphasis on lay ministry, rather than parish priests. 

At a meeting with STPC at St John’s Church, Truro, when pressed neither he, nor Diocesan Secretary Canon Simon Cade, were prepared to reveal an exact number but said theordained parish priest figures would be included in the 2025 budget, due to be published before the November Diocesan Synod. 

“We do want to see more stipendiary clergy and the church growing,” Bishop Hugh said, responding to STPC’s published plan for 100 paid parish priests, fully costed from the Diocese’s own current budget. 

Bishop Hugh said recruiting 100 priests would be impossible even if he wanted to – because ‘there are only ever a certain number of Anglican clergy and there are only a much smaller number that want to move, and an even smaller number that want to move to Cornwall.”

“This is a very downbeat admission, which if true, suggests that the future of the Church of England in Cornwall is bleak,” said STPC spokesman Neil Wallis. “STPC believes that a much more upbeat attitude is needed from the leaders of the Church in Cornwall.”

However, Wallis welcomed the Bishop’s commitment to more clergy, despite his over-arching support for encouraging lay, rather than ordained, ministry.

“We are pleased to hear that Bishop Hugh believes this,” he said. “We believe that rural parishes need vicars, not teams of lay workers, and congregations want this too.”

Bishop Hugh said he would listen to voices in parishes and take anxieties into account – anxieties that have been exposed by STPC’s campaigning. Plans for radical parish re-organisation, to create structures to employ new teams of lay workers managed by an ‘oversight minister’ have caused concern across Cornwall, in particular in the Roseland peninsula and in East Wivelshire (Saltash/Callington area).  In Kerrier, the deanery plan envisages a giant benefice of 23 churches, overseen by a single rural dean alongside a Pioneer Priest who does not work on Sundays.

“Supporters tell us that ‘oversight ministers’ are struggling with impossible workloads and in many cases buckling under the strain,” said Wallis. “We also hear that there are difficulties in recruiting the planned new lay workers -for example for education or youth.”

On The Way has been widely criticised in Cornwall and beyond for a lack of transparency in its process, failures in consultation as deaneries negotiated plans with the Diocese, and now its implementation. 

However newly appointed Archdeacon Clive Hogger said that he was prepared to listen, implying that the controversial deanery plans were not set in stone and could be changed when appropriate.  “It is possible to have different options,” he said. 

“This is a very encouraging attitude from somebody who is very new to Cornwall and has little knowledge of its ways, if listening results in a change to the disastrous proposals of the On the Way Programme,” said Wallis.