AT MIDNIGHT on 19 April 2014, a rebirth took place in Yorkshire (News, 17 April 2014). The three dioceses of Bradford, Ripon & Leeds, and Wakefield ceased to be, and the brand new diocese of West Yorkshire & the Dales (now Leeds) was created. The first latest diocese since 1929, it represented the primary fruits of a latest Dioceses Commission given “teeth” to propose change. The Archbishop of York praised those forming the brand new diocese as “pioneers”, while the late Queen spoke of a “clear example of how the Church is responding to Christ’s call to proclaim the gospel afresh in a rapidly changing society”.
The diocesan Bishop, Acting, at that time, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, offered a rejoinder to the concept that the Church of England was “incapable or unwilling to alter”. “We face many challenges as a consequence of our willingness to take the danger of dying so as to live — but we are going to face them as people of hope whose hearts and imaginations have been caught by Jesus himself,” he wrote in his blog.
TEN years on, appetite for further large-scale change appears to have waned, not less than on the centre. In a letter last yr, Dame Caroline Spelman, who chairs the Dioceses Commission, confirmed that, in agreement with the Archbishops, there can be “no ‘big bang’ or centrally-led approach to restructuring or combining dioceses presently” (News, 4 August 2023). Such a change would, she suggested, function a “distraction” from mission and ministry. It would “absorb hard-pressed leadership time” and prove to be “an extra burden on the already constrained resources of the Church in any respect levels”.
The letter was a change of tune from a confidential paper that surfaced two years earlier, prepared by the Archbishops and the Bishop of London, which had concluded that the Church have to be prepared to “give up much that now we have held dear, but which we now imagine might now be hindering our mission” (News, 11 February 2022).
“We suggest that given all the pieces else that is occurring we can be moving to having fewer dioceses over time,” they wrote. “The structure and culture of the Church of England, and the proliferation of ‘vested interest’ and diversified decision-making power structures make change difficult. Yet if we will not be prepared to alter then fruit can’t be produced — it is a gospel truth.”
Does the incontrovertible fact that the Commission has proposed a less radical option (pooling back-office functions was diplomatically described within the 2021 paper as not considered “universally successful”), indicate that nerve has been lost?
“They’ll be back here inside five to 10 years saying, ‘How will we do that?’” Bishop Baines predicts. “But they won’t have learned anything from how we did it.”
THIS frustration — the sense that the Church has did not learn from one its most radical recent experiments (News, 29 October 2021) — is felt deeply by Bishop Baines.
“Let me be absolutely clear: it was the best thing to do,” he says, of the creation of the diocese. “And we want to do it again. . . But no learning has been done. Now, the Archbishops say, ‘Yes, now we have learned.’ Well, you possibly can then say: ‘Well, what have you ever learned?’ All they’ve learned is that it’s very hard; so we’re not going to do it again. That’s not learning.”
A gathering that he organised in 2017 — seven years after the Commission’s first report on the region — was, he reports, each the primary and the last time that “everybody involved had sat around the identical table.”
“On the negative side, it’s an unwillingness to face ongoing challenge,” he observes. “It’s the courage thing. The second thing is that the glory of the Church of England is its dispersed authority. And the curse of the Church of England is its dispersed authority. . . If it’s nobody’s transient to carry this process together, then nobody does it.”
One of the results of a “complete neglect of evaluation, monitoring, evaluation, and learning” is, he suggests, that the Church won’t learn from the pain endured by those that lived through the Leeds process — and find out how to avoid it in future. “You know, there are individuals who bear the scars, which can never be known.”
WHILE it’s now ten years because the diocese of Leeds officially got here into being, 15 have elapsed because the Dioceses Commission began a review of boundaries of the five Yorkshire dioceses of Bradford, Ripon & Leeds, Sheffield, Wakefield, and York, “to find out whether different boundaries would improve the Church’s mission” (News, 30 January 2009).
Besides proposing the dissolution of Bradford, Ripon & Leeds, and Wakefield, and the establishment of a latest diocese of Leeds, the draft scheme of 2012 made the three existing cathedrals — Bradford, Ripon, and Wakefield — cathedrals of the brand new diocese, and created two latest suffragan sees: Bradford and Huddersfield.
Diocese of LeedsThe Dean of Ripon, the Very Revd John Dobson (left), and the Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Revd Nick Baines (centre), at a Walk of Witness, in Ripon, on Boxing Day, 2019
In setting out the case for change, the Commission emphasised how much had modified because the creation of the prevailing diocesan boundaries within the nineteenth and early-Twentieth centuries. Leeds, now the third largest English city, was split between 4 separate dioceses, making it “almost not possible for the Church to talk with a single voice on major issues”.
On the financial side, while the dioceses were “surviving”, they were “severely limited by their lack of resources, and financial flexibility”. Bradford was found to be covering its costs by selling houses and reducing the variety of stipendiary clergy, with a deficit predicted for every of the subsequent five years. In Wakefield, a six-figure annual deficit within the years 2010-2014 was forecast.
The latest structure can be “more consistent with socio-economic realities, civic institutions, and the secular communities that the Church seeks to serve”, and, with five episcopal areas in place, mix “the perfect of the intimacy of the local church with the benefits of scale”. Benefits listed included “greater flexibility and deployment of clergy”, and an “enlarged financial envelope”.
While emphasising that the scheme was mission- reasonably than finance-led, the Commission predicted that “significant financial savings” could possibly be made, to the tune of £800,000 a yr, against set-up costs of £1.4 million.
FROM the outset, objections were raised concerning the proposal. In 2013, Wakefield diocesan synod voted by almost two to 1 against the proposals, in a debate that heard predictions that the brand new diocese can be a “monster creation”.
During a General Synod debate that culminated in an amazing vote in favour of implementation, the Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Revd Stephen Platten, warned: “We are making this decision without having had a debate across the Church on what kind of dioceses and bishops we wish” (News, 5 July 2013).
For Stephen Hogg, a General Synod member, chartered accountant, and skilled change manager, who retired from London to Settle in 2014, the draft scheme raised alarm bells. “Lots of the problems within the early days were to do with setting it up wrongly to start out with,” he says. “Looking on the initial draft, I used to be considering, ‘I can see a very good argument to merge dioceses, to not create a latest one.’”
Choosing one diocese into which to merge the opposite two would, he suggests, have saved thousands and thousands of kilos. The logistics of organising a latest diocese from scratch, including “massive legal costs”, are “monstrous”, he observes. And, while he agrees that there can be huge opposition inside the dioceses identified for merger, he believes that “they need to have had the nerve to do it. . . I’d have fought for a merger and managed the communication around it.”
Ten years on, nonetheless, he reports that the scheme has “worked out significantly better that I had feared”, to the extent that he believes that the creation of Leeds “might well have saved the Church of England on this a part of Yorkshire”. While that is partly a tribute to its financial management — Leeds has “weathered Covid reasonably higher than some”, he suggests — his chief source of pride within the diocese is the relationships that underpin it.
“I don’t know the way it’s happened, nevertheless it has gelled,” he says. “We work so well together. . . There’s a general type of atmosphere within the diocese of ‘just getting on with it’. . .The warfare, the difficulties, the tensions between the three old dioceses that were very apparent eight, nine years ago have gone.” A lay worship leader within the Castleberg Benefice, he is stuffed with praise for Bishop Baines, including his vision and appointments, and the staff at Church House, Leeds. “I feel it’s been a hit,” he concludes. “I wouldn’t have said that six years ago.”
MR HOGG’s colleague on the General Synod, Joyce Hill, Emeritus Professor of English on the University of Leeds and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor, echoes his upbeat assessment. A member of the Chapter of Ripon Cathedral, she is especially positive concerning the retention and management of three cathedrals, recalling earlier “nervousness” about their fate.
“I do know that’s somewhat irregular, but it could actually be made to work,” she says. “I strongly feel that it’s been a hit story. Each cathedral is a cathedral for the entire diocese, and that message is all the time strongly convey. . . But, at the identical time, each cathedral has got an outlined focus that makes them complementary and set within the geographical and sociocultural position that they’re actually in.”
She shares Bishop Baines’s frustration on the subject of wider learning, identifying “a possibility lost”, and observing that, because the years pass, “you forget, sometimes, the marginally crooked path by which you’ve got to the position you’re in.”
The Dioceses Commission’s recent advice was, she argues, “blinkered, short-sighted, partisan, and characteristic, may I dare say, of the Church of England all the time favouring the established order. And I feel we’re going to should square as much as reality in one other five or ten years.” Its “fudge” advice for the sharing of some functions is, she suggests, “unimaginative”.
“People are afraid of change, afraid of being done down, afraid of losing power in some type of way,” she observes. Such fears — particularly amongst those that feel that they’re fighting a “rear-guard motion” — have to be acknowledged, she says. “But I just think that it doesn’t should be that way. And it’s never felt like that to me.”
While she acknowledges that, by definition, a bigger organisation will leave people “more distant”, she also emphasises the potential for online communication and meeting, and “a growth of experience on the centre”.
When it involves applying lessons from change management within the secular realm, there may be a difficult balance to be struck, she suggests. “I do think there are occasions when the Church hides behind Christianity so as to avoid making difficult decisions. And I do think we are able to learn and will learn. But the difficulty is that we sometimes veer from saying, ‘We can’t learn because we’re Christian, and we’re different,’ to ‘Oh, yes, that’s thing to do,’ after which try to import it lock, stock, and barrel. And that doesn’t work. . .
“There’s a whole lot of knowledge on the market, and the Church doesn’t all the time tap into it. And, sometimes, it tries to to tap into it by attempting to adopt some detail. That’s not the top to adopt from; it’s the principle.”
IN 2014, a review of the Leeds scheme by Hilary Russell, Emeritus Professor of Urban Policy at Liverpool John Moores University, and a member of the Dioceses Commission, drew attention to “the failure to have in mind the human implications of the scheme and the dearth of care shown to affected individuals at different stages of the method”, and the necessity for “some person or body with the authority to steer and to co-ordinate dispersed authority”.
This is definitely Bishop Baines’s perspective. Nominated as Bishop of Bradford inside days of the Dioceses’ Commissions first proposal for the creation of a latest, larger diocese, he accepted the position “knowing that it’d result in me losing it” (News, 31 December 2010).
Diocese of LeedsFrom left: the Bishop of Huddersfield, the Rt Revd Smitha Prasadam; the Bishop of Wakefield, the Rt Revd Tony Robinson; the Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Revd Nick Baines; the Bishop of Kirkstall, the Rt Revd Arun Arora; the Bishop of Ripon, the Rt Revd Anna Eltringham; and the Bishop of Bradford, the Rt Revd Toby Howarth, at a chrism eucharist on 28 March
Still, he observes, “no thought had been given, no contact given, to what happens when you’re made redundant.” He recognised from the outset, he says, that preparation was inadequate: “There was no prescription for any accompaniment, for monitoring and evaluation, for resourcing, for support,” and, crucially, “a scarcity of take care of the people involved, lack of leadership, lack of guidance, lack of just looking ahead, you already know, even politically, strategically”.
The word he returns to is “incoherent. . . People meant well, but when you could have dispersed authority, who has the job of pulling it together, ensuring you’ve got the best people in place, coping with the legal stuff?”
He was also conscious, nonetheless, of an inclination within the Church to “find 1,000,000 the reason why we shouldn’t change things”, concluding that “someone’s got to have the heart, the courage to say, we’re going to do it anyway.” Having contemplated moving on, he realised that, “to be obedient to the decision God has given me, I had to go away my name within the hat.”
Having accepted the diocesan bishopric, he found himself having to go to the Archbishop of York to elucidate that he would should be made an assistant bishop within the diocese of York so as to be seconded as Acting Bishop of Leeds. He later made the case for reviving the see of Richmond (later Kirkstall) as a way of securing one other area bishop within the diocese, having initially been tasked with each leading the Church’s newest diocese and serving as Area Bishop for Leeds.
There was, he says, no template for what was asked of those leading the brand new diocese, and “an enormous assumption that a bishop knew find out how to manage change”. The diocese began with no infrastructure, no governance, no area bishops in three of the episcopal areas, no diocesan bishop in post, and 4 distant offices. Both legal and financial costs were unexpected. The cost to the Church of organising the brand new diocese was forecast to be £1.4 million; it ended up costing the diocese of Leeds about £10 million.
He recalls now “the sheer cost of the time, the trouble, the grief, the criticism that we regularly got, the misrepresentation that it’s all about money or bums on pews. . . We should never take it with no consideration that this worked without particular individuals . . . They shed blood to do it.”
In future, he says, there have to be “a change-management infrastructure” in place. Among his recommendations in 2017 was that, in future, the Archbishop should take responsibility for such schemes, and that work on legislative change should begin immediately, to create an Enabling Measure “so as to allow this process to be done properly, professionally, humanely”.
BISHOP Baines stays happy with what has been achieved within the diocese, which has, he suggests, achieved a geographical “coherence” that serves the Church’s mission within the region. Like Mr Hogg, he reports a way of unity. After the recent chrism eucharist, he was told by “someone who’s been around a protracted time . . . ‘This will not be a diocese pulling itself apart’”.
Tasked by a design agency with coming up with three alliterative words for the brand new diocese’s brand, he and colleagues landed on “loving, living, learning”, and that note of humility has been vital, he says. “If anyone ever said to me, ‘Well, you’ve done this fallacious,’ I’d go, ‘You may be right. Because now we have to learn.’”
Ten years on, he also stays convinced that “dissolution and creation was the best model”, one wherein “everybody lost and everybody then identifies with the brand new”.
IN 2021, a data-led review of “lessons learned from the creation of the diocese of Leeds”, conducted by Jonathan Neil-Smith, secretary to the Dioceses Commission (2011-21), was published.
The latest diocese was in a significantly better place than the previous three, it concluded. The area system was “proving its value”; 50 per cent of the parishes in Bradford were growing; and the diocesan Bishop was “free to play a regional role, and to articulate a transparent vision for the diocese”.
A review of indices of attendance and giving indicated that “the brand new diocese has performed worse than the general national average, but not disastrously so, and there could also be a bunch of things that needs to be taken under consideration.”
Between 2015 and 2020, staff salary costs increased by 0.1 per cent, while numbers of full-time staff increased by five per cent to 90.3. Support costs fell by 1.1 per cent. The report noted the increased investment in safeguarding across the Church, and suggested that “almost by definition a bigger diocesan team covering the brand new combined diocese should have greater depth and resilience than those of the previous dioceses.”
Between 2013 and 2018, attendance fell by 15.2 per cent (compared with 11.9 per cent nationally). Usual Sunday attendance fell by 10.8 per cent (more aligned to the national figure), and total giving fell by 2.3 per cent to £16.8 million (compared with a 14.9 per cent increase nationally). The latest figure (for 2022) is £11.1 million.
Today, the diocesan secretary, Jonathan Wood, is keen to place to bed the “myth” that the scheme was has did not deliver savings. He points to £600,000 stripped from central costs in each of the past two years.
In 2018, he reports, 66 per cent of the general budget was spent on front-line ministry; today, that figure is 75 per cent — reminiscent of an extra £2 million. With 310 clergy (including curates) and a Church House staff of 80, he describes the diocese as “on the lower end of leaner, efficient dioceses”.
While some have pointed to a greater variety of bishops than previously, he says that Bradford was unusual in having only one bishop, that there may be one fewer archdeacon, and that every of the world bishops covers a comparatively large area. The purchase of latest diocesan offices in central Leeds for £4 million “raised eyebrows”, he acknowledges. But many of the floors are let to other organisations, and he suspects that purchasing the property will prove to be a sound investment.
In 2018, his predecessor, Debbie Child, announced plans to shut the church staff’ defined-benefit pension schemes at the top of the yr, and confirmed that 14 employees can be made redundant, in a bid to deal with an annual deficit of £3 million, underpinned by a shortfall in parish share of £1.8 million (News, 3 August 2018).
Today, challenges remain. The net deficit stood at £2.26 million in 2022, while the parish-share collection rate was 78 per cent. Had the share stayed at pre-Covid 2019 levels, Mr Wood reports, the diocese can be “financially within the green” this yr. It will not be expected to be back in surplus until 2028. Nevertheless, the deficit is lower than five per cent of overall expenditure.
Creating one larger diocese has delivered “resilience, to administer the entire changes which can be coming”, he suggests. It has also, he says, enabled Leeds to take a position in areas including safeguarding, property management, and effective use of central funding akin to SDF.
“Where I struggle is this concept that it didn’t work,” he says. “I kind of need to go, ‘Well, what didn’t work?’ . . . We’re doing our greatest in quite difficult circumstances, like everyone else, but we’re doing it with a very good team, and a spot where a number of people want to return to work.”
When it involves more such schemes, he struggles to see “any reason to not do it. . . Why wouldn’t we glance to maximise our strength in capability and due to this fact be more resilient because of this?”
THE Revd Gary Waddington, Team Rector of St Wilfrid’s, Harrogate, arrived within the diocese of Ripon & Leeds in 2010 from the diocese of Portsmouth, where there “all the time appeared to be speculation about mergers”. The proposal to create a “super-diocese” got here as something of a surprise. “Day to day, it had little effect, yet in other ways it was really very unsettling,” he recalls.
During the transition, he sensed “a fantastic deal of flux — sometimes it became almost not possible to know who you now needed to contact if you happen to needed assistance.” Initially, it felt “less like one latest diocese and more like three dioceses in a perichoretic dance. Equally, with a big churn in central staff, there was a way that context needed to be continually re-explained to a latest audience where a repository of information had been lost: we were sometimes ranging from scratch.”
Diocese of LeedsThe Revd Ludia Shokai leads an act of lament at a vigil for the situation in Sudan, on 28 April 2023
Today, he believes that the diocese has adjusted well, while he’s conscious of a “more profound impact on central staff”. He also draws attention to the sheer size of the diocese, 2425 square miles. “It still appears like parts of the diocese are like a distant country,” he says, and only previously few years has the technique of rationalising three sets of processes into one “begun to feel comfortable”.
A central query, he suggests, is whether or not any future proposal constitutes “a merger or a takeover. Handling that’s incredibly tricky.”
Forty miles south, in Huddersfield, Canon Joyce Jones, Associate Priest of Clayton West, Scissett and Skelmanthorpe, recalls looking favourably on the Dioceses Commission scheme, as an incumbent within the diocese of Wakefield, where many opposed it.
While agreeing that implementation was difficult — “working at scale proved rather more difficult to implement and value greater than anyone imagined” — she praises the leadership of Bishop Baines and senior staff. “It now feels that now we have a diocese which works efficiently and consistently in matters akin to appointments, finance, and discipline, and has its own distinct character.” She regards the movement of clergy inside the diocese — an early hope of the Commission — as contributing “to a way of being a part of the entire”.
“I can understand the reluctance to start out on something like this again when dioceses are struggling for people and resources, but I feel sorry that other dioceses won’t have that chance to rethink all the pieces and construct more robust systems for the longer term,” she concludes.
WHILE the Dioceses Commission has backed away from centrally led restructuring, last yr’s letter also acknowledged “views that our structures can prevent mission and ministry, and result in resources being deployed within the fallacious places”. A Diocesan Finances Review, carried out in partnership with an accountancy firm, BDO, is anticipated to report significant financial deficits in lots of dioceses, running into eight figures in total (News, 1 March 2024). The Archbishops’ own observations concerning the disparity between the Church’s structures and population patterns, but in addition with regard to dioceses’ comparative size and wealth, hold true.
Among those that share the view that fundamental reform is required is the Revd Gareth Miller, Rector of the Akeman Benefice, and Area Dean of Bicester and Islip. It is now 21 years since he set out proposals within the Church Times — much debated — for smaller dioceses, grouped into provinces, with a considerable amount of administrative work done at provincial reasonably than diocesan level (News, 28 March 2003).
Today, he describes himself as “disenchanted and perplexed that the C of E has not had the courage or foresight to tackle what seems to me a reasonably obvious problem — namely, a national Church with a footprint in every a part of the land, struggling financially and strategically to take care of the massive variety of churches with fewer and fewer priests. Surely a radical overhaul is required.”
In Leeds, there may be a way in the brand new diocese of nettles grasped, at no small cost; but a pride, too, in having dared to enterprise beyond the established order.
In response, Dame Caroline Spelman, the current chair of the Dioceses Commission, said on Wednesday: “The Commission’s advice last yr that there needs to be no centrally-led or ‘big bang’ approach to restructuring or combining dioceses at present was a rigorously considered view drawing from two separate consultations and soundings from people from across the Church of England and from a wide selection of experiences.
“The Commission continues to maintain diocesan structures under review and is undertaking work to explore how dioceses could be encouraged and facilitated to collaborate and share services more.
“The formation of what became the diocese of Leeds, from the previous dioceses of Wakefield, Bradford and Ripon & Leeds, was a serious undertaking, and the teachings from that process have been on the forefront of the Commission’s work and considerations since then, and can proceed to be so. The Commission was pleased to welcome the Bishop of Leeds to one in every of its meetings last yr where they invited him to share his reflections. The Commission is hugely grateful to all who worked so hard.”
Read more on this story on this week’s Leader comment
