IT WAS, the Revd Paul Holley admits, barely perverse to be drawn to the diocese of Truro when its then diocesan Bishop predicted that the Church had “only 5 – 6 years” to show around its decline. “I believed, ‘That may very well be an interesting place to work,’” he recalls. “A type of open canvas.”
Nine years after his arrival within the diocese, where he’s Team Rector within the Bodmin Team Ministry, he chairs a social enterprise that employs 16 people, with a budget of £300,000 and contracts with the NHS. He paints a portrait of a church “deeply embedded” in its community, and one which consciously selected a unique path from the resource-church model formerly championed within the diocese.
“Right initially, when the Bishop’s Diocesan Council (BDC) was discussing the prospect of expanding the resource-church model, I questioned whether an injection of considerable funds would actually hinder sustainability slightly than support it,” he says. “It is straightforward to grow to be depending on external grants. That’s why I made a decision to take the Bodmin Team by itself journey. Six or seven years later, there is evident evidence that we selected the best path.”
Mr Holley arrived within the diocese in 2016 and was made Team Rector the next yr. The benefice’s five churches include St Petroc, Bodmin, the biggest parish church in Cornwall and one in all the 300 “major churches” in England.
During the contentious “On the Way” restructuring programme, the deanery selected not to chop the variety of stipendiary clergy. It also benefitted from an allocation of Lowest Income Communities Funding (LICF), distributed to dioceses by the Archbishops’ Council and, before On the Way, used to plug Truro’s operating-budget deficit (News,15 March 2024).
The Transforming Mission (TM) project, funded by the Archbishops’ Council’s Strategic Development Fund, began in Falmouth in 2017 and was prolonged to 4 more areas in 2019 (News,13 May 2022). It got here with ambitious goals for attendance growth and the expectation that it could be self-sufficient inside six years. The 2017 SDF bid asserted that it was “widely recognised that simply continuing to appoint parish priests in the standard model doesn’t result in the expansion of the Church”.
The chair of the diocesan board of finance, Justin Day, told members last yr: “Generally speaking, the five TM projects together didn’t, and possibly won’t, meet a lot of the targets described of their original bid documents. . . The targets were all the time ambitious and possibly unrealistic.” But, he said, “they proceed to do good vital work.”
Among the educational was that “local leaders usually tend to understand local need” and the necessity to “resource all of the churches within the diocese, not only a number of”. Growth and sustainability required time, he said. The Acting Bishop of Truro, the Rt Revd Hugh Nelson, said last yr that there have been no plans to ascertain recent resource churches within the diocese.
Mr Holley, a member of the BDC, said this week that he had turned down an invite to be considered for inclusion in Transforming Mission. “It felt to me like, in the long run, I’d be higher off constructing step-by-step and, in the method, constructing sustainability. . . My pondering is all the time around asset-based development, constructing on what’s here.”
In Bodmin, where 20 per cent of the population are among the many country’s most deprived decile, he had the help of the Revd Elaine Munday, a former pub landlady living on a council estate, who serves as a pioneer minister. There were also self-supporting ministers and Readers.
Mr Holley, who helped to ascertain a healthy-living centre while serving in Manchester, and led the Anglican Health Network in Switzerland, became the diocese’s first oversight minister when he was appointed in 2016. The Bodmin Way social enterprise was established in 2018, focused on “trying to succeed in on behalf of the NHS into lives that they might otherwise struggle to attach with”.
The Covid-19 pandemic proved a catalyst. Ms Munday was the community leader “that everybody would turn to”, Mr Holley recalls. Emerging from it, the church could discuss with the NHS “with some authority”, having secured local trust.
Today, the enterprise has 16 members of staff who run programmes, which include six funded by the NHS. Four Community Health and Wellbeing Workers are contracted to succeed in out to residents on two estates, alongside two parish nurses. Community offerings include a larder, café, garden, choir, and cooking group. Profits of £21,000 were constructed from 40 events, including live shows, in 2024.
The growth of the project is illustrative of a wider expansion of the Church of England’s social motion, and calls by politicians for the Church to hunt different sources of revenue (News, 1 August). A 2020 report by Theos, Growing Good, spoke of a “paradox” in the present decade: “The national Church of a nation which is increasingly reliant on its social motion and yet less and fewer spiritually connected to it” (Features, 27 September 2024).
Mr Holley believes that those that have access to support through the Bodmin Way are “very conscious” that it’s a church-run enterprise, due to the “magic of Elaine”, who’s “very visibly a priest, and far respected as such”.
Health and faith “seem so integrated”, he says. “They were there within the Gospels and there within the Early Church and have continued ever since. There has been a separation in people’s minds within the UK for 70-odd years, but, in the remainder of the worl,d . . . Christian hospitals, health programmes are only a part of the scene.”
But it may possibly be difficult, he says, to “crystallise” the effectiveness of pioneer ministry. “We understand it’s there, we hear people talking, but it surely’s not a worshipping community: it’s a network of people who find themselves conscious of faith.”
On Sunday morning, he thinks: “This is what I do. Where are the people?” he says. “But I keep telling myself and others: ‘There’s a whole lot of faith on the market in that community. . . That hidden faith doesn’t lack power or impact.’”
The project has faced challenges this yr, and a few grants drying up, but it surely is now supporting neighbouring parishes which might be searching for partnerships beyond the deanery.
The story suits right into a wider debate within the Church, Mr Holley suggests, about “the strategic decision either to impose assumptions and targets or to permit for organic growth in accordance with context. . . My view is that, despite the fact that the finance model of the C of E is just not designed to fail, it has yet to be reformed sufficiently to succeed. Parishes must pay for the upkeep of their buildings, the associated fee of their ministers, and a contribution to the prices of the diocese. This is unsustainable. We try to operate a congregational model of financing in an Established Church with large medieval buildings.
“Ambiguous talk of abundance and generosity doesn’t attend to the very real calculations that must be made. The development of Bodmin Way is our try to see further into the long run than the present parochial horizon can expect to last.”
The Archdeacon of Bodmin, the Ven. Kelly Betteridge, praised the Bodmin Way this week as “an excellent example of the creativity and faithfulness of the Church in Cornwall”.
A conference, “Doing things the Bodmin way”, will probably be held at St Petroc’s on 2 October. Cost £15. Email: office@bodminway.org
