INCREASING the variety of stipendiary priests within the diocese of Truro is the “top operational priority”, the Acting Bishop of Truro, the Rt Revd Hugh Nelson, who’s the Bishop of St Germans, said this week.
His comments followed claims by the campaign group Save the Parish Cornwall (STP) that the variety of stipendiary priests within the diocese had fallen to 38, and that there have been 19 vacancies to be filled. The group says that the diocese is “struggling to recruit latest priests to undertake the unrealistic roles proposed by the restructuring plans — specifically ‘oversight ministers’ . . . in giant benefices”.
A diocesan spokeswoman said this week that there have been 58 stipendiary clergy in post at the tip of last month, including incumbent-status clergy, assistant curates, and archdeacons. In addition, eight latest appointments had been made up to now three months. The plan was to extend the variety of stipendiary clergy to about 85, “depending on clergy being interested in our posts”.
Defending the direction of travel, one among the clergy explained that he had chosen to return the diocese precisely due to its “ambitious” changes to patterns of ministry.
Recently appointed as Rural Dean of East Wivelshire, the Revd Michael Johnson said that the diocese had realised that “simply using up any financial reserves to take care of the usual patterns of ministry was offering no latest vision for any realistic hope of turning things around.”
Numbers of stipendiary clergy have been falling in Truro for a long time: from 118 in 2001, to 81 in January 2019, and 70 in January 2023. In a blog post last month (“Penpushers outnumber priests in diocese of Truro”), Save the Parish Cornwall said that the diocesan central office employed 40 lay people. The diocese says that the figure stands at 35 within the 2024 budget. Central costs were reduced by £250,000 in 2023.
“All dioceses within the Church of England are having difficulty filling the variety of posts available and we all know from feedback that dioceses with lively Save the Parish groups struggle greater than others because clergy are wary of coming into an area where they shall be harassed,” a press release issued in response to the blog said.
On Tuesday, Bishop Nelson said that there have been no plans to shut churches or establish more resource churches, and that the diocese was investing in supporting its many small rural churches, within the care of buildings and other matters. It was a “real challenge to recruit clergy in the meanwhile”, he said. But the diocese was one among the few within the country that had made a transparent, public commitment to ending the decline in stipendiary clergy numbers, and this was “our top operational priority”. The Diocesan Secretary, Canon Simon Cade, said that this is able to cost the diocesan board of finance “quite a bit: parishes can’t just afford that themselves.”
Last yr, the diocesan synod approved a plan to spend £22 million of diocesan reserves over the following ten years; £10 million is for use to maintain the Mission and Ministry Fund (the parish share) call as little as possible, in an effort to guard stipendiary posts. It was projected that, by this January, between 78 and 83 stipendiary clergy could be in post (News, 2 June 2023).
Diocesan assets grew from £33 million in 2001 to £113 million in 2021. Of the £22 million, £3 million has been earmarked for work with children and young people, £3 million for the Church’s Net Zero 2030 goal, and £2 million for supporting parishes of their responsibility for church buildings.
The diocese’s commitment to increasing stipendiary numbers follows the two-year “On the Way” process, wherein Truro’s 12 deaneries were asked to attract up plans, for approval by Bishop’s Council, for a “fruitful and sustainable” future (News, 2 June 2023).
The process was launched in 2019, against a backdrop of stark statistics. Average Sunday attendance fell from 13,000 in 2001 to fewer than 6000 in 2021, while the number of youngsters fell from 1200 to only over 400. The diocese had an operating budget deficit of £1.4 million, and the then Bishop of Truro, the Rt Revd Philip Mounstephen, warned that it was “unsustainable” for the fee of ministry in deaneries to be outstripping their MMF contributions.
Reductions within the variety of stipendiary clergy in some deaneries were a key think about STP’s criticisms, along with pastoral reorganisation (one deanery now has a single benefice of 23 churches and two stipendiary clergy), and the expansion of communion by extension. It has raised concerns concerning the move to employ the numerous lay positions set out within the deanery plans via Community Interest Companies. It has called for a moratorium on implementation of the plans, arguing that “many regular worshippers feel inadequately consulted and in no way convinced of the wisdom of the plans.”
It says that clergy within the diocese “fear for his or her jobs so won’t speak publicly”. An anonymous priest who contributed to its dossier of testimonies said of On the Way: “a gun was put to people’s heads. It was a divisive thing, with people being
turned against one another. People were told ‘it’s only you’ (that’s making a
fuss).”
STP can be critical of the diocesan-wide move to a model of oversight ministry, which, it argues, “removes ordained clergy from day-to-day contact with their parishioners and creates a top-heavy bureaucracy”. It says that clergy within the diocese are retiring early or taking on posts elsewhere relatively than conform to the model. Published last yr, the diocese’s ten-year Plan for Change and Renewal (News, 2 June 2023) forecasts that, by the tip of the period, “the vast majority of church communities are led by Local Ministers (each lay and ordained), with stipendiary priests in oversight roles.”
Before his departure last yr, Bishop Mounstephen told the diocesan synod that “just about all the ordained clergy on this room are already exercising oversight ministry in a single form or one other . . . but we haven’t been as intentional about it as we must always have been.” He acknowledged that, with a scarcity of coaching in place, “people have by accident moved into oversight roles, and a few have suffered in that process.” Commenting on the variety of vacancies last yr — greater than was expected — Bishop Nelson acknowledged that some clergy didn’t wish to tackle the oversight post (News, 2 June 2023).
This week, clergy defended the On the Way process, and the move to latest patterns of ministry.
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The Priest-in-Charge of St John the Evangelist, Truro, the Revd William Harwood, said: “In order for the church to be fruitful there must be a concerted effort to attach with children and young people. This means we want to have a special focus by way of our models of ministry and services. . .
“Oversight ministry, where it’s coupled with effective local leadership, can provide higher accountability and support. It must, nonetheless, not come on the expense of local believers’ knowing they’re cared for. It is working thoroughly in my context but I realise this is just not the case in all deaneries.”
The Revd Jeffrey Terry, a self-supporting associate priest within the Camel-Allen benefice, chairs the implementation team within the Bodmin and Trigg Minor deanery. The deanery had chosen not to chop the variety of stipendiary clergy, he said, and had used Lowest Income Communities Funding (LICF), and a few mission funding from the diocese, to assist to take care of one full-time post in each benefice. In his own benefice, LICF was also being use to fund an ordained parish nurse to spent two days every week in essentially the most impoverished urban areas of the deanery.
“I actually have little time for individuals who criticise the low numbers of filled clergy posts, as if these are being deliberately kept at a low level, when the converse is true,” he said. “Cornwall is somewhat out on a limb geographically, and there may be probably a reluctance on the a part of some to relocate here from other parts of the nation. Many people entering ministry need to work in additional heavily populated areas, where they feel they’ll make an even bigger difference.
“It is a straightforward proven fact that Cornwall has many small rural churches with increasingly elderly congregations, and, whilst the diocese is struggling to reverse this trend to date as possible, there are limits to what can realistically be done.
“A simplistic approach of asserting that there must be a parish priest in every parish bears no relationship to the sensible reality of find out how to achieve this. Unless the Church Commissioners determine to take a radically different view of find out how to spend national church resources, dioceses akin to Truro, acting alone, can only achieve this much.”
This week, a diocesan spokeswoman said that the diocese received more applications for pioneer and oversight posts than for “traditionally organised” posts. It has recently announced the appointment of three oversight ministers, two of whom have just accomplished curacies within the dioceses. It has pushed back against Save the Parish’s description of the brand new appointments as “inexperienced”.
In a diocesan press release this month, the Revd Laura Bushell Hawke, Oversight Minister of Saltash, Landrake with St Erney and Botus Fleming, and the Tamar Benefice, within the East Wivelshire deanery, said that working on “On the Way” as a curate was “a part of the rationale I desired to stay here. I’m excited to see latest patterns of ministry developing. This is a diocese that is just not frightened to try something latest and discover where God is at work inside and out of doors of our buildings.
“This really feels positive for the long run of the Church within the East Wivelshire Deanery and I’m truly delighted to be an element of it.”
The East Wivelshire plan entails a transition from five benefices with five incumbents, to 3 benefices with three incumbents plus a full time Rural Dean, a house-for-duty priest and a pioneer post. One of two latest Christians Against Poverty coaches is in place and three school-chaplain posts are planned. Mrs Bushell Hawke said on Wednesday that the plan would “provide us with higher resources so we are able to reply to the needs of our parishes” and that groups from across the parishes were already meeting to share ideas and support each other. “I’ve been within the deanery for over ten years, and such a collaboration across parish boundaries hadn’t been seen here before On The Way,” she said.
This week, Mr Johnson, who has joined the deanery from Oxford diocese, where one among his posts was a deanery creative-mission enabler, said that he had been attracted by “a really ambitious latest way of structuring what we do in mission and ministry, which not only values the clergy, but values and nurtures and supports the gifts and abilities of a much wider pool of individuals. . . Any church which relies too heavily on its clergy alone is inevitably limiting any opportunities for growth.”
He described how, in his previous diocese, an “almost disused church” had been was an arts- and theatre-performance space used seven days every week, while one other church constructing, open only twice every week, had been was a “vibrant café space”, attracting a whole bunch of individuals. The church had develop into “re-engaged in its local people . . . and not sees Sunday services because the only thing they’ll offer, nor indeed necessarily crucial thing they’ll offer, but is attempting to reengage with unusual people, whether or not they are churchgoers or not”.
In the course of visiting his deanery’s 32 churches, he was beginning to discover areas that may very well be built on, akin to a craft fair that “packed the church out” three days a yr. There were opportunities to work with theatre corporations, musicians, and artists, and to deal with in church each a children’s library and cafés that had been lost in the course of the pandemic, he reported.
“If the Church is willing to be a spot where all types of individuals engage then it will probably actually make opportunities for the Church that weren’t previously there and conversations can start and relationships are built and Sunday worship is just not the one thing that we’re offering to people.”
Church buildings needed to be made more comfortable, he suggested. The previous Sunday, a service had been held in a college relatively than the church, which was “simply cold”. The Church needed to be “daring by way of allowing the inside our buildings to be reordered, where obligatory”.
East Wivelshire’s deanery plan reported that recorded attendance by children in 2019 never exceeded single figures, “and in lots of cases was just one or two”.
Asked about On the Way this week, one among the diocese’s lay representatives on the General Synod, Nicolas Herian, said: “Any plan which seeks to grow the Church, particularly amongst our youth inside the diocese of Truro, is to be encouraged.”
