The Church of England and "The hastening death of the parish".

As readers of this blog may have noticed I enjoy photographing churches and wandering around churchyards.  I am obviously stating the obvious, but there is history inside the church as well as outside where the locals are laid to rest.  Churches with their nineteenth century and earlier architecture make wonderfully picturesque photos, and when exploring a churchyard I always find something of interest whether it be a grave of a notable local or an interesting epitaph on a headstone.

An English town or village would not be the same without its church so it is sad to see that many churches are now unused.  Thankfully, many have been taken over by various church conservation trusts, and they do a fine job in preserving them. 

The Church of St. Thomas in the Somerset village of Thurlbear.  It is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

Therefore I was disappointed to read an article in the 8^th of August edition of The Week.  It suggests that the Church of England will become more remote from its parishioners resulting in fewer active churches – no doubt more will regrettably close.  I reproduce the article, first published in The Daily Telegraph, below.

The C of E is killing off the parish church.

Giles Fraser

The Daily Telegraph

The parish church – “for centuries the bedrock of the Church of England’s engagement with communities throughout the land” – is dying, says Giles Fraser.  It’s not just secularisation that’s killing it, but the controlling nature of Church leaders.  As a recent piece by Revd Stephen Trott in The Church Times pointed out, the rot set in back in the 1970s, when the assets of individual parishes were effectively nationalised by the General Synod.  This enabled money to be redistributed from wealthy parishes to smaller ones, but it also spawned a burgeoning central administration that has since employed ever more accountants, administrators and archdeacons.  Ever fewer communities, meanwhile, have their own vicar.  Covid has accelerated this trend, with talk of digital aids such as zoom reducing the need for “analogue priests”, and the Archbishop of Canterbury ordering parish clergy not to enter their own churches over Easter to pray.  Such centralisation is a “recipe for institutional collapse”.  “The hastening death of the parish will tear the beating heart from many a small place that is reliant upon church to help organise its common life.”