Timelines of Pastoral Reorganisation
A Save The Parish researcher has prepared detailed outlines of the pastoral reorganisation plans afoot in the Church of England. Although such arrangements can happen piecemeal, there are some dioceses who have already developed wholescale and radical schemes, of which we all need to be apprised, so that we are ready to act to defend our parishes.
The two most developed are ‘Shaped by God Together’ (SBGT) in Leicester and ‘On the Way’ (OTW) in Truro, details of which are laid out in timeline form. Liverpool saw the earliest pilot of such schemes in ‘Transforming Wigan’ and is moving apace in other deaneries. You can read the sad independent evaluation by Helen Dutton on our website too, at [link]. Centralising pastoral work and occasional offices has been a disaster, and money and numbers have fallen by one third. Our timelines therefore include Liverpool, as well as the very rural diocese of Lincoln, which has struggled financially partly because of distrust about some uses of historic endowments in the past. We also include Sheffield, where wave after wave of varied plans reflect the dependence of dioceses on competitive grants from central funds, which are too often given for what one bishop described as ‘whizzy things’ rather than core parish ministry.
The timelines are laid out in three columns:
- the decisions, made by diocesan or deanery synods, or bishop’s council;
- the plans and proposals, and various ‘conversations’ leading up to decisions;
- press responses, opposition and other forms of reaction.
So, you can trace Leicester’s scheme’s origin before lockdown, and the diocesan synod groups which decided so much long before any wider discussion with the parishes concerned. In Truro, you will see how central church Strategic Development Funding in 2017 was already, through a Bishop’s Mission Order, allowing the bishop to override parish structures and prepare the way for the later scheme.
We have provided maps, which really bring home the size of the areas to be made into one parish or minster community.
Do look at the narrative that each of these schemes follows, because this will help you to locate where your parish, deanery or diocese is in relation to these. Has your parish been invited to deanery ‘conversations’? You will note that this was only stage 2 of Leicester’s process in March 2021, when the diocesan synod had long had groups working on the scheme, which was signed off even before the Covid lockdown in 2020. Has your diocese applied to the Strategic Transformation Fund or the Strategic Capacity Fund? These are aimed specifically to aid dioceses develop these radical schemes. You will see how Leicester has been awarded just under a million pounds only this July to appoint a range of people like a ‘strategic development enabler’ to carry out reorganisation, which is heavy in administrative load. You can see how much evidence we gain from diocesan synod minutes. Do keep up to date with what is decided at your own synods; all the minutes should be publicly available. However, some dioceses take minutes and synod papers off their websites after a while – so we strongly recommend making copies as documents and keeping them on file.
If the decisions occasionally lack detail, that is because of the opaque and often vague manner in which we found them in the original documents.
Huge changes are being described in these plans and voted through, often by people told there is no alternative, and they must do so. Look at Save The Parish Cornwall’s dossier of bad behaviour at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HbT3dCLpfw-hne2uwSsxdCm9JIxZ0wzC/view which makes instructive reading alongside these timelines.
We must all be alert and understand how these processes creep up on parishes, before it is too late. If you in your parish feel under threat from these or similar processes, even at an early stage, do write to us at Save The Parish and we will try to help. Write to help@savetheparish.com