In response to a cover story in the Spectator: ‘Holy Relic – The Church of England as we know it is disappearing’ published 4 February 2021, William Nye, Secretary General, Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England has responded with the following Letter to the Editor (for publication). The letter reads as follows:
Sir,
As a longstanding and loyal reader of the Spectator, I was disappointed in your cover story about the Church of England.
I was amazed to read the ludicrous claim that the parish system is being dissolved like the monasteries, repeated without even a cursory check on whether this could possibly be true. We read of a supposed central take-over of independent dioceses and an imaginary national plan to roll out cuts and sell assets to fund more managers. The old canard that the Archbishops decided to suspend public worship last year at the height of the first wave of the pandemic, rather than the Government, did not even get a rudimentary qualification.
No one from the Spectator called the Church of England to ask whether any of these things were true.
This matters because truth matters. It matters because this kind of misinformation is damaging and demoralising to clergy and laity in every corner of England who have been worshipping God and serving their neighbours in extraordinary new ways, despite the restrictions we have all faced during this pandemic.
William Nye, Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council of @c_of_e, gave a superb talk to the managers of @MethodistGB about vision, engagement and delivery. pic.twitter.com/tXOmtUIYrR
— The Methodist Church (@MethodistGB) February 21, 2018