Meanwhile, just when we needed to consolidate our remaining strengths, to re-energise parish ministry, and to reinvigorate the ordained ministry with funding, affirmation, and a theological rationale, the opposite course of action has been pursued: centralised control of policy and resources, disparagement of the parochial form of Anglican life, and devaluing of the ordained vocation.
Much has already been demolished, especially at the local level; much more has been weakened and made more difficult. It is hard going, these days, in parishes for clergy, together with churchwardens and other hard-working lay people. There are social and cultural reasons for the uphill nature of the task in the present era, but lack of support — in able clergy, in financial resources, in moral affirmation, in practical wisdom — is another. The Church of England on the ground is an ailing and failing Church. How has all this come about?
A minority of activists (lay and ordained General Synod members, some bishops and an Archbishop, and the Archbishops’ Council collectively) have contrived and conspired, over a period of years, to change the nature of the Church, to replace it with a different and alien ecclesial model. That replacement model is essentially managerial rather than relational, bureaucratic instead of organic, centralised in place of localised — all varnished over with the vacuous rhetoric of “leadership” (seldom has such a necessary concept been so misappropriated and abused). And all accompanied by complacent theological illiteracy and ignorance.
Centralisation of resources and of decision-making, whether at the national or diocesan level, subverts the institution as a whole. It sucks the life and energy out of the very places in which life and energy are primarily generated: the parish and (potentially) the diocese.
Read it all.
