The Church of England is treating its volunteers abominably
by Emma Thompson, Telegraph:
The CofE is facing an existential crisis, seeking to rely more on lay people while driving them away with bureaucracy.
There are only two easy ways to leave a voluntary job in a small parish church: to die or move abroad. Even then, a friend of mine returns at intervals from a posting in Singapore to do the flowers in her village church.
A report this week unsurprisingly identified that up to a quarter of Church of England parishes have no churchwardens. Not only are these tasks hard to hand on, but often thankless and taxing.
To quote a churchwarden who commented under The Telegraph’s news story: “I decided to resign after my last annual swearing-in ceremony when the archdeacon gave us a diatribe about the sins of the Save The Parish movement. As neither he nor our bishops have ever visited my church, I decided to vote with my feet. They can clear the weeds from the drains … referee the battle between the organist and bellringers, arrange transport to church for the elderly members of the congregation…”
The CofE is facing an existential crisis, manifesting itself in fewer bums on seats and a chronic lack of volunteers. Many dioceses are compounding and accelerating this crisis by making financially unnecessary clergy cuts and merging parishes – creating an intolerable workload for the remaining clergy.
This follows a model of “oversight ministry” in which each priest becomes, essentially, an area manager. Priests become “oversight ministers”, supervising the taking of services in each church by so-called “focal ministers” – generally expected to be lay people.
So will bishops do politics, clergy do administration and lay people take services, then? It seems bizarre that part of the Church’s “solution” to its problems is to increase its own dependence on a nationally-dwindling number of volunteers.
Read here (£)
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