A new province for traditionalists in the Church of England?
by Martin Davie, Christian Today:
In a previous article for Christian Today I suggested that the Church of England needs a new settlement which would allow conservatives and liberals to each have their own province (or provinces) within which they could either maintain or alter the current doctrine of the Church of England on marriage and sexuality and the disciplines that go with it.
This suggestion prompts the obvious question: ‘What would such a settlement look like in practice?’. In this article I shall attempt to answer this question by sketching out what a province for conservatives (let’s call it the ‘Province of Mercia’) might look like, drawing on material I produced for the Church of England Evangelical Council’s paper, Visibly Different.
The formation of the Province
The Province of Mercia would be established through a measure passed by General Synod and endorsed by both Houses of Parliament and receiving Royal Assent. This measure would contain a provision that it could not be repealed except with the consent of the province.
The province would come into being by means of parishes voting in their PCCs to leave their existing diocese and transfer to a diocese in the new province instead. To give the new province stability, parishes would not be able to return to their previous diocese for a period of ten years. Apart from that requirement, parishes would be free to move from the provinces of Canterbury and York to the new province, or to move back the other way.
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