by Quentin Letts, Spectator
Something amazing happened as I was walking my 91-year-old mother through Ledbury: we saw a bobby on the beat. He was even in a helmet, not a baseball cap. ‘A real policeman!’ squealed various people, reacting as they might to a steam train or an Austin-Healey, reminders of more distinctive days.
The same surprise may soon be evident when we see dog collars. A new scheme, oversight ministry, adopted by some Church of England dioceses, is taking vicars off the streets. Instead of being front-line clergy they will become ‘oversight ministers’ and ‘area deans’, managers of lay, unpaid ‘focal ministers’. These focal ministers will take services, undertake pastoral visits and, as the promotional blurb puts it, ‘be present in the wider community as an available point of contact for anyone connecting with the church community’. David Blunkett gave us plastic Plod community support officers; the C of E is giving us plastic parsons.
Oversight ministry has reached Truro, Leicester, Sheffield, Birmingham and Lincoln and is coming to our patch, Hereford. Our bishop is graciously saying that he will allow vicars to opt out of the scheme. Let’s see. Bureaucrats are quietly applying pressure on priests. Muscular Christianity has been replaced by acidic office politics.
Focal ministers will not spend years at theological college. They will, however, be drilled in the things that modern Church officials revere. They ‘will be required to complete Safeguarding training to Leadership level as well as Raising Awareness of Domestic Abuse’. Church documents once reserved initial capital letters for God Almighty. Now they are given to Safeguarding and Domestic Abuse.
Readers will know that the C of E is in a pickle. Pews empty while race advisers, environmentalists and Safeguarding experts are marching as to war, spouting passive-aggressive managerialism and citing charity law as they hassle the few weekly worshippers. These bureaucrats benefit from a fund Queen Anne founded in 1704 to help poor parishes. In 1948 that bounty was merged into the Church Commissioners. Today, according to the Save the Parish ginger group, only £85 million of the fund’s annual £653 million income goes to parishes. Rural churches are pitifully impoverished and several cathedrals are in deficit, some near bankruptcy. Vicars are resigning in even greater numbers than those who are retiring, a third showing symptoms of depression. Working for today’s corporatised Church is plainly not much fun. Yet the Archbishop of Canterbury smiles brightly and talks of splurging £100 million on what the C of E insists on calling ‘reparatory justice’.