from Marcus Walker
“A building, a stipend, and long costly college-based training”. You may remember these three things.
Not faith, not hope, not charity but the “key limiting factors” holding back church growth.
As proclaimed at a church planting conference by Canon John McGinley back in 2021, as part of the newly published Vision and Strategy of the Church of England for the 2020s.
10,000 lay-led churches would be funded by the Church of England, freeing our church of the key limiting factors that hold it back. “A building, a stipend, and long costly, college-based training.”
Well, buildings, stipends, and college-based education are back. And with your help, they are here to stay.
What we have realised, over the last five years, as Save the Parish has got off the ground and started to ask the questions that should have been asked decades ago, is that what we are in danger of losing is not just some old buildings, or the clerical stipend, or one mode of training over another, but the essence of the Church of England itself.
Who are we? What is the unique ecology of the Church of England, which we love so dearly that we have got up and come here on a Saturday morning?
“If the Church of England were to fail,” said John Keble, “it should be found in my parish.”
Or, listen to Justin Welby, who, I concede isn’t often quoted by Save the Parish: “you could lose the House of Bishops tonight…[and] it’d be a couple of years before there was any noticeable impact on the Church of England. Whereas if you got rid of all the parishes and the churchwardens and the laypeople it would be noticeable in about one second.”
Well, we are here for the parishes and the churchwardens and the laypeople today. And for the priests. (I do declare an interest…)