by Tim Wyatt, Premier Christianity
As evangelicals in the Church of England push for new churches to be planted while traditionalists rally to “save the parish”, the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury will need to grapple with questions of place, power and what it really means to be a local church in 21st-century England. Tim Wyatt reports
The Church of England takes its mandate as England’s national church very seriously. Every square inch of England sits within one of its 12,500 parishes. And each parish has its own church and – in theory at least – a parish priest to care for every soul within their patch. There is no one in England who cannot point to a church, just a short walk away at most, and say: “That’s mine.”
But twice in the past 100 years, sharp-elbowed evangelicals in Oxford have ripped up this ecclesiastical map. At the turn of the 20th century, those dissatisfied with the ‘popish’ high church persuaded the Bishop of Oxford to make them a new parish. They raised funds and built their own church to be a flagbearer for Bible-believing Protestantism – St Andrew’s.
A century later, they did it again. This time St Andrew’s planted a new church on a deprived housing estate called Cutteslowe, which was being largely ignored by the affluent village church to whose parish it technically belonged. The new church initially met in a community centre and was led by a lay pastor. It grew through intensive outreach and, eventually, the bishop gave Cutteslowe Connected its own vicar, despite it flagrantly trespassing parish boundaries.
This is both the story of my church, and also of the modern – and ancient – Church of England.