Save the Church campaign wheels out the big guns in its defense of the parish system in the Church of England

Jun 8, 2022 by Jill

by Julian Mann, Anglican Ink:

The Save the Parish campaign in the Church of England, which has now registered as a company after launching last year, has a heavy gun in the form of a retired Admiral.

Sir James Burnell-Nugent KCB CBE is a director of the new company. A frontline churchwarden in rural Devon, he is a former Commander-in-Chief Fleet of the Royal Navy. Before becoming an Admiral in 2005, he had served as the Maritime Commander of the UK Joint Force and Deputy Maritime Commander of the Coalition during the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan.

Sir James is able to deploy a newspaper letter-writing pen that is proving mightier than the Church House press release. In a letter to The Church Times in March, loudly applauded on demoralised Parochial Church Councils (PCCs), Sir James, 73, highlighted ‘the massacre, through ever more mergers and closures, of parishes that are the source of £1 billion of funding’.

He called on ‘the Church Commissioners (via the Archbishops’ Council) to allocate a tiny fraction of their capital gain of £550 million in 2020 to clear the £12-million deficit accumulated by parishes in 2020 owing to Covid. This would bring immediate relief to those parishes hardest hit and reset a grave lack of fairness’.

Then, he wrote, ‘they should review the outrage that for the cremation of a parishioner by their parish priest, the funeral fee goes to the diocese. All fees ‘earned’ by a parish priest working for their parishioners should go to the parish. Again, simply a matter of fairness’.

This was not the first time Sir James has intervened in the debate over the future direction of the national Church. In a letter to The Times in October last year, he called Leicester diocese’s decision ‘to fold 234 parishes into the embrace of 20 to 25 huge groups’ a ‘sad day for the Church of England’.

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