Save the Parish campaign clashes with the Bishop of Truro over church spending priorities

May 15, 2022 by Jill

by Julian Mann, Anglican Ink:

The row between a group of Church of England parishioners in Cornwall including one lay member of its legislative body, the General Synod, and the Bishop of Truro has some elements of Trollopean farce but there are serious issues at stake.

According to a press release last week from CofE campaign group Save the Parish, (StP), Truro Bishop Philip Mounstephen ‘curtly’ refused to meet its supporters because they had gone to the press with their concerns about clergy cuts and ‘costly evangelical initiatives like Transforming Mission in five towns in Cornwall’.

Truro Diocese then defended its Transforming Mission programme in the press. In Friday’s Church Times the suffragan Bishop of St Germans, Hugh Nelson, said that all TM work was ‘happening in and through local churches, and is an investment in the life and ministry of the parish’.

He claimed that in a diocese reporting the lowest number of children and young people engaged in church life the TM churches in Cornwall were doing ‘outstanding work to connect with that demographic’.

But Anglican evangelicals traditionally have worked their parishes conscientiously. So, if StP is suggesting that evangelicals, with their theological convictions about the supreme authority of the Bible in Christian faith and conduct, the centrality of the Cross in salvation and the priority of evangelism, are anti-parish ministry, that would not be accurate.

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