‘Saving the parish’ and church planting must go hand in hand – Archbishop
by Julian Mann, Christian Today:
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has tried to reconcile Anglican ‘save the parish’ traditionalists and ambitious church planters at the new General Synod meeting this week.
In his presidential address, he told members of the Church of England’s legislative body, “To save the parish does not mean to stop church planting. To church plant does not mean abandoning the parish. Far from it.
“If we take either of those binary decisions we will lose all of them. We will fail completely in every respect.”
General Synod is meeting at Church House, Westminster, this week for its new five-year term after October’s record-turnout elections.
Archbishop Welby pointed out that the number of regular churchgoers “has shrunk in absolute terms every year since around 1952”, as he appealed to Synod members to embrace change.
“As a percentage of the population of England, the Church of England was at its high point, when there were accurate records, in the 1851 census when we were about 20 per cent of the population, roughly a couple of percentage points less than what were then called the non-Conformist churches.
“We are today around about a little less than two per cent of the population,” he said.
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