Can C of E parishes stop bureaucrats wasting their money?

<div>If you belong to or care about the Church of England, you may be shocked by some of the things you learn in this episode of Holy Smoke.</div><div><br> I'm not referring to the familiar evidence that the Established Church, in common with all mainstream Christian denominations in Britain, is watching its congregations shrink <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/church-of-england-spends-millions-but-fails-to-convert-cash-into-congregations-xx7hbxj8d">at a humiliating rate</a>. In 2019, an average of only 690,000 people attended Church of England services on Sundays – 50,000 fewer than in 2016. And that was before Covid. This is what people mean when they talk about churchgoing falling off a cliff, and it’s a desperate problem for a church facing the impossible challenge of maintaining 16,000 buildings, many of them Grade I listed.<br><br></div><div>What shocked me was what my guest, the Rev Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London, revealed about the horrors of the C of E’s insatiably greedy and tediously right-on bureaucracy. An ever-growing army of administrators and busybodies – he describes their numbers as ‘astronomical’ – is raiding the collection plates of local parishes so that they can force-feed churchgoers with their drivel.<br><br></div><div>Marcus is one of the best-connected priests in the Church of England – and one of the bravest. In our interview he talks candidly about the ‘despoiling’ of parishes by the managerial culture promoted by the bishops, which has thrown away more than £240 million on doomed projects to attract new worshippers. These schemes are mostly cack-handed attempts to foist the charismatic evangelical model of ‘church plants’ on ordinary parishes. (For an idea of just how badly this can go wrong, read <a href="https://www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/news/19397173.chronic-problems-winchester-diocese-revealed/">the under-reported story</a> of the resignation of the Bishop of Winchester, Tim Dakin, a hardline evangelical whose obsession with mega-churches and alleged harassment of vicars led Winchester to be dubbed ‘the diocese of North Korea’).<br><br></div><div>It was a barking mad scheme to create 10,000 ‘lay-led churches’ that prompted Marcus Walker, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/as-this-the-last-chance-to-save-the-church-of-england">writing in The Spectator in July</a>, to launch a ‘Save the parish’ campaign that, among other things, encourages parish priests and their congregations to lock away their money so that the power-crazed mediocrities who control the church can’t get their hands on it.<br><br></div><div>Trust me: you don’t want to miss what the Rector of the oldest parish church in the City of London has to say. And, once you’ve listened to him, I don’t think you’ll be surprised that St Bartholomew’s is absolutely thriving under his stewardship.<br><br></div><div>(Note to Catholic listeners: I couldn’t resist asking Marcus, former deputy director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, what he makes of Pope Francis’s campaign to suppress the traditional Latin Mass…)</div><p>Become a <em>Spectator </em>subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/follow-your-podcasts/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">spectator.co.uk/adfree</a> to find out more.</p><br><p>For more <em>Spectator</em> podcasts, go to <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/podcasts/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">spectator.co.uk/podcasts</a>. </p><br><p>Contact us: [email protected]</p> <hr><p style='color:grey; font-size:0.75em;'> Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://acast.com/privacy'>acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.</p>