Martin Sewell Surviving Church Resigning from General Synod
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Martyn Percy Meander Barnaclization in the Church of England
Helen King ViaMedia.News In the Beginning: Sex, AIDS, Judgment and the Church of England, 1986-1991
Martyn Percy: Let me give an example. I recently met a retired Church of England priest, who is over the age of 80. Still helping his local churches, he told me that to hold a licence (PTO) he must apply for and complete a process annually, and also pass the mandatory safeguarding training. It takes many hours, and is a lot of work for him. So he was thinking that he might just “retire to the pews”, and sit with the laity. However, he’s been told as a clergyman that he must still hold a licence just to sit in… Read more »
I read Dr Percy’s piece with interest, as it seems evident that the Church is sinking under the weight of its own administrative accretions and pretensions. A bureaucracy of rococo complexity might – just – have been tolerable when the Church had regular attendance north of a million, but not now. Moreover, administration has increased in inverse proportion to the remorseless decline in attendance – the two tendencies often function in symbiosis. Here, I am reminded of the following famous passage of C. Northcote Parkinson: “The strength of the Navy in 1914 could be shown as 146,000 officers and men,… Read more »