Gill and Craven report proposes cutting Church of England dioceses from 42 to 30

Church advised to cull its bishops to avoid ruin

So ran the ironic headline in a recent issue of The Times, which summarised the report "Wasted Money in a Shrinking Church", written by the theologian Canon Robin Gill, a former adviser to the Archbishops of Canterbury Robert Runcie and George Carey, and Professor John Craven. The irony is that "cull" is usually used in the sense of the slaughter of livestock.

The authors write that the Church of England is heading for financial catastrophe. Of the 42 dioceses, 37 are now running budget deficits, whereas in 2019 there were 18. Attendance, donations and the number of ordinations are falling, while diocesan staffing has grown by 80% since 2005, from 1,300 to 2,300 employees. In the nineteenth century England had 22 dioceses; now it has 42.

The authors propose reducing the number of dioceses and diocesan bishops to about 30, and returning some suffragan bishops, that is, assistants to the diocesan bishop, and archdeacons to parish ministry. They also criticise spending on carbon neutrality and the fund of 100 million pounds set aside as compensation for the Church's involvement in the slave trade.

This is what happens when a Christian monarch ceases to be the defender of the faith, or, worse still, secretly embraces a new religion. I remind you that Europe today can be saved only by a mass turning to Christianity, a return to the bosom of the Church and the glorification of the word of Christ, and this applies to us too. Otherwise news of engineers and doctors who have wrecked half a country will become far more frequent and commonplace. Time will tell