the english clergy assocation

ANNUAL ADDRESS 2P.M. 14th May - The 2011 Speaker was the Rt. Hon. Dominic Grieve, Q.C., M.P., the Attorney-General, who attends Cabinet.

The present issue of Parson & Parish is the 171st - a new issue is in preparation, and contributions are always invited, including Letters to the Editor. We have most of the old issues, as does Lambeth Palace Library, and the Copyright Deposit Libraries. Read the Parson and Parish backnumbers on this site.

Download Last Event Poster - Monday 16th May 2011 and watch this space.

The Ecclesiastical Offices (Terms of Service) Measure we campaigned against.  The Measure was amended, to lose the unfortunate proposals to confiscate Parsonages and Churches from Incumbents and place them vulnerably in diocesan ownership.  The Archdeacon of Berkshire and others played a huge part in this reversal of Synod's line.  Now the rest of the Measure has gone through Parliament, despite the stalwart efforts of our then Parliamentary Vice-President, Sir Patrick Cormack, F.S.A., M.P., and Synod in its labyrinthine way has worked on revised draft Regulations, by which, we would maintain, clergy's traditional freedom of work and association will be all but strangled.  Watch this space!  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  The regulations have already needed amendment, and a Cod of Practice has been issued, with legal force.

Existing freeholders will be asked to surrender the freehold of office (retaining the freehold of property) and go over to Common Tenure.  The Archbishops will do so.  The advice of your Council is: don't!  You'd regret it - as Esau did when he sold his birthright for a mess of potage.  Mess is the word.  Still, we await the actual working out on the ground of the new Regulations with great interest.  They have statutory force of law.

The Incumbents (Vacation of Benefices) Measure 1977, expensively revised since, was also going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Will the capability procedure described in the Code of Practice fare any better? The employment tribunals are unknown quantities, and too much expertise is asked of them if they are all to get to grips with the unique culture of the Church of England. Is not this passing the buck - and when the new Clergy Discipline Measure is still so barely tried and novel?

The Regulations will usher in a control freak's paradise. There is much good in the recommendations, particularly in the giving of real security to the licensed through common tenure. But those with permission to officiate are still in outer darkness. Ministerial review becomes compulsory and intrusive. Human-resources staff, costed at millions each year, will be in the control-room of a Big Brother House.

The distinction between enhanced ministerial review and the new capability procedure will be less than clear in the psyche of most clergy and laity. Bishops and archdeacons will be put in an impossibly convoluted position, needing to maintain a distance from anyone who might be likely to appear before them in a capability proceeding, and knowing that, costs apart, the whole issue is likely to go to an employment tribunal anyway.  Nor is it really clear that there is more than a Chinese wall between the Capability Procedure and the Clergy Discipline Measure.

What of St Paul's injunction that we should settle matters among believers? Do the proposals reflect badly on devoted chancellors and registrars? Do the new procedures apply to them? In the past, they were aided by elected assessors and committees. Even examiners under the consistory-court system were appointed by an elected committee. Now we go over to a system of non-transparent appointment. We shall all be sorry.

John Masding

...Back