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June 2006, Page 4.
Index of articles:
by subject,
by date.
In this issue:
(June 2006)
Alive!
Local elections,
Deanery plan.
The Paralysed Pastoral Plan
I’ve tried to avoid writing about the Deanery Pastoral Plan for the last three months, in the hope that the arguments will be resolved and I’ll be able to give you an agreed plan for the next few years. But, sadly, it hasn’t worked out that way.
The Problem you will recall is that we will no longer have 15 clergy to go round the 15 parishes of the Calverley Deanery, and the Diocese has asked the Deanery to work out how to staff the churches with 12 clergy. (Actually we may not even have 12 clergy!)
We first tried to ask the parishes to consider three options and say what they wanted or make other suggestions. This resulted in about a dozen different suggestions! So the Synod’s Standing Committee boiled them down to four (as reported in February’s Link). The Deanery Synod in February debated these. Options B and C didn’t get much support, and Option D beat Option A by a very narrow margin.
However, several people then wrote letters to the Archdeacon saying that they couldn’t make this arrangement work, as the bottom “cluster” was too big to be manageable. So the Diocesan Pastoral Committee asked the Deanery Synod to reconsider Option A. The Archdeacon drew up a modified version of Option A, changing the staffing numbers a bit so as to make it ‘fairer’ to the big parishes.
The argument then moved to whether Option A was really viable either. Here are three problems:
1) You’ll have noticed the half figures in the numbers. How do you make a cluster work with “half” a clergy person? Yes, you can have someone working half-time for a diocesan-wide responsibility if there are such posts available, but it’s very hard to imagine someone working half-time in one cluster and half-time in another, when the churches are supposed to be growing links with other churches in their clusters rather than across the cluster boundaries.
2) What’s the right size for a clusters of churches? Some people think a small cluster is better because people from churches can get their heads round it easier, and you can make friends with people from a small number of other congregations. But some people think you need bigger clusters so that the clergy work in larger teams: a team needs at least 3 clergy together and preferably more, because otherwise there’s no real chance of specializing and saving work for each other.
3) And last, Tong is already three churches working together. So why destabilize our only cluster? Leave it alone!
The vote on 27th April at Deanery Synod was anything but straightforward. Two individuals produced new schemes: Options E and F. At the meeting there were five amendments to be considered. However, the overwhelming vote was for Option F: an option which puts Laisterdyke with the northern group, on the grounds of good working relationships already established.
All done and dusted? I’m afraid not. At the time of writing we have just heard that the Diocesan Pastoral Committee has also rejected this idea, and asked for Laisterdyke to be taken out of the northern group and reconsidered. Which leaves the northern group with only 2 clergy. So it’s all up in the air again.
(There are Synod reports on our web site.)
John Hartley
The original article carried a rough sketch-map of the deanery and a summary of the options A, D, E and F. As these can be found on the Deanery pages of our web site we have not included them here - we may add them later.