• Putting a Church Online – lessons from Finland

    Posted on: 19/01/15  |  Posted By: Meri-Anna Hintsala  |  Category: Blog

    It’s All Saint’s Day 2014. I log onto my Facebook account and am greeted by a vivid image of glowing candles and a few solemn white words: desire, thanksgiving, mourning and hope. Beside the picture, I see a prayer: All…

    Read More

  • The Church must recover its Spirit

    Posted on: 16/12/14  |  Posted By: Lorraine Cavanagh  |  Category: Blog

    What is good about the Church of England? Is there a reason to continue? These are two of the questions which emerged in the course of the last of the Westminster Faith Debates on the future of the Church of England. They are two…

    Read More

  • Synod Reform: A Proposal

    Posted on: 12/12/14  |  Posted By: Martin Clay  |  Category: Blog

    The system we have is in 3 layers from the parish electoral roll and Annual Parish Church Meeting to the General Synod, via Deanery and Diocese. Deanery Synods are much undervalued, considered to be a waste of time by clergy and…

    Read More

  • Reforming General Synod

    Posted on: 03/12/14  |  Posted By: Jane Charman  |  Category: Blog

    How representative is General Synod? The question is not new. In 2005 Dr Colin Podmore, the then Secretary to the Synod, remarked in a useful essay on synodical government that ‘there is, admittedly, an issue as to how far…

    Read More

  • How can Church of England diversity become a strength?

    Posted on: 26/11/14  |  Posted By: Lorraine Cavanagh  |  Category: Blog

    I have a small dog who wants to consume her very large bone in my study. This would make my working environment smell of meat, so the bone is to be eaten outside. Being an obstinate little dachshund she is trying to gain access…

    Read More

  • Growing the Church of England

    Posted on: 17/11/14  |  Posted By: Tony Baldry  |  Category: Blog

    The Church of England is nothing if it is not a National Church. A National Church – a National Institution – present in every community. However, there has been a progressive squeeze on the Church’s ability to sustain a…

    Read More

  • The Church of England must remain credible as well as viable

    Posted on: 12/11/14  |  Posted By: Lorraine Cavanagh  |  Category: Blog

    Last Thursday’s Oxford Faith Debate at the church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford was a timely reminder of the fact that there are other things at stake, when it comes to the future of the Church of England, than the issues…

    Read More

  • Clergy united on parish system

    Posted on: 09/10/14  |  Posted By: Faith Debates  |  Category: Blog

    As previously reported, a representative survey of Anglican clergy was recently commissioned to inform our new debate series on the future of the Church of England. The survey was administered online by YouGov in August 2014 and…

    Read More

  • Clergy polled in new Anglican survey

    Posted on: 26/08/14  |  Posted By: Faith Debates  |  Category: Blog

    A new survey is underway, gathering information about the beliefs and values of Anglican clergy in the UK for the purpose of academic research, and to support a forthcoming debate series on the Future of the Church of England….

    Read More

  • Only enterprise can save our parish churches now

    Posted on: 27/06/14  |  Posted By: Andrew Mawson  |  Category: Blog

    On a recent trip to Wales, I visited a church with an attached café. It was heavily subsidised by grants, a situation that is simply not going to be possible in the coming years. Over the road was a curry house, the winner of…

    Read More

recent posts

  • Gladiators, humanists and religion: a battle over collective worship

    Posted on: 10/01/2020

    Under current legislation, all schools in England and Wales must provide daily acts of ‘broadly Christian’ collective worship for their pupils. Although it is no longer enforced, this is a much-contested requirement seemingly…

  • GCSE Religious Studies numbers plummeting outside the faith school sector, new report finds

    Posted on: 19/08/2019

    Thanks to a grant from the Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, and the work of my colleague Mi Young Ahn, now a research fellow at UCL Institute of Education, I have been able this week to publish figures on the dramatic drop in…

  • Letter published in The Tablet

    Posted on: 06/08/2018

    RE syllabus A letter from Charles Clarke and Linda Woodhead, published in The Tablet on 2nd August 2018. In 2015, we published a set of recommendations on how to improve the quality of religious education in state schools, and…

 

popular posts

  • Youth work and church growth: what works

    Posted on: 12/12/2013

    My research into young people’s experiences of Christian youth work challenges the dominant assumption that it is the young that have rejected the church. It’s the churches which too often reject the young. I encountered many…

  • Quakers, (Same-Sex) Marriage and the State

    Posted on: 28/03/2014

    In 1663 Charles and Mary Appleby, a Quaker couple from Liskeard, Cornwall, were summoned and questioned by the mayor and eventually imprisoned in Launceston gaol. Their misdemeanour, according to the fellow Quaker who recorded…

  • Surveys reveal widening gulf between Catholics and Church teaching

    Posted on: 18/11/2013

    As the Vatican surveys the opinions of Catholics in dioceses and parishes around the world, three large polls I carried out this year with YouGov for the Westminster Faith Debates reveal a profile of British Catholics adrift from…

Categories

    Sorry, no categories available

 

Archives

1 2 3 4