New wine and old wine skins?

This evening the Bishop of Ripon & Leeds talked about what it means to be a diocese and the role of bishops, cathedrals and other structures in this.  It may sound a dull subject but the context of reorganisation in precisely all of those structures gave it an edge for his audience.  The three dioceses covering West Yorkshire and the Dales (Ripon & Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield) are facing amalgamtion and so it was worth the effort to think around the issues at stake.

He said the Church of England is fundamentally rooted in the parishes - local communities.  When these parishes come together to make a diocese they give an economy of scale that can provide support for what they are trying to do.  But the diocese is more than just a group of parishes.  As the parish means the church serves an area, so a diocese serves a wider geographical area and provides a vehicle to address the common issues that raises.

Bishops encourage and sustain vision.  Their leadership is to ensure that the mission to places is focused.  He felt that the changes being proposed will enable the church to related better to the civil communities it seeks to serve.

Where I had the most questions was over his comments on cathedrals.  When an area has more than one cathedral - the new diocese will have three and there will be two further areas that won't have one - I am left wondering what a cathedral is.  To call it the mother church (which he did) and have three of them means we have three mothers.  To say it is the focus for the areas when two of the new areas don't have one leaves me scratching my head as to whether this means two areas are impoverished.  If they are not impoverished then what have the other three areas actually got?  If they have got a big church that provides a focus for a given area then this begins to redefine the peramenters in such a way as to start to invent a new entity. I think I have more thinking to do on this.  For me it is pertinent because I am on the governing body (Chapter) of Ripon Catheral, so I am reassessing what we are and indeed what we will be!

The questions that followed took the discussion a little further, not least on the importance of ethos and coherence for a group, and how we are better abled to interface with the concerns of the world and how the gospel is relevant to those.