Churches ringing in the new as parish mags fold

For more than 150 years, England’s parish rags were first port of call for anyone wanting news from their village or the date of the next Women’s Institute meeting.

One of the oldest, the parish magazine at the Brontës’ former home of Haworth, West Yorkshire, flourished in the aftermath of the sisters’ literary legacy.

The first edition went on sale in the new year of 1899 for one old penny – subsidised by local adverts for everything from knitted vests to Greenwood’s Tea.

From humble beginnings as the single page Haworth Church Notice, it grew into a 12 page magazine which lasted more than a century.

But the current edition will be the last after the church – which hosts a busy website – got fed up with throwing half the copies unsold into the bin.

Experts fear less than five 
years after the Church of 
England celebrated 150 years of church magazines many are 
now approaching their final chapter.

Those not replaced by websites are being rebranded as glossy quarterly magazines.

Bishop of Bradford the Rt Rev Nick Baines, one of the guiding lights of Church of England communications, said: “The whole media world has changed.

“People look at a church on the internet, not wandering around buildings. If we are trying to communicate more widely there are other more imaginative cost- effective ways of doing it.

“What we should not be is slaves to nostalgia.

“The other thing is you have to have the people to produce a church magazine, which can be a problem these days.”

Only 200 copies of each edition of the Haworth magazine were printed, and half were usually thrown away. Haworth vicar the Rev Peter Mayo-Smith said: “It is costing us a lot of money and like all organisations we have to make hard decisions about spending.”

No one really knew how old the magazine was and its roots could extend back to the Brontës, he said, adding: “We have to take into account the Brontë connection. But people are now very much more involved in social networking and it is all part and parcel of that.

“We recognise certain groups of people really love paper, so we might go to quarterly 
glossy magazine rather than 
who is doing the tea rota and 
who is handing out the hymn books.”

Nationally, the Church of England celebrated 150 years of parish magazines in 2009.

Ironically, they did this with a new section on their website. The then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, said at the time: “A good parish magazine is a wonderful resource that places the local church at the heart of the community it serves. We owe our gratitude to all those who labour lovingly to produce this regular shop-window for their church or parish. As a team or solo, with a generous budget or an alarmingly fraying shoestring, this is a ministry we need to recognise and to support.”

Mr Mayo-Smith said: “Back then Facebook was just catching on and most people would have thought Twitter was something to do with birds. There has been such a revolution in the whole media in only a few years.”

The Church of England supplies an insert for parish magazines but does not have circulation figures on how well they are doing.

But there are signs that many are changing from monthly publications to more expensive quarterly glossy magazines far removed from their parish pump roots.

Worst hit may be the bigger circulation magazines published by the diocese – as underlined by a recent report to the church bosses north of the border.

The report to the Church of Scotland General Assembly by its Communications Committee pointed to the decline of its publications The Record and Free, a youth magazine.