Super diocese poses threat to future of Church

I WRITE in response to the Dean of Wakefield’s article (Yorkshire Post, September 24) on the threat posed to our cathedrals by proposals to amalgamate the three West Yorkshire Dioceses.

Jonathan Greener is to be congratulated for raising this issue publicly. Those of us lay people who have followed the Church Commissioners’ ill-conceived proposals have long hoped that the issues he discusses would be debated outside the charmed circle of the Commissioners’ working party.

He has exposed the wooliness of their thinking about the nature of cathedrals, and this should prompt further reflection on how damaging their wider proposals for a West Yorkshire “super-diocese” would be.

Only a body as isolated and complacent as the Commissioners could imagine that the solution to the Church’s problems could be found in a reorganisation of well established diocesan patterns and loyalties.

It is classic “displacement activity” which distracts from the Church’s primary purpose of preaching the Gospel.

The quality of thinking and analysis in the Commissioners’ proposals is poor: if this exercise is repeated elsewhere in England, as is threatened, one fears for the future of the national Church. It is a shame that West Yorkshire is to be used as a test bed for their half-baked experiments in institutional change.