Proposed Diocesan Changes
I’ve created an interactive map to show the proposed changes to Church of England dioceses in the north. Put your mouse over the dioceses in the north to see how each is affected.
Wakefield, Ripon and Leeds and Bradford dioceses are combined into a new enlarged Wakefield diocese. This new diocese loses parishes to Carlisle, Blackburn, Durham and Sheffield. Sheffield loses parishes to York and Lincoln. Other parishes (not shown) are asked to consider whether they move to York diocese.
FWIW I think this is finally evidence that the CofE is thinking practically about resource allocation.
Thanks, Peter – this is really useful. My geography of Britain is useless, so I had only the sketchiest idea of how the boundaries shift.
I haven't read the whole report, but the summaries suggest that the process has been done carefully, and from the outside it looks like a good result. I'm inclined to think that fewer, larger dioceses with properly devolved area schemes might be a way forward elsewhere, too.
Yes, the proposals are well thought out and shoud help future mission strategy.
Peter,
Is there a map of how the new areas relate to the existing dioceses and archdeaconaries? Your mapdoes show how mush area is "lost" to Blackburn and Carlisle and the boundry with Sheffield? I feel that it would be better to set up Leeds as a separate diocese to prevent it overshadowing the whole region.
David
Personally I'm all for going back (quite a few centuries) to about 5 dioceses: say Canterbury (SE), Winchester (SW), Worcester (WM), Lincoln (EM) and York (N). If each diocese just had one ordinary and a decent sized college of local Bishops (and just one administration centre) we could have a lot more flexibility on oversight, a structure that could last well into the future and a lot of cost savings on "overheads".