The road to Wigan’s tears

The Church’s drive to remake itself has been a pastoral and financial catastrophe

WE NEED TO TALK about Wigan. “Why Wigan?” you might ask. Because Wigan is the prototype for a whole new way of being Anglican which is being rolled out across various dioceses and, being the first of this model, it has been the subject of a detailed study and shown to be a disaster. This is not hyperbole. I’m not sure how else to describe a scheme which drives away fully a third of your congregation and results in a collapse of giving by a third, which cost £1.2 million to implement and has resulted in the deficits of the churches involved shooting up from £56,000 per year to £295,666. Let’s go back to the beginning. Wigan was the first project of a vast scheme of national spending called “Strategic…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2023

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