IT WAS only a few days after the Church Times’s extensive coverage of clergy vacancies (Feature, 18 October) that an email from the Bishop’s PA — bland, factual, empathetic — stated that no one had applied for our vacancy. I could imagine something of the feelings of all those on the PCC who received it: intense disappointment and bewilderment — and these were certainly among my own feelings. I had been included in the email as a courtesy, as the “retired” priest in the parish who fronts most of the services since the Vicar went off sick and, a year later, retired and moved away.

Looking back, I think that we entered the vacancy with a sense of buoyancy. This is a well-run, busy parish — not well-to-do, but comfortable enough, on the edge of a town, with good schools, near motorways, within an hour of two large cities. There is no hint from the collective memory of those who have been here longest that there was such a problem during previous vacancies. Yet this is the third email from the Bishop’s PA since the vacancy began, with similar wording; the third time that no one has applied to be our incumbent.

I stand at the front, Sunday by Sunday, trying to be faithful to the gospel, as I urge the lovely, but diminishing and mostly elderly congregation to “keep on keeping on”: to say their prayers, and to love God and neighbour with all that they have and are; and I can see now, in my mind’s eye, the look of incomprehension and bewilderment as I tell them, once again, that we have failed to find any applicants for the post — not even one to interview. “What’s wrong with us?” “Why?”

THE vast majority will not have the slightest clue about the difficulties that the Church of England faces, as numbers of ordinations fall and a cohort of clergy come up to retirement. Why should they? This has been a parish that had a faithful congregation, extensive social contacts, a valued ministry in schools, and an impressive number of initiatives with families that have younger children, although this latter struggled after Covid, and largely collapsed subsequently as the Vicar became ill and left, and various others dropped out.

The congregation has not been faced with any merger of churches, so that the picture of a “successful parish” has not been challenged. I look around and see half a dozen very competent people — more, maybe — who, in their time, have been churchwarden and now do their bit, their big bit, to help with the intercessions, the readings, the coffee rotas, arranging funerals, backing up baptisms, clerking in weddings. They are tired.

And I am the old fogey, approaching 80, with health issues, who can do only what I can do — which is about keeping Sunday worship going with the help of colleagues, equally pressed, in the deanery. Becoming more tired by the week, I had, as we attempted to recruit for the third time, set my mind on “I can keep going till next Easter,” thinking that, the third time we advertised, we might get a shortlist — or at least one person to apply.

That “setting sights ahead” had already slipped from last Easter, to September just past. Now, my sights are, reluctantly, beginning to focus, with some horror, on next September, effectively three years into this vacancy, and as I face the possibility of extensive time out with surgery.

AS I write this, I am conscious that there will be many nods of recognition around the country, from bishops, churchwardens, congregations, and, not least, that army of “retireds” who hold permission to officiate.

And I have to ask myself whether this ramshackle system (system?) of “managing” a vacancy is the best way forward, depending as it does on overworked area deans, “retireds” who may or may not wish to take up an array of services and duties, churchwardens (if the church is blessed with them), and senior staff whose attention is often elsewhere.

In all the strategising, the papers, the push for growth, all the stuff that grabs the headlines, can some serious attention be paid to maintaining parishes and benefices — the bedrock of the Church of England — in vacancy, more than the present decrepit arrangement allows?

And don’t give me the stuff about “new opportunities in vacancy”, “a chance to discover hidden gifts”: three years in, we are beyond that. Let’s get some debate going, a flow of ideas, some strategies to help parishes to face what will increasingly be a very long haul through a vacancy. Please?

The writer is a retired priest in the north of England.

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