MEMORIES of seeing small numbers of people come to faith gradually, while serving on outer estates, were shared by the new Bishop of Ely, the Rt Revd Sarah Clark, this week.
“Sometimes growth came but it was one by one,” she said. “The apostle Paul talks about a labour of love and I think in some smaller communities, where it’s been a struggle, it’s a real labour of love. It takes a lot of energy and lot of faith, hope, and love.”
Bishop Clark, who served in parish ministry in the diocese of Southwell & Nottingham for 16 years after ordination, was installed in Ely Cathedral on Sunday. In her sermon, she spoke of a longing to see the diocese “grow increasingly confident in the person who we believe has risen from the dead and is alive and shares that life with anyone who comes to him — for that is the gift we have to share”.
The Statement of Needs produced prior to her appointment was frank about the challenges facing the diocese, noting that the diocesan plan, Ely 2025: People Fully Alive, had failed to reverse the decline in attendance. It continued: “Our new bishop will have to consider how to address the decline and whether a further period of centralised planning is likely to be the most effective tool to deploy.”
The Changing Market Towns project, backed by £2.13 million from the Church Commissioners after a successful bid for strategic development funding (News, 12 July 2018), had mixed results with a review concluding that the “sudden transformations” in the churches involved were ones that “most were unready for” (News, 16 May 2025). The project bid highlighted that the average church attendance across market towns in the Fens was 0.9 per cent compared to three per cent in Cambridge.
Asked about the task of the bishop against a backdrop of numerical decline — with an attendant impact on clergy morale — Bishop Clark shared her own memories of parish ministry.
“Part of it is how we care for the clergy, to enable them to hold on to their vocation and this sense of a God, who is alive and isn’t just in Cambridge but it is here — and to be able to celebrate that,” she said. She recalled as a bishop in Durham seeing “two or three people” being confirmed. “[They had] really complicated stories and yet they had found in this small church a belonging in a way that you might not see in the four-hundred-strong church. So I think it’s celebrating what we do see as well. And it’s not all about us. I think we’ve got to renew our prayer and our hope.”
In her sermon, Bishop Clark spoke about finding courage in the gospel. The Church, she said, was in the middle of a “really big generational move from a pastoral Church, which is present and here, to one which is on the move and is more mission-orientated”. She added: “It’s a long arc, I think, and we are seeing pockets of growth.”
Brought up in a family that did not regularly attend church, Bishop Clark became a Christian through her older sister, who was the first member of the family to go to college and came to faith through friends from a Baptist church. She was baptised at the age of 22, four years after first exploring faith.
Asked about how this shaped her ministry, she said: “I think if you have come to faith as a teenager or adult then the story of how this happened appears to be very clear. Probably, for some, it’s easier to name Jesus or something about the Christian faith that drew you in, and that is one of the strengths. You can chat to others really easily about ‘there was a time when . . .’”
But, having become a Christian, she had envied those brought up in a Christian home, she said. “Some of my friends who had been brought up in a Christian home, been Christians all their lives, there was a depth and ease and trust in God that was almost woven in them. It’s beautiful and actually what we really desire is that, as people come to faith and become Christians, they will bring their children up as Christians and will nurture them in the faith.”
The congregation she had served in her first incumbency as Rector of Carlton-in-Lindrick had taught her a lot, she said. One of their favourite hymns had been “Father, hear the prayer we offer” which includes the line: “Not for ever in green pastures do we ask our way to be.”
“These were people who lived in the same village, worshipped in the same church all their lives, and I used to wonder what they were imagining about this prayer, what to live courageously looked like for people who were never going to move,” she said. “I learned it as a pastor because I met them in the circumstances of their lives and I saw a faith and a depth and a love. But that wasn’t obvious on a Sunday — it was in the one-to-ones.
“I feel quite moved by that because it was a lesson to me. I was used to this outward, showy strong Baptist church of ‘tell people’ and I encountered this depth and faithfulness that didn’t shout but they just kept walking.”