Major Considerations

The Vicar of Tophill and the priest-in-charge of Hornington described for the meeting’s benefit the process of establishing the new ‘minster’ parish that will cover them both. When we last mentioned this here, some of my readers expressed a degree of scepticism over whether the term ‘Minster’ was really applicable to Hornington church which is a sprawling and very badly organised parish church rather than anything grander. His Grace of Tophill stated that ‘minsters’ were often former monastic churches and Hornington qualified partly due to once being a Benedictine monastery. I don’t know where he got that from: it may be scrambled from the fact that there was indeed an Anglo-Saxon ‘minster’ there, but those were not always monastic and not always very big either. He outlined the current requirements for a church to be designated as a minster. The trouble with this is that what he’s talking about is not actually ‘minster status’ but ‘major church status’, something which I think has existed since about 2020. This seems to have developed from, and is still tangled up with, the notion of a ‘Greater Church’ which is about thirty years older.

In 1991 a group of big and historic churches, often former monastic ones, which were of a near-cathedral size (and in many cases bigger than small cathedrals like Carlisle and Oxford), but lacked the recognition and resources available to cathedrals, set up the Greater Churches Network to swap ideas about fundraising, marketing and management. There were more in some areas than others: Dorset had three (Sherborne Abbey, Christchurch Priory and Wimborne Minster), but Surrey, none at all. The GCN trundled on for a couple of decades and then in 2016 the Church of England issued a report discussing the idea of the ‘Major Church’. To be designated ‘Major’, a church had to fulfil several criteria: it had to be more than 1000 square metres in size, be Grade 1 or 2* listed, to have exceptional historical significance, and a role beyond that of an ordinary parish church. When the GCN dissolved itself in 2019, it had 55 members; the 2019 report had already identified 300 ‘major churches’. Not all were as big as the former ‘Greater Churches’; not all were even very old, as the number included Fr Gresham Kirby’s modernist gem St Paul’s Bow Common. It’s this designation which Hornington is being proposed for, rather than the courtesy title of ‘Minster’ which doesn’t really mean anything and which certainly carries no legal status whatever; you’d have to be very imaginative indeed to describe St Paul’s Bow Common as a ‘minster’. As I mentioned, the GCN is no more, and is now the Major Churches Network, and designated Major Churches can apply to join it (though its membership is still only 65).

It seems clear that Major Churches are just one element of a Church in a state of flux. It might be that they could indeed develop into being something like the Anglo-Saxon minsters, centres for Christian activity locally, with dependent daughter churches or communities, and organising and galvanising bodies for mission; but that’s not what they are yet. They would need to work out the boundaries between that kind of activity and the strategic role deaneries are supposed to be developing, and what happens to those churches who find themselves in the region of a Major Church with which they are out of sympathy ecclesiologically? That’s likely to be the case with Swanvale Halt and Greater Hornington. It only makes the £300K the Diocese is giving to the putative new ‘minster’ for additional staff grate all the more. If there’s that kind of money to be given away, I could make use of some!