NEWSPAPERS relish headlines about cold weather, especially at this time of year: “Met Office issues severe weather warning”; “Snow could force schools to close”. For those attending Sunday worship, clad in winter coats, the words of William Blake might come to mind: “Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold, But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm.” Heating large, old buildings is not a new problem, and solutions have been long been hard to find: readers may recall overhead radiant heaters, inducing nausea in members of the congregation; or hot-air heaters blasting audibly from the back of the nave, making worshippers on the back pews toasty, but leaving those nearer to the front shivering. But this is not a trivial matter: a warm church is vital to mission and ministry. The prospect of attending worship in a cold and draughty building is off-putting. Many church buildings are open throughout the week, providing activities for parishioners and others, from toddlers to the elderly. Some provide important warm spaces for people who cannot afford to heat their homes for much of the day.
Christ Church, Chineham, in Winchester diocese, considered the replacement of two gas boilers to be so urgent that it installed them without a faculty and without proper consideration given to the Church Buildings Council’s net-zero guidance (News, 7 November 2025). The Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful Cain Ormondroyd, granted a confirmatory faculty, and gave the parish three years to install “a more sustainable form of heating before the 2030 target date”. When national newspapers picked up on the story this week, this quite reasonable demand was placed in the vanguard of a supposed war between cash-strapped parishes and the 2030 target: “Church’s net zero crackdown forces parish to rip out new boilers.” In response, a prominent cleric declared on social media that this showed how the C of E “prioritises its current political obsessions over its flock”.
But the target was not dreamt up by remote “wokeish” bureaucrats in solar-panelled diocesan offices: it was set by the General Synod, most of whose members are elected. If people in the parishes feel strongly that the target is unattainable, or detrimental to mission and ministry, they should lobby their Synod representatives to change it or rip it up altogether. This is highly unlikely to happen, of course, and nor is it a course of action that we counsel. But, as Chancellor Ormondroyd asserted in his Chineham judgment: “If the 2030 objective means anything, it is in churches such as this that sustainable heating solutions need to be installed now, not in 2045 or thereafter.” If they are not offered more assistance soon, some parishes may conclude, given the scale of the problem and the apocalyptic language of some climate campaigners, that the target is pointless — and that they might as well try to get warm in the here and now.
