IT WAS, the Revd Paul Holley admits, slightly perverse to be drawn to the diocese of Truro when its then diocesan Bishop predicted that the Church had “only five or six years” to turn around its decline. “I thought, ‘That could be an interesting place to work,’” he recalls. “A sort of open canvas.”
Nine years after his arrival in the diocese, where he is Team Rector in the Bodmin Team Ministry, he chairs a social enterprise that employs 16 people, with a budget of £300,000 and contracts with the NHS. He paints a portrait of a church “deeply embedded” in its community, and one that consciously chose a different path from the resource-church model formerly championed in the diocese.
“Right at the beginning, when the Bishop’s Diocesan Council (BDC) was discussing the prospect of expanding the resource-church model, I questioned whether an injection of substantial funds would actually hinder sustainability rather than support it,” he says. “It is easy to become dependent on external grants. That’s why I decided to take the Bodmin Team on its own journey. Six or seven years later, there is clear evidence that we chose the right path.”
Mr Holley arrived in the diocese in 2016 and was made Team Rector the following year. The benefice’s five churches include St Petroc, Bodmin, the largest parish church in Cornwall and one of the 300 “major churches” in England.
During the contentious “On the Way” restructuring programme, the deanery chose not to cut the number of stipendiary clergy. It also benefitted from an allocation of Lowest Income Communities Funding (LICF), distributed to dioceses by the Archbishops’ Council and, before On the Way, used to plug Truro’s operating-budget deficit (News,15 March 2024).
The Transforming Mission (TM) project, funded by the Archbishops’ Council’s Strategic Development Fund, began in Falmouth in 2017 and was extended to four more areas in 2019 (News,13 May 2022). It came with ambitious goals for attendance growth and the expectation that it would be self-sufficient within six years. The 2017 SDF bid asserted that it was “widely recognised that simply continuing to appoint parish priests in the traditional model does not lead to the growth of the Church”.
The chair of the diocesan board of finance, Justin Day, told members last year: “Generally speaking, the five TM projects together did not, and probably will not, meet most of the targets described in their original bid documents. . . The targets were always ambitious and probably unrealistic.” But, he said, “they continue to do good important work.”
Among the learning was that “local leaders are more likely to understand local need” and the need to “resource all the churches in the diocese, not just a few”. Growth and sustainability required time, he said. The Acting Bishop of Truro, the Rt Revd Hugh Nelson, said last year that there were no plans to establish new resource churches in the diocese.
Mr Holley, a member of the BDC, said this week that he had turned down an invitation to be considered for inclusion in Transforming Mission. “It felt to me like, in the long term, I’d be better off building step by step and, in the process, building sustainability. . . My thinking is always around asset-based development, building on what’s here.”
In Bodmin, where 20 per cent of the population are among the country’s most deprived decile, he had the assistance of the Revd Elaine Munday, a former pub landlady living on a council estate, who serves as a pioneer minister. There were also self-supporting ministers and Readers.
Mr Holley, who helped to establish a healthy-living centre while serving in Manchester, and led the Anglican Health Network in Switzerland, became the diocese’s first oversight minister when he was appointed in 2016. The Bodmin Way social enterprise was established in 2018, focused on “trying to reach on behalf of the NHS into lives that they would otherwise struggle to connect with”.
The Covid-19 pandemic proved a catalyst. Ms Munday was the community leader “that everyone would turn to”, Mr Holley recalls. Emerging from it, the church could talk to the NHS “with some authority”, having secured local trust.
Today, the enterprise has 16 members of staff who run programmes, which include six funded by the NHS. Four Community Health and Wellbeing Workers are contracted to reach out to residents on two estates, alongside two parish nurses. Community offerings include a larder, café, garden, choir, and cooking group. Profits of £21,000 were made from 40 events, including concerts, in 2024.
The growth of the project is illustrative of a wider expansion of the Church of England’s social action, and calls by politicians for the Church to seek different sources of revenue (News, 1 August). A 2020 report by Theos, Growing Good, spoke of a “paradox” in the current decade: “The national Church of a nation which is increasingly reliant on its social action and yet less and less spiritually connected to it” (Features, 27 September 2024).
Mr Holley believes that those who have access to support through the Bodmin Way are “very conscious” that it is a church-run enterprise, thanks to the “magic of Elaine”, who is “very visibly a priest, and much respected as such”.
Health and faith “seem so integrated”, he says. “They were there in the Gospels and there in the Early Church and have continued ever since. There has been a separation in people’s minds in the UK for 70-odd years, but, in the rest of the worl,d . . . Christian hospitals, health programmes are just part of the scene.”
But it can be difficult, he says, to “crystallise” the effectiveness of pioneer ministry. “We know it’s there, we hear people talking, but it’s not a worshipping community: it’s a network of people who are responsive to faith.”
On Sunday morning, he thinks: “This is what I do. Where are the people?” he says. “But I keep telling myself and others: ‘There’s a lot of faith out there in that community. . . That hidden faith does not lack power or impact.’”
The project has faced challenges this year, and some grants drying up, but it is now supporting neighbouring parishes that are seeking partnerships beyond the deanery.
The story fits into a wider debate in the Church, Mr Holley suggests, about “the strategic decision either to impose assumptions and targets or to allow for organic growth according to context. . . My view is that, even though the finance model of the C of E is not designed to fail, it has yet to be reformed sufficiently to succeed. Parishes have to pay for the maintenance of their buildings, the cost of their ministers, and a contribution to the costs of the diocese. This is unsustainable. We are trying to operate a congregational model of financing in an Established Church with large medieval buildings.
“Ambiguous talk of abundance and generosity does not attend to the very real calculations that have to be made. The development of Bodmin Way is our attempt to see further into the future than the current parochial horizon can expect to last.”
The Archdeacon of Bodmin, the Ven. Kelly Betteridge, praised the Bodmin Way this week as “an outstanding example of the creativity and faithfulness of the Church in Cornwall”.
A conference, “Doing things the Bodmin way”, will be held at St Petroc’s on 2 October. Cost £15. Email: office@bodminway.org
