“If elected I will serve with the interested of parishes always in mind….” So said my election address for the Church of England’s General Synod in 1999. Now, as I approach my final few months on General Synod, having served on it for two very different Dioceses I have come to the conclusion that the gap between Synodical Structures and Pastoral Parishes is wider still. The central structures have come up with a plethora of initiatives, such as Renewal and Reform, Simplification, Mission Shaped Church, Strategic funding for Resourcing and Planting new church communities, Estates Ministry, Everyday Faith. However, questions need to be asked about how these fine sounding initiatives actually connect with existing neighbourhood schemes of care, advocacy and support? What is more, it often seems to be forgotten that parishes run on shoestring budgets, unlike the eye watering budgets behind these national projects! The relevance of such initiatives to parishes is questionable and so the gap remains. A gap brought sharply into focus by the response of the Institutional Church to Covid-19.

I resigned from my Bishop’s Council this week.

The decision has been a long time coming – I’ve felt I’ve been hitting my head against a brick wall over our failure to prioritise the poor and disadvantaged, especially given we are such a rich diocese, for years. In fact, I’ve been banging the drum since I got onto Council five years ago. Interestingly, even though we constantly rated serving the poor in our diocese as a “the top priority” during our discussions, it rarely seemed to make the cut into any paperwork . In virtually every meeting I can remember I have had to remind those in authority of the commitments we had agreed as a Council.

For many of us, this time of year brings that back-to-school feeling, no matter how old we are.

While this year has been difficult for children, teachers and parents, we have seen many heroes come together to look after our young people: from Marcus Rashford’s free school meals campaign to Norwich Diocese’s “Filling the Gap” project, which provided 128 families with a staggering 26,082 meals over six weeks.