Press release from the Prime Minister’s Office. There is more on the Durham diocesan website.
Appointment of Dean of Durham: 16 June 2023
The King has approved the nomination of The Reverend Canon Dr Philip Plyming to be appointed as Dean of Durham.
From: Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street
Published 16 June 2023
The King has approved the nomination of The Reverend Canon Dr Philip Plyming, Warden of Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham, to be appointed as Dean of Durham, in succession to The Very Reverend Andrew Tremlett following his appointment as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Philip studied German and Russian at Cambridge University followed by Theology at Durham University while training for ministry at Cranmer Hall. His PhD was awarded by Edinburgh University for research into Paul’s hardship narratives in 1 and 2 Corinthians. He served his title at Christ Church, Chineham, in the Diocese of Winchester, and was ordained priest in 2002.
In 2006 Philip was appointed Vicar of Claygate, in the Diocese of Guildford, and from 2012 he additionally served as Area Dean of Emly.
Philip was appointed to his current role as Warden of Cranmer Hall, St John’s College, Durham, in 2017. He was made an Honorary Canon of Durham Cathedral in 2022.
Philip is married to Annabelle, who works as a palliative care consultant for a local NHS Trust, and they have two teenage sons.
…..and yet another evangelical senior appointment
Actually very few cathedral deans are evangelicals in any ‘classic’ sense – 3 or 4 maybe out of 42 cathedrals.
This is excellent news for Durham cathedral – Philip is a ‘class act’.
That is very reassuring. Too many bishops are though.
I’m not sure that is true either. By the time people have arrived at senior appointments they have often moved on quite a long way from where they started.
I would like to hope that you are right but somewhat doubt it
If anything evangelicals are underrepresented among the bishops as well – maybe 40% compared with 50% in congregations
Is it 50% in congregations. Thank God I am out of touch or I could quite lose the will to live.
What is your source for that information? I should guess that the majority of people in the pews, including in Anglo Catholic churches, might broadly be categorised as liberal Protestant.
I’m working on the fact that nearly 50% of the House of Laity voted against welcoming the LLF report – mainly evangelicals with a few Anglo Catholics. It’s well known (but a bit unspoken) that the electorate for Laity at General Synod, Deanery Synod reps, is skewed towards smaller churches and underrepresents larger churches, which tend to be the evangelical ones. Indeed an amendment by Clive Scowen back in 2019 (I think) to make the electorate more balanced across church sizes was blocked by liberals.
Hence my ‘back of envelope’ suggests evangelicals are about 50% of those in the pews.
I wouldn’t assume that General Synod’s House of Laity accurately reflects the convictions of those in the pews. Those elected are among the most activist, the most able to take time away from work – and the election process is not one layperson one vote.
Quite. I have been in the same parish for 23 years and no one from our church has ever been on the general synod. I am rather sure that most other parishes in this diocese have not provided any general synod representatives in the last two decades either.
Yes but usually (not always) synod members are clear on where they stand on different issues, and their churchmanship, so the electorate can choose. Here I’m especially focused on the make up of the electorate, not the reps. Responding to Matthews’s comment below, not every church will have a GS rep of course, but every church has at least one member of the laity eligible to vote (or at the very least a vacancy for that)
Agreed. The turnout for the House of Laity is not strong in many Dioceses and those who do vote (taken from those who are on Deanery synods only) are either very engaged or do so with the encouragement of their Parish Priest. In many parishes the deanery synod rep is the person who couldn’t say no to filling a necessary role.
I thought that the marital status and offspring details were to be a thing of the past?
I thought it was the football favorites that were dropped.
It’s all so twee; why is it relevant to his role that his wife is a good thing doing good works? Would we have been told if she was a shelf stacker in Aldi? I think not. It’s all so irredeemably snooty and middle class and yet Archbishop Welby is scratching his head wondering why people aren’t coming to church.
I knew one cathedral canon whose partner worked on the tills in the local Waitrose. He said there was no better way of being kept in touch with the gossip amongst the cathedral congregation.
I think that was in a novel by Joanna Trollope
Actually, it is wonderful to welcome someone, who has given their life and talents to something so challenging as palliative care, to the cathedral community. Furthermore, you continuously overlook the power and autonomy that a parish priest, and a diocesan bishop has, to do precisely what they want, especially when it comes to mission. Archbishop Welby has little to do with it. Yet, the parishes and the dioceses with the priests and bishops that align with your preferences are rarely growing or thriving either. I have a sense that you are a bit of a “smart Alec” – if only… Read more »
Ellie, I think that you have misunderstood the point I was making about the necessity or otherwise of including biographical details of the spouses and children of senior clerical appointments. I do not have the leadership skills to be a senior cleric but that shouldn’t preclude me from holding the archbishops and bishops to account; they applied for these positions after all. Archbishop Welby at a recent media conference conceded that he was accountable for the dramatic loss of membership during his tenure as archbishop.
There are precisely zero dioceses in the Church of England that, viewed overall, are ‘growing or thriving’. The only thing masking catastrophic decline is the occasional thriving parish. This is a far greater problem than one ecclesial style or another. Acknowledging the disaster would be a start.