on Friday, 3 May 2024 at 9.18 am by Peter Owen
categorised as Church of England, News
The Rt Revd John Inge, the Bishop of Worcester since 2008, has announced that he will retire on 9 October 2024. Details are on the diocesan website.
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Clifford Jones
2 months ago
A warm and moving announcement of the retirement on the diocesan website.
Kate Keates
2 months ago
I follow John on X. Nice chap. I wish him well.
Michael Hopkins
2 months ago
I’m a great admirer of his, even more so since he conferred my doctorate at Lambeth, under delegation from ++Cantuar. He’ll be much missed, and i wish him a long and happy retirement.
Looking forward to the election of a Regional Bishop of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, in due course … courtesy of a governance review by the Dioceses Commission
Funny county Worcestershire – the north end has got far more in common with Birmingham and the Black Country than it has with the West Country. And when local government merged Herefordshire and Worcestershire in 1973 it just led to 20-odd years of unhappy marriage and near permanent agitation from both sides to have nothing to do with the other*. Worcestershire and Herefordshire get on far better as neighbours than they ever did as relatives.
*IIRC Herefordshire resented being treated as the poor relation, and Worcestershire disliked union with a poor relation!
My father (a surveyor with Worcestershire CC at the time) said that if whoever thought the merger was a good idea had stood on the top of the Malvern Hills, looked to the east then to the west, they would have seen two very different counties. Shades of parish reorganisations done off an archdeacon’s map.
The three dioceses (Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester) have a combined population of 1.92million (https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/statisticsformission2022.pdf). That’s still fewer than in 8 of the 44 CofE dioceses (Chelmsford, Lichfield, London, Manchester, Oxford, St Albans, Southwark and Leeds). The stats also show that the usual Sunday Attendance across England has declined by a third over 13 years, from 824,000 in 2009 to 557,000 in 2022, while the number of diocesan bishops has been painfully reduced by two, from 46 to 44 (less than 5%). Retirements make ‘efficiency gains’ easier to achieve with less pain. Why is the Dioceses Commission not commissioned to undertake… Read more »
A diocese needs to be a reasonable geographical size. It is the suffragans that should be cut esp with fewer confirmations.
Jane Charman
2 months ago
I first met Bishop John when he arrived as Residentiary Canon of Ely Cathedral in the 1990s. I know him to be a person of integrity who ‘walks his talk’, including standing with characteristic gentle firmness against the tide of managerialism that has swept away some of the foundations of the Church of England, and a number of less principled bishops with it. He has considerable theological credibility and his book, A Christian Theology of Place, was a timely contribution to discussions about the enduring significance of parishes and their churches. Sadness and loss in his personal life have not… Read more »
I appreciate this comment about John Inge’s stance on managerialism. It must have been hard for him and other bishops who share that conviction to bear with the managerialism that has emerged during Justin Welby’s tenure. There is a lot of work for the next Archbishop of Canterbury to do to reset the culture within some of the central institutions. If General Synod wasn’t so engulfed and exhausted by battling with LLF/PLF and safeguarding issues it might have been able to push back against the creeping centralisation which has developed while they were busy. From the outside it seems that… Read more »
A warm and moving announcement of the retirement on the diocesan website.
I follow John on X. Nice chap. I wish him well.
I’m a great admirer of his, even more so since he conferred my doctorate at Lambeth, under delegation from ++Cantuar. He’ll be much missed, and i wish him a long and happy retirement.
I see that that was in 2021.
Looking forward to the election of a Regional Bishop of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, in due course … courtesy of a governance review by the Dioceses Commission
Funny county Worcestershire – the north end has got far more in common with Birmingham and the Black Country than it has with the West Country. And when local government merged Herefordshire and Worcestershire in 1973 it just led to 20-odd years of unhappy marriage and near permanent agitation from both sides to have nothing to do with the other*. Worcestershire and Herefordshire get on far better as neighbours than they ever did as relatives.
*IIRC Herefordshire resented being treated as the poor relation, and Worcestershire disliked union with a poor relation!
My father (a surveyor with Worcestershire CC at the time) said that if whoever thought the merger was a good idea had stood on the top of the Malvern Hills, looked to the east then to the west, they would have seen two very different counties. Shades of parish reorganisations done off an archdeacon’s map.
The three dioceses (Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester) have a combined population of 1.92million (https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-11/statisticsformission2022.pdf). That’s still fewer than in 8 of the 44 CofE dioceses (Chelmsford, Lichfield, London, Manchester, Oxford, St Albans, Southwark and Leeds). The stats also show that the usual Sunday Attendance across England has declined by a third over 13 years, from 824,000 in 2009 to 557,000 in 2022, while the number of diocesan bishops has been painfully reduced by two, from 46 to 44 (less than 5%). Retirements make ‘efficiency gains’ easier to achieve with less pain. Why is the Dioceses Commission not commissioned to undertake… Read more »
A diocese needs to be a reasonable geographical size. It is the suffragans that should be cut esp with fewer confirmations.
I first met Bishop John when he arrived as Residentiary Canon of Ely Cathedral in the 1990s. I know him to be a person of integrity who ‘walks his talk’, including standing with characteristic gentle firmness against the tide of managerialism that has swept away some of the foundations of the Church of England, and a number of less principled bishops with it. He has considerable theological credibility and his book, A Christian Theology of Place, was a timely contribution to discussions about the enduring significance of parishes and their churches. Sadness and loss in his personal life have not… Read more »
I appreciate this comment about John Inge’s stance on managerialism. It must have been hard for him and other bishops who share that conviction to bear with the managerialism that has emerged during Justin Welby’s tenure. There is a lot of work for the next Archbishop of Canterbury to do to reset the culture within some of the central institutions. If General Synod wasn’t so engulfed and exhausted by battling with LLF/PLF and safeguarding issues it might have been able to push back against the creeping centralisation which has developed while they were busy. From the outside it seems that… Read more »