Wakefield Diocese. Kate Taylor

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Church House

Other Diocesan Organizations

      Bishop How established a Diocesan Lay Readers Association (for men only) in 1889. Anyone with a licence from Ripon would be granted his licence. Others could get one, it was announced, by passing a simple examination on the Bible and the prayer book and by satisfying the bishop as to his moral character and fitness for the office. All Lay Readers would get a licence which would hold good throughout the diocese and, if an incumbent requested it, would also be given a commission to exercise the office in a particular parish. Perhaps it should be noted that, although ‘Reader’ has always been the formal designation, until recent years ‘Lay Reader’ was much more commonly used within the diocese, even in issues of the Diocesan Gazette and the Wakefield Diocesan News. For the sake of consistency, ‘Reader’ has been adopted hereafter.

      The Diocesan Council of Girls’ Friendly Societies was established in 1891 by Edith How, the bishop’s daughter-in-law, who came with her husband to live at Bishopgarth with the widowed bishop.

      A Diocesan Board of Missions was formed in 1905. It was designed to promote the work within the diocese to support missionary work abroad and, to this end, to plan missionary exhibitions and festivals within the diocese.

      The Diocesan Sunday School Teachers’ Association was founded on 27 June 1908, bringing together a number of smaller bodies.

      Bishop Eden formed the Diocesan Board of Readers in 1921. At the time he explained, ‘In the increasing scarcity of clergy, we are convinced that a real call is coming, especially to our educated laymen, for all earnest and sincere church people to take an active part in the evangelistic work of the church.’ The aim of the Board was to raise standards and to arrange and supervise conferences. A first diocesan admission service for Readers was held at the cathedral on 6 May 1922. Sixty-six Readers were admitted into the new office. Each attended in the Chapter House to sign a new roll and make a declaration. They were presented by Archdeacon Harvey as the Warden of Readers. W. H. Coles served as the registrar for the new organization. Bishop Eden said that the service marked an epoch in the long and chequered history of the Readers’ movement which had been revived in the 1870s. Formerly it was only a diocesan office. Now Readers were admitted into a Corporate Body for the whole Church of England.

      In 1930, Bishop Seaton formed a Diocesan Council of Youth.

New Churches, New Mission Rooms and New Parishes

      The fundamental concerns of the diocese in its first fifty years were the provision of further churches to serve a growing population and the clergy to staff them, and the gathering of the flocks to attend them. Pressures for new churches came from the spread of housing into the suburbs, the emergence of council-housing estates, and the development of a new community serving a colliery. The churches might be built for new parishes, or in areas designated as conventional districts which might later become independent parishes, or chapels of ease (consecrated buildings in the same parish as, but at a distance from, a parish church) or as mission churches (licensed for worship but not consecrated). Where there was little hope of finance for a church building, Commissioners looking at the needs of the diocese advocated the opening of mission rooms.

      Not infrequently, new congregations were brought together in these mission rooms, perhaps making use of an existing church school. A temporary mission chapel might follow. As funds slowly accumulated (or if a prosperous benefactor emerged) a permanent church might ensue. The lack of money, in particular, meant that the fulfilment of new-church schemes might take a long time, as much as twenty years or more.

      While the landed classes had been generous in building and endowing churches in the area in the past, the new diocese now enjoyed relatively little of their support. Some still gave sites for new churches (Lord Dartmouth, for example, provided the site for St Andrew’s at Bruntcliffe) but these might come, too, from industrial concerns or from a local authority which had acquired land for housing.

      The process of church building and of establishing new parishes had continued independently of the expectation of a new diocese so that Bishop How’s earliest act of consecration, on 27 May 1889, was of one of the churches planned before the see was created. St Luke’s, Heckmondwike, was on a site given by the Low Moor Iron Company. The parish had been formed in 1878. Services had taken place first at the National School and then in a temporary iron church. Typically for the period the church was designed (by Medland Taylor of Manchester) in a Gothic style, specified at the time as ‘geometrical decorated’. An endowment had been provided by Mrs Woodhead of Moor House.

      Lack of funding meant that a church might be partially completed years before the overall design was accomplished. An example of the not unusual struggle was the forty-year gestation of St Peter’s, Barnsley. Its history went back to 1872 when a schoolroom was built on Doncaster Road as a mission for St Mary’s, Barnsley’s parish church. Two years later a visiting priest conducted a mission in the vicinity which resulted in the drawing together of a congregation. One of St Mary’s curates, John Lloyd Brereton, was given charge. Plans for a church were drawn up by the Hampstead architect Temple Lushington Moore (1856–1920), but fund-raising was dismally slow. By 1883, a large enough endowment had been amassed to provide a stipend of £150 a year and the new parish was formed with Brereton as its first vicar. Three years later, in 1886, a temporary nave was built on the site planned for the church, next to the schoolroom. By 1892, a more extensive and permanent building could be envisaged and the cornerstone was laid in January of that year. At the time, Brereton referred to the ‘slow and uphill struggle’ and observed that when he had first gone there, the local people had little idea of what a church was and thought it was something for the upper classes. In October 1993, Bishop How consecrated the still-temporary nave and the newly added chancel, side aisles and vestries. With the church still unfinished in 1908, a public meeting was held in Barnsley’s Arcade Hall when the Rector of Barnsley, Canon Foxley Norris, said that the parish still had only half a church and no parsonage house and that out of a stipend of £160 the vicar was spending £40–£50 on rented accommodation. A committee was established with representatives from the church councils of each of the Barnsley parishes to remedy the situation. The foundation stone of the new nave was laid on 2 July 1910 and the completed church was consecrated on 14 December 1911.

      Each of Wakefield’s first three bishops set up a Commission of Enquiry into the ‘wants and requirements’ of the diocese, How in January 1889 within a year of his installation, Eden in 1907 when he had already been in the diocese for nine years by which time many of the proposals of How’s Commission had been met, and Seaton in 1929 when, with a somewhat changed brief, the Commission was asked to report on cases where existing churches and mission rooms appeared to be unnecessary.

      How’s Commission included both his archdeacons, all six rural deans, a further member of clergy from each of the deaneries, and a number of lay people. It considered not only the need for more churches but the situation in regard to church schools, and the question of whether there were advowsons which could be transferred to the bishop. Its report, which was published in March 1890, noted that it was always difficult to secure the endowments required for new parishes and that the funds at the disposal of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to contribute to them had been seriously diminished. Hence the Report, published on 5 March 1890, recommended the formation of only a modest number of new parishes. Two further parishes were needed in СКАЧАТЬ