In his first Presidential Address to Diocesan Synod on 16 May 2026, Bishop Rick reflects on the profound changes shaping the world and the Church at this time. With honesty and hope, he encourages us to embrace this new season with deeper humility and boldness in sharing the love of Jesus with our communities.
INTRODUCTION: Thank you
It’s a great pleasure and considerable surprise to me to be speaking to you as Bishop of Durham. This was not my expectation, or my idea!
But I am delighted to be here. In the discernment process for this role our Statement of Needs for the Diocese made it very clear that the Diocese needs the presence, love and encouragement of the next Bishop, in spite of the many other demands that would be made upon them. I will do my best to get that balance right, my friends.
We’re still somewhat in transition, until my installation on 7th June. And I really want to thank +Frank for his amazing support as Acting and now again continuing again as Assistant Bishop. Thank you, Frank. And I want to thank senior colleagues – you know who you all are – for continuing to take an extra load now and as we seek to find a new Archdeacon of Auckland and Bishop of Jarrow.
And I want to say a wider thank you. I have been overwhelmed by the warmth, kindness, support and welcome that have come my way with the announcement of my appointment. Thank you.
ADDRESS: A Vision for healthy growing, churches in our Diocese
1. Introduction
But what might this new Bishop want to say at this time?
I had a chance to think about the challenges that we face last autumn, on my Sabbatical. They are serious: if the hugely valuable worship, witness and service of many of our local churches is going to be sustained in the next generation, we need God by his Holy Spirit to renew us.
I had planned to write on this. My wife jokingly called this “The Career-Ending Book”, because it was going to be honest. But I lost a lot of writing time because of a certain interview process! Instead of a Career-Ending Book I ended up with a book-ending career move!
But I got as far as knowing what the book will say, if I ever finish it. And in ten minutes flat, here’s some of that, because it is about where we are:
2. A moment in history
I find it helps me to try to understand that we are experiencing not something random in the decline and struggles of the Church but a moment in history. It is not random that the Church of England and nearly all Christian denominations across the UK, Europe, and the western world have been seeing deep decline.
It is the out-working of trends in history long in motion. A world which was, for centuries, broadly and mainly Christian, however imperfectly, has been coming to an end – it’s just been taking a very long time.
What do I mean?
Well, 2,000 years in two minutes, here we go:
The faith that began with the resurrection of Christ began as a tiny minority. Often persecuted, knowing that to be converted and baptised into Christ put you at huge risk, nevertheless this faith grew. The love Christians showed, especially to the weakest, even to their persecutors, undermined the Roman world where might alone was right. This quiet, non-violent revolution turned everything upside down until Christianity was embraced as its official religion, and from there became the religion of the whole of Europe, and then later of much of the world.
There were losses and gains in this transition: before, this was a faith you’d only possibly profess, take the risk of being Christian, different from the world around you, if you were convinced it was true or had experienced its benefits personally. But in Christendom it was risky not to be a Christian! That created this frequent occurrence of outward conformity without inner conviction, being officially Christian without knowing the peace, joy and hope of the grace of Christ having worked in your life. It also confused Christianity with secular power, endlessly, which has been hugely damaging.
And yet Christian values shaped the world to a huge extent for the good, better than it would have been otherwise, and Christian churches were planted everywhere. This mass church-planting eventually resulted in the parish system, through which generations of people were raised in the Christian faith. There was no other show in town – or, more often then, the village.
However, for 400 years or so the Christianity of this Christendom world has been giving way to doubt, to the enormous disruption of the Industrial revolution, and the trauma of world wars. For these and other reasons the norm of Christianity has gradually but steadily collapsed. This has taken a long time, but has been finally really been coming home to roost in our time. This is history’s hospital-pass to the church of today.
Some figures illustrate this clearly. One hundred years ago, in the 1920s, 90% of infants were baptised in the 1920s, about 80% of them by the CofE, today fewer than 10% are. In the 20s c. 225,000 CofE confirmations took place annually, in 2024, 11,000 confirmations. Twenty-two times smaller. Even Census data, which records even the most tacit faith, showed in 2021 fewer than 50% even identifying culturally as Christian.
So being Christian is no longer the norm it had been. We don’t easily see this or feel how huge a change it is: there are still church buildings in most villages and on many city streets; most are still open ... but the vast majority of worshippers have gone, so it’s partly an illusion that Christendom remains.
And of course, this is messy because Christianity still has some resonance, sometimes unpredictably strong: for example Christian nationalism easily evokes a Christendom nostalgia, isn’t that complicated?
Brief side-bar on this: large numbers will meet in London today for the Unite the Kingdom rally, and it will be claimed they stand for a Christian nation. Hmmm. We need to be wise about all this. We need to listen to why so many people are angry, using their feet and their votes to protest, while also challenging the often over-simplified stories told about the causes of difficulties in our country.
Now, identity does really matter. However, in Christ, national identity – I am English and British - is put in proper perspective as just one part of who we are – I am most deeply Christ’s, and a member of his church. Tommy Robinson has publicly spoken of coming to Christian faith through the ministry of a prison chaplain so I am praying he grows in that faith, and learns that in Christ all our divisions are less significant than him being a brother of Christians of every nation and race. That’s the deepest source of genuine Christian identity, beyond anything national or tribal. I also suspect Christian nationalism is flawed because it makes the Christendom mistake of seeing a Christian heritage and history, however important they are, as the same as people being genuine disciples now; it presumes people are Christian because they are English. Not any more, no; certainly not in any simple way. But we need to pray for peace in London today.
3. What does this mean for mission – and for becoming a church of missionary disciples?
So we follow Christ at this time when momentous changes, centuries in the making, have finally broken the Christendom norm. We are players on the stage in one scene of a long play, experiencing events that have been building in its previous acts.
One huge implication of this obvious decline is, we know, the basic sustainability of our local churches. When 80, 60 or even 40% of the population were baptised and nurtured as Christians, we actually only needed a small minority of them to retain this faith and stay in church to be the next generation of congregations, givers, church wardens, PCC members, youth workers and clergy. About 10% of people did that in each generation for ages, and that was enough; 10% of 80% of the population – we could run the church on that OK, and we have for decades.
But when the number being baptised is tiny and many of those have very little affiliation with the church, 10% of that is not enough. It’s only enough to sustain a much smaller very of this national church… unless we’re renewed. And at the same time it has been proving very hard to share Christian faith in a nation that thinks it knows what it is and doesn’t want it any more.
I don’t say this to diminish our responsibility to respond. But it helps me to see something of why we are here, to know how to respond.
What then, shall we do? There is no simple fix, but some thoughts:
First, we need to understand that the time when people largely just turned up to become Christians is over. For now. Therefore, churches, and ministers, geared largely for being pastors to a basically Christian population are poorly equipped.
We are instead once again in a time of explicit mission, like the earliest church. So, we need churches of missionary disciples – which just happens to be one of the three national priorities of the CofE – to be able to proclaim the faith afresh in our time.
Second, therefore, we need to nurture and train ministers, lay and ordained, for this missionary situation, who can share faith in a way that is beautiful, compelling, and real for those who do not know Christ is risen. Ministers who can run a group exploring faith with enquirers, reintroduce work with children and young people, and help those in our congregations grow in faith, and help nurture others to become leaders and ministers too.
Annwen will tell you much more about how we are trying to enable these things later this morning.
Is this to abandon pastoral care, presence and social action? No! Because it is Christians filled with the love of Christ for our communities who will hear Christ calling them to be present, to meet needs, to seek reconciliation between tribes in tension. Without new generations of Christians to worship, witness and sustain the local branches of our national church, they can’t continue. So let’s stop, please, seeing a contradiction between evangelism and work for peace and justice: we need Christ to call more people to faith and active discipleship, to join the workforce of those who in his name stand for love, peace, the well-being of our communities, and climate care.
Third, we need to recognise we actually can’t do this. This centuries-in-the-making retreat of Christian faith can’t easily be reversed by us. But God by his Holy Spirit can do it. We need to pray without ceasing, as I do daily, that God will renew his church in this land of Cuthbert and the northern saints. I will soon ask all our churches if they will join me in explicitly praying, every time they meet, for God to lead people to faith in Christ through the worship and witness we offer.
Fourth, let’s see that just as the change from a minority, missionary faith in the early church to the time of Christendom brought both gains and losses, so the end of Christendom brings losses and gains too.
However imperfect the Christianity of previous centuries often was, millions of people in our nation came to a faith in Christ which gave them strength in trials, comfort in sorrow, hope for the future, and a moral vision which shaped our nation. And if this is largely gone, and it is, the loss is huge.
But there are gains:
And as we come to a time when few profess to be Christian any more unless it is real for them, we have the chance to show the difference Christ makes. It’s hard to do that when everyone is a bit Christian-ish. But in this world now facing many fears, wherever hope in Christ is real, the difference the good news makes is visible again.
To do that, to become a church of missionary disciples, we need now to learn more deeply who we are, grow in our discipleship and our ability to live and share a life-giving faith. We will bless the world most by knowing we have something distinct and wonderful, by the grace of God, to offer it. And through that we have the chance that a renewed version of this national church, present in every parish place, both deeply local and humbly Godly, can be born.
We can also I hope realise it is good to stop confusing Christian faith with power and control, because we often handle power so badly. Maintaining a Christian voice in this country with its deeply Christian foundations is a good thing. But we are not in charge.
Thank goodness it’s many years since a Bishop of Durham was a Prince-Bishop, confusing the charge to feed the flock and preach the good news with wielding secular authority, often clumsily. This has at times damaged the the Church’s witness in the north-east: the church has been unpopular.
Learning a new humility as Christians also means, I hope, we can truly acknowledge failures by the church, especially where people have abused positions in the church to harm others. I hope a church conscious of how we handle power, and more humble, will be a safer place for all, especially victims and survivors. We do and we must continue to work at this.
And with this we have the opportunity to learn a new voice, a different tone: speaking as if everyone still is or should be Christian is easily patronising, while speaking as if we have nothing unique to share is to lose our calling. Being both humbler and bolder are curiously possible post-Christendom.
Fifth, sixth and seventh ... I haven’t got time! There too many implications of all this for mission in our diocese than I can speak about now.
But of course, starting from here, working with the parish system we have inherited, how we can enable churches within to be healthy and growing, and making the best use of the ministers we do have to do that – wow, this is hard, really hard. We will at times get upset with each other as we keep trying to work out what these immense challenges mean, because changes will keep coming. This is hard. So let’s try to love one another through these decisions we all wish were easier.
But I am realistic about all this, and I am delighted to be with you as your Bishop in them, and I am hopeful: we follow Christ in this messy, difficult, confused time, at the hinge between Christendom and something new that’s coming. But Christ is risen, and if we again and again prioritise the choices that can move us towards being a church of missionary disciples, well, let’s see together what God might do among us and through us.
Come, Holy Spirit.
Come, Holy Spirit.