An appeal was made at the October meeting (and many times subsequently) for donors to the funds who might give a single capital sum or promise an annual subscription. The initial subscription list was short and the sums promised, typically of the diocese, only modest. The donors could indicate which of the three funds they were supporting and it was soon clear that most regarded the Spiritual Aid Fund as the most important. In their first year the Church Extension Society received £742, the Board of Education £597, and the Spiritual Aid Society £3,650, including one donation of £1,000 earmarked for the parish of St Luke’s, Heckmondwike.
In May 1908, the different funds were brought together under the new umbrella of the Wakefield Diocesan Fund and the office of Organizing Secretary was established. A Diocesan Loan Fund was founded in 1911 to further assist church extension.
Wakefield Diocesan Church Organization Society was founded in 1894 as a limited company to hold trusts and land on behalf of the diocese. It became, inter alia, the trustee of parochial property used partly for religious and partly for secular purposes since this could not be vested in the minister and churchwardens but only in an incorporated body.
Bishop How held his first (and apparently only) synod on 29 April 1889. Some 250–300 clergy walked in procession, to the gaze of numerous bystanders, wearing their surplices, college hoods and caps, from the Church Institute in Marygate to the cathedral for a communion service led by How and the two Archdeacons. From the pulpit, How observed that he saw no need for the synod to meet either regularly or frequently. He referred to the importance of the laity in diocesan affairs. He spoke of the necessity, among the clergy, for personal holiness, pastoral activity, and their own daily prayer. He referred to the disputes over ritual then dividing the church, called for tolerance of the different positions and said that ‘there are but few now who rejoice in the spectacle of prosecution of ritual offenders’ although he added that, in his view, ritualism went against the spirit of loyalty to the church.
At the afternoon meeting in the Church Institute, How returned to the matter of the laity and spoke of having decided at the outset of his tenure to set up a Diocesan Conference. The Conference, presided over by the bishop, was to be the principal forum of the diocese and was to have no more than 460 members. Clerical members included the Archdeacons, Rural Deans, Proctors in Convocation, and all beneficed clergy. Unbeneficed clergy who had held the bishop’s licence as priests for two years, were also included. The Diocesan Chancellor and the Registrar were among the lay members, together with one representative from each parish, with a second from parishes with a population of over 4,500. Lay members were to be elected triennially in each parish by male communicants aged over twenty-one. The bishop could himself nominate ten people – clerical or lay – as members. The Conference was to elect a standing committee to be charged with its general business.
The first Conference was held on 22 and 23 October 1889, in the hall of Wakefield Mechanics Institute (popularly known as the Music Saloon although strictly the term applied only to its upper floor hall). The bishop spoke of the Conference aims to make the Church in the diocese as efficient as possible and to raise the ‘lofty standard of religion and of spiritual life among the people’. A committee was appointed to draw up a scheme for the Diocesan Board of Education which would be needed in January 1890 when the new diocese became independent of the Ripon Board.
Throughout the period under consideration and indeed until it was replaced in 1971 by Synodical government, the Conference normally took place annually over two days in October, meeting in various halls and churches across the diocese. It received reports from all diocesan organizations and heard papers on key issues affecting the Church nationally or at diocesan level.
The Conference also passed resolutions on many issues, including pending parliamentary action. Early in its life, for example, there was a special meeting in April 1883 to debate a motion opposing the Welsh Suspensory Bill which was to disestablish the Church in Wales. Education was a major and perennial issue in the first decades of the diocese. In 1908, at the time of an Education Bill aimed at reversing some of the provisions of the 1870 Education Act, the Conference placed on record its ‘deliberate conviction that there is no hope of any arrangement of the Education Question affording any permanent settlement or lasting peace, which does not secure – as far as it is possible to secure it – the opportunity of full church teaching for all children whose parents desire it, given by qualified teachers who are themselves members of the Church’.
From time to time the Conference focused, too, on social questions. The 1907 Conference, for example, heard a paper on housing reform (a matter in which Bishop Eden was especially interested) by Canon Moore Ede of Gateshead, who referred to the value of town planning, to co-operative house building on lines known as Tenants Limited, and to garden cities. In 1923, the Conference focused on birth control and the instruction of the young in the ‘laws’ of sex.
Licensed but unbeneficed priests living at the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield were included in the membership of the Conference. This brought it one of the best minds in the Church at the time, Walter Howard Frere (1863–1938), an outstanding liturgical scholar who had been one of the six original members of the Community and who was the Superior at Mirfield in 1902–13 and 1916–22.
Changes in the diocesan organization reflected those at national level. Prompted, it seems, by the great Pan-Anglican Congress of 1908, the two Archbishops set up a committee to look into the organization and financing of the churches. In the light of the committee’s recommendations, the financial organization of the Wakefield Diocese was reshaped. Canon Richard Phipps, who had come to Wakefield as a curate at the cathedral in 1892, resigned the living of Brighouse in 1912 to become the Wakefield Diocesan Secretary, and, in anticipation of the national scheme, he masterminded a restructuring of the financial organizations of the diocese. Under his guidance, and after agreement at the 1912 Diocesan Conference, the over-arching Wakefield Diocesan Board of Finance was established, to take control from 1 January 1914, of the Wakefield Diocesan Education Society and the Wakefield Diocesan Fund (which held both the Wakefield Church Extension Fund and the Spiritual Aid Fund). From then onwards, the Conference, which was the supreme authority in matters of finance, had responsibility for determining the sum needed each year for diocesan expenditure.
The new scheme set out seven areas of church work and the diocesan bodies which would come under each:
Training for the ministry
Ordination Candidates’ Fund.
Maintenance of the ministry, clerical and lay
The Bishop of Wakefield’s Spiritual Aid Society.
The Wakefield Church Extension Society (object iii).
Provision of pensions for the ministry
The Wakefield Clergy Pensions Fund.
Provision for widows and orphans of the clergy and for necessitous clergy
The West Riding Charitable Society Ripon and Wakefield section.
The Queen Victoria Clergy Fund.
(Neither of these was strictly diocesan but could be used by the Board of Finance as distributing agencies.)
The erection of church buildings
The Wakefield Church Extension Society.
The Wakefield Diocesan Loan Fund.
The Cathedral Sustentation Fund.
Religious education of the young
The Wakefield Diocesan Education Society.
The Diocesan Association of Church Schools.
The Wakefield Diocesan Sunday Schools Association.
Provision for expenses of diocesan and central organizations
General