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Diocese of Perth
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MISSION STATEMENT
The mission of the church is:
· to proclaim the good news of the kingdom
· to teach, baptise and nurture new believers
· to respond to human need by loving service
· to seek to transform unjust structures of society
· to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and to sustain and renew the life of the earth
WHAT IS THE ANGLICAN CHURCH?
The Anglican Church is a Church that is both Catholic and Reformed. This means that it is equally a Church that has inherited an ancient faith from the earliest days of the Church as this was developed since the first Christian century after Jesus Christ; and it is also a Church whose faith and practice were reformed in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. This combination of catholic and protestant is unusual. It was more common for the Christian Churches who owe their historic inheritance to Western Europe to keep these two traditions apart. So there are numerous Churches who would see themselves as Protestant, in that they owe their origins and beliefs to one of the Protestant reformers or groups of the Reformation. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church consciously sees itself as totally Catholic, owing no influence or inheritance to the Protestant Reformation which it opposed, just as the Protestant Reformers opposed the Catholic Church.
But the Church of England, which is the Church all other Anglican Churches derive from, was different. It held together what other Churches divided. More and more explicitly after the sixteenth century the Church of England affirmed itself to be both Catholic and Protestant. That is, saw itself as basically a Church holding the Catholic Faith, but which underwent necessary reformation in the sixteenth century. In this Anglican understanding, the Protestant Reformation of the Church of England enabled that Church to hold more purely aspects of the Catholic Faith that had become corrupt or blurred over the preceding centuries.
So the Church of England persisted with a liturgical worship in its Book of Common Prayer; liturgical worship that had had been the Catholic custom for most of the Christian centuries since Jesus Christ. It also persisted with a Catholic form of church government by bishops. It upheld beliefs such as baptismal regeneration, sacramental grace, and grace given to its ordained ministers that were traditional Catholic doctrines. But it also produced a confession of faith (the Thirty-Nine Articles), which was customary of Protestant Churches; though Articles themselves were themselves a mixture of Catholic and Protestant beliefs. Like other Protestant Churches it required the Bible to be read in the local language in both church and in private, and maintained that no belief was necessary for salvation that could not be proved out of the Bible.
This odd mixture of Catholic and Protestant in the Church of England was largely an historical accident because the kings and queens of England, who imposed the Protestant reformation upon their Church and people, wanted to make sure the Church of England was acceptable to as many of the English as possible. So they deliberately produced a rather ambiguous church. For this policy they were criticized by both sides in the sixteenth century. The Protestants thought the Church of England wasn’t Protestant enough; the Catholics thought it was too Protestant. But over the centuries many Anglicans have come to delight in the unique nature of a Church that has both traditions in it, and believe that holding both together has given them a rather unique Church.
But, it has to be said, some Anglicans, like the Protestants and Catholics of the sixteenth century, have not been pleased with a Church that is both Catholic and Reformed and would rather it was one or the other.
WHAT ANGLICANS BELIEVE
So what Anglicans believe can seem to observers as a messy business, because some Anglicans believe their Church to be Protestant and so emphasize only these beliefs of the Church. Others believe their Church to be Catholic and only uphold those doctrines. However, there are very fundamental Christian beliefs that Anglicans believe.
- Anglicans believe that no belief is required of a Christian but what can be proved out of the Bible. While Anglicans are free to believe more than this if their conscience prompts them otherwise, this is the basic criteria for the beliefs required by the Church of her members. It also means that all Anglicans hold to the basics of traditional Christian faith.
- Anglicans believe in the One and the Only God, the Creator of all that is, revealed himself to the Jewish people as witnessed to in the Hebrew Bible or what Christians call the Old Testament, which is the first and largest section of the Christian Bible.
- Anglicans believe that this same God, because he loves us and all God’s creation, perfectly became a human being in his eternal Son who became the man Jesus of Nazareth who lived as one of us in first-century Palestine, suffered and died at the hands of the Romans and rose again to a new and spiritual life three days after his death. This was the plan of the One God that we might know God perfectly in our own terms, and by entering completely into human life, including our weaknesses, sin, and death, gives us the power to transcend them in a new life of following the way of Jesus.
- Anglicans believe that this same God continues the power and life of his Son, Jesus, continues to be available to Jesus’ followers and in the Church through the indwelling Holy Spirit.
- So Anglicans believe the One God is a Trinity of Divine Persons, or God the Holy Trinity.
- Anglicans believe that those who follow Jesus will, like him, through God’s power, love and grace, also rise again to a new and eternal life, but that new life also begins in the here and now as Jesus’ Spirit gives new life to his followers to live meaningfully and lovingly in the world we know now.
- Anglicans believe in the fundamental importance for living the Christian life of the fellowship of all Christians known as the Church. No one can be a Christian on their own, we all need the help and encouragement and experience of other faithful people on our life’s journey. The Christian community, they believed, is a holy fellowship called into existence of Jesus Christ and incorporates all Christians, both those living today and those who have died in what is known as ‘the Communion of Saints’.
These beliefs are summarized in an ancient Christian profession of faith known as The Apostles Creed:
I believe in one God, the Father almighty
Creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, died, and was buried;
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
Her ascended into heaven,
He is seated at the right hand of the Father,
And he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
The holy catholic Church,
The communion of saints,
The forgiveness of sins,
The resurrection of the body,
And the life everlasting. Amen
WHAT MAKES ANGLICANS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER CHRISTIANS?
Anglicans have a unique Christian culture as a result of having a contested identity. Reforming a medieval church to be inclusive of both Catholics and protestants probably made it inevitable there would be an internal struggle over it’s identity – was it a Catholic Church or was it a Protestant one? In each of the centuries from the sixteenth to our present one, Anglicans have struggled with each other over this matter of their identity. As a consequence of that internal division there has emerged a distinctive Anglican identity – of a Christian Church that is both Catholic and Protestant and which gives its members a wide latitude of belief as a consequence. It is not that Anglicans belief very little. As pointed out above they hold very firmly to the central beliefs of traditional Catholic Christianity, but that beyond those core beliefs they maintain Anglican Christians are free to hold to a more Protestant or a more Catholic position.
ANGLICAN HISTORY IN AUSTRALIA
A moral policeman
In 1788 the Church of England arrived in the new colony of New South Wales as a component of the penal settlement which was the first colonial settlement by a European power on the newly discovered continent. To begin with the clergymen were military chaplains. Their official standing meant that for the first decades of British settlement in Australia Anglicanism enjoyed a state-backed monopoly. This identification between the Church of England and the state, customary in England at the time, solidified in the 1790s when chaplain Samuel Marsden accepted Governor Hunter’s appointment as a magistrate. It was a sign that the Church of England was assuming the role of moral policeman over colonists’ and convicts' behaviour. The end to the Church of England’s quasi-establishment came in 1836 with the Church Act of Governor Richard Bourke when state-aid for all the Churches in New South Wales was instituted on an equitable basis.
Anglican sectarianism
Anglican antagonism towards Roman Catholicism was a feature of the nineteenth century. Anglican anti-Catholicism coupled with British anti-Irishness to become a virulent sectarianism over the past two centuries. Protestant-Catholic sectarianism came to a head in the next century when the Catholic Church, led by Archbishop Daniel Mannix of Melbourne, opposed conscription during World War One. Placing the best interests of the British Empire and of God on equal footing, the Church of England enlisted in the government’s cause of conscription against the devilish Catholic opposition. The subsequent defeat of conscription in a referendum in October 1916 revealed that Australian sympathies were narrowly in accord with the Catholic stand. By the end of the war, with its horrors increasingly apparent, Anglican clergy were belatedly examining their unquestioning support for the government and the war. Slowly there began to emerge a more critical attitude towards the state and established society that was new for Australian Anglicanism. Yet support for established authority had so long been a characteristic of Anglicanism since the sixteenth century that it was not going to be jettisoned easily. This was particularly apparent regarding the Church’s mission to the Aborigines.
A white Church
The brief of the original chaplain to the penal colony in New South Wales, Richard Johnson, included a mission to Aborigines. But Johnson soon gave this up because Aborigines did not seem interested concerned about Christianity. Later attempts to convert the original inhabitants of the land to Christianity were invariably associated with attempts to introduce them to a European lifestyle of settled agriculture and British customs. Missionaries did, however, stand against the prevailing designation of Aborigines as sub-human. They generally maintained the essential humanity of the Aborigine who, having a soul like all humans, was therefore capable of salvation.
In Western Australia early Aboriginal resistance led to a punitive military raid at Pinjarra in 1834, just a few years after the commencement of the Swan River colony in 1829. One of the Anglican stalwarts of the struggling colony, John Septimus Roe, accompanied the expedition in his capacity as surveyor-general, which of course gave him a vested interest in land acquisition. The missionaries’ failure to understand Aboriginal culture on its own terms, the missions’ alliance with white settlement, and the association of Christianity with British culture all led to repeated failures of Christian missions to the Aborigines. However, one Anglican missionary dared to be different and consequently incurred the wrath of settler society and of Anglican authority.
The Reverend John Brown Gribble was appointed to the area around the frontier pastoral settlement of Carnarvon in Western Australia in 1885 by the Church of England Diocesan Missions’ Committee as evangelist to the Aborigines. Gribble was an untactful and sometimes hotheaded man, but he had a passionate concern for justice for the Aborigines against what he regarded as ‘unprincipled’ white men. In Carnarvon he encountered a pastoral system that, with its dependence on black labour, had reduced Aborigines to virtual slave-labour with brutal penalties for dissent. Gribble soon found himself in confrontation with the pastoralists and white townsfolk who, with a few exceptions, pressured the diocese for his withdrawal. The furore soon spread to Perth where Gribble found that white society and the Church’s missions’ committee had turned against him. The support of Bishop Henry Parry was not enough to override the prejudices of the colonists. Gribble had to acknowledge defeat by the pastoral and Anglican establishment of the colony. He left Western Australia an impoverished and angry man. He never recovered from his defeat. Despite going on to work in the Yarrabah mission in Queensland he died a few months later in 1893.
A cautiously critical Church
A socially just Anglicanism was not apparent in its nineteenth-century missions to Aborigines. Yet a greater social awareness can be seen in the responses of the Church and clergy to the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Generally, the Church of England’s devoted its energies to maintaining its institutional life as the best way to provide the resources for relief of people’s needs. Analysis of the Depression by church leaders tended to be long on moralistic solutions, but short on the social or structural change needed to redress the effects of the world-wide Depression, exacerbated by a government committed to non-intervention. Yet there were a few indications of a more critical engagement with the deprivation. By 1932 Archbishop Henry Le Fanu of Perth had begun to criticise the Church for not doing more to assist the unemployed. At the local level some Anglicans adopted a more challenging response as the Depression lengthened. In Collie, a coal-mining town with a reputation of religious disinterest, there was acute unemployment to which the town’s churches responded at first by simple alleviation. But as the distress continued ministers, including the Anglican priest, began to publicly call for a more equitable society.
The effect of the Depression in producing a cautiously critical Anglicanism reached a climax in the election of Ernest Burgmann as bishop of Canberra and Goulburn in 1934. Burgmann’s theological outlook had been formed by his working-class background, his lively intellectual curiosity, and an experience of people’s hardship and distress during the Depression when he was warden of St John’s Theological College, Morpeth, near Newcastle. Burgmann was a rather startling departure from the more conservative figures that had generally comprised the Anglican episcopate until then. He came to believe that western society was in crisis after the turmoils of war, class division, secularism, and social and economic inequality. He also believed that Christianity had a unique contribution to make in facilitating the more equitable Australian society that he believed was required in order to address this crisis. Burgmann was highly critical of any Church, his own included, which simply accepted social injustices:
Churches are always a great danger to religion. They get interested in themselves, in their own aggrandisement and power, in countless things that keep them too busy to live close to the life of the people. Churchmen get interested in a world beyond this world. largely to escape the trouble of setting right the wrongs that afflict the human race. [Peter Hempenstall, The Meddlesome Priest: A Life of Ernest Burgmann (1993), 251]
He wanted his own Church to become Australian. In other words the Church of England in Australia should be less and less a Church of the English in Australia. The Depression had awakened Burgmann and just a few other Anglicans, such as the Anglo-catholic Canon Farnham Maynard in Melbourne, to the social and political dimensions of the ethical claims of Christianity.
A divided Church.
During the 1930s divisions within the Church of England in Australia reached a new high (or rather low) of acrimony in the perennial tensions between the conservative evangelicals of Sydney and the anglo-catholicism that predominated in a number of country dioceses. This division was inherent in the nature of Australian Anglicanism that gave individual dioceses autonomy over large areas of church life.
Sydney had long been distinctive in its particular form of evangelicalism. Its original bishop, William Broughton, was a high churchman influenced by Tractarianism. His successor, Frederic Barker, was an evangelical and was bishop of Sydney for a quarter of a century and he promoted the spread of a thoroughly Anglican evangelicalism in his diocese. However, numbers of the clergy who arrived in the diocese were from Northern Ireland, bringing their brand of militantly Protestant Anglicanism with them. The foundation of Moore College in 1856 gradually gave the diocese an evangelical theological college for its future clergy that turned Sydney into a closed system. Its evangelicalism steadily became unique in the Anglican Communion, assisted by its great wealth which enabled it be virtually autonomous among the Australian dioceses, and by a succession of Moore College wardens who formed clergy according to the lights of Irish Protestantism. Periodic injections of Northern Irish blood among the diocesan clergy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries kept Sydney in the same mould.
In the same way, a virile anglo-catholicism was being imported into other Australian dioceses. This was hardly surprising given that Australian Anglicanism continued to import its leading clergy from England where evangelicalism and anglo-catholicism were predominant. It was clergy from these parties who were adventurous enough, or frustrated enough through lack of preferment, to risk going to the colonies. Eventually these two Anglicanisms would clash in Australia, in the same way as they had confronted each other in England, in the civil courts. There had been a number of skirmishes by the mid-twentieth century but it came to a head over the Red Book Case in the 1940s. Sydney Evangelicals challenged in the courts in 1944, the ritual recommendations made by the Bishop of Bathurst to priest in his diocese. The case brought to a climax the mutual antagonism between Sydney and the anglo-catholic dioceses of New South Wales. It entrenched for decades the divisiveness between the high and low traditions of Australian Anglicanism and contributed to the polarisation that was seen in the belligerence of Sydney towards the diocese of Perth when its archbishop, Peter Carnley, unilaterally ordained women to the priesthood in 1991 without waiting for a final decision on the issue by the General Synod.
Anglican diocesanism
This wide variety of church life in the dioceses within Australia was a consequence of the pattern of colonial settlement in the country. Various colonies were independently established throughout Australia during the nineteenth century and these (the forerunners of the modern states) were legally independent until the formation in 1901 of the Commonwealth of Australia as a national federation of states. Just as the passengers travelling by rail had to repeatedly change trains when they crossed state borders because of the differing gauges of track in separate states, so a variety of Anglicanisms existed among the dioceses of the historic colonies. These jealously guarded their independence. This diocesanism in which the dioceses had a remarkable degree of autonomy was enshrined in the constitution of the Church of England in Australia that finally brought the suspicious dioceses together nationally in 1962. The only way of bringing such argumentative Anglicans together in this sort of partnership was to maintain their historic diocesan autonomy. The constitution ultimately ceded to the dioceses an ultimate veto over most things not contained in its fundamental declarations. It enabled the diocese of Sydney to outlaw the chasuble as a eucharistic vestment, and at least one diocese to unofficially to allow the liturgical use of the Roman missal! So domestically the Anglican Church in Australia was a microcosm (if such a term can be used of a continent) of the often contradictory Anglicanisms available throughout the Anglican Communion.
A marginal Church
After the Second World War the Church of England in Australia settled down to making its presence felt in the expanding suburbs of the cities. It was becoming, like most of Australian society, a Church of the suburbs rather than the bush. The extensive programme of parish development in these new suburbs was prompted by an awareness that by 1945 the Churches had become increasingly marginalised in Australian society. Anglican leaders were also anxious about the changing nature of immigration into Australia. British dominance was being eroded by increasing numbers of Orthodox and non-Irish Catholic immigrants. To a Church whose culture was still very much that of the English at prayer this was a threat to its traditional first-place in Australia. Nevertheless the 1950s were a time of renewed optimism for most of the Australian Churches, the Anglican Church included. The ‘baby-boom’ era provided them all with growth that supported their traditional family-based values in the face of perceived threats such as materialism or the atheism of Communism. But the ‘permissive culture’ of the 1960s came as a rude shock to the Churches because it suggested that most Australians were not after all as deeply religious as the church growth of the 1950s had suggested.
So the marginalisation apparent to the Churches in 1945 continued after all, and it still does. Since the war the Anglican Church, like other Australian Churches, has been searching for the key to its relevance in Australian society that would give it the means to return to the centre of Australian life. Anglican willingness (or reluctant consent) about liturgical change and two completely new prayerbooks, coupled with cooperation with other Churches as a consequence of the Ecumenical Movement have been two major outcomes of this search for an Australian identity. But an independent Australian Anglicanism perhaps has yet to materialise in any self-confident form out of its colonial political and cultural past.
SYNOD
Synod exists to provide for the regulation of the Church. Each Synod is for three years with annual session and normally meets in October of each year. Its purpose is to:
· Implement and/or amend legislation for the Diocese
· Review work of the Diocese
· Discuss matters of concern to both Church and community
· Conduct elections for various Diocesan bodies and committees
· Consider General Synod legislation
Synod Members
· All Bishops and licensed clergy of the Diocese
· Designated office holders – Chancellor, Registrar, Trustees
· Representatives of bodies reporting to Synod
· Ten lay members appointed by Archbishop in Council
· Two lay members from each ecclesiastical district
Each ecclesiastical district (i.e. Parish) is required to appoint two Synod representatives plus two alternates. In the event that the elected Synod person is unable to attend Synod, the designated alternate person attends on their behalf. Parish Council elects their Synod lay and lay alternate members at the AGM held during May or during the first two weeks of June. Synod representatives are elected for a 3 years term and are only replaced in the event that a Synod member leaves the Parish, dies or resigns for personal reasons. Members are elected at the AGM in the year of the first Session of a new cycle of Synod.
DIOCESAN COUNCIL
By virtue of the Diocesan Council Statute 1888-2002, Diocesan Council is the Standing Committee of Synod and when Synod is not in session acts for and on behalf of Synod in all matters appertaining to the "temporal affairs" of the Church in the Diocese. In this context, "temporal affairs" includes the fixing of clergy stipends and allowances, arrangements for clergy housing and office accommodation, and generally, all pecuniary arrangements relating to parochial and non-parochial clergy.
Council is also responsible for:
· setting conditions of employment relating to lay employees engaged in departments funded by council;
· policy matters relating to parish buildings;
· strategies for funding parochial outreach and parish development;
· training of clergy and their deployment;
· provisions of the Statutes and resolutions of Synod;
· the arrangements of Synod and the transaction of all business rising out of the decisions of Synod.
Diocesan Council usually meets on the second Thursday of each month but does not meet in January or in the month Synod is held.
THE PERTH DIOCESAN TRUSTEES
The Perth Diocesan Trustees is a body corporate incorporated under the Anglican Church of Australia (Diocesan Trustees) Act 1888. The Trustees are also governed by The Diocesan Trustees' Statute 1952-1990 which (amongst other things) regulates the operation and method of election of the Trustees. The Trustees comprise the Archbishop ex officio, two clerical and two lay Trustees nominated by the Diocesan Council and six lay Trustees elected by Synod. The Trustees elect their own Chairman, select a Treasurer from amongst their number and appoint a Secretary who is also the Chief Executive Officer/Diocesan Secretary.
The responsibilities of the Trustees include the duties to:
· hold as registered proprietor all real estate beneficially owned by the diocese, parishes or any trust of which the Trustees act as trustee;
· administer trusts such as the Cathedral Square Foundation, Bishop Hale's Trusts and the H1 and H7 Trust on behalf of the respective beneficiaries of those trusts;
· enter into, enforce and comply with all legal agreements and contracts on behalf of the diocese and its parishes, organisations and institutions which are not separately incorporated;
· act as the designated employer of people employed by the diocese and its parishes, organisations and institutions which are not separately incorporated;
· invest on behalf of any trust of which it acts as trustee, any monies or property forming part of that trust;
· purchase, develop and sell any real estate such as parish and church sites or a trust of which it acts as trustee.
The Trustees are analogous to a board of directors of a company with the members of Synod being the "shareholders" of that company. The Trustees are subject to the same legal duties, liabilities and obligations to both the diocese and the beneficiaries of the trusts which they administer as a board of directors of a company owe to the company's shareholders.
The Perth Diocesan Trustees meet on the third Thursday in each month but does not meet in January or in the month Synod is held.
ARCHDEACONRIES, DEANERIES AND ALLIED MINISTRIES
EPISCOPAL OVERSIGHT
The Cathedral as the Mother Church of the Diocese belongs to all
Archbishop: The Most Reverend Roger Herft
Archdeaconry: Mission and Evangelism
Archdeacon: The Venerable Kanishka Raffel
Archdeaconry: Allied Ministries/Deacons
Archdeacon: The Venerable Canon Theresa Harvey
Allied Anglican Ministries: All Saints’ College, Anglican Church Office, Anglican Homes, Anglican Men’s Society, Anglicare, ADF, Bentley Hospital, Christ Church Grammar School, Cursillo, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Fremantle Hospital, Guildford Grammar School, Hale School, Health & Aged Care Service Avon, Hospice, Hollywood Private Hospital, Hospice, John Septimus Roe ACS, John Wollaston ACS, KEMH, Meath, Missions to Seafarers (Flying Angel Club), MU, Mount Hospital, Murdoch University, Osborne Park Hospital, Parkerville, Perth College, Peter Carnley ACS, Peter Moyes ACS, PMH, Prisons, Psychiatric Services, RPH, RPH – Shenton Park, St Anne’s Hospital, St Bartholomew’s House, St George’s College, SJOG Murdoch, SJOG Subiaco, St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls, St Mark’s ACS, St Mary’s Anglican Girls’ School, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Swanleigh Residential College, Swan Valley ACS, Youth & Children’s Ministries, WA Police
Assistant Bishop: The Right Reverend Brian Kyme
Archdeaconry: Fremantle (Cockburn & Melville Deaneries)
Archdeacon: The Venerable Don Fimognari
Cockburn Deanery (11): Atwell-Success, Beaconsfield, Fremantle, Kwinana, Hilton, Lakelands, Murdoch-Winthrop, Rockingham-Safety Bay, Spearwood, Warnbro, Willagee-Kardinya
Melville Deanery (8): Applecross, Bicton-Attadale, Bull Creek-Leeming, Lynwood-Langford- Ferndale, Melville, Mt Pleasant, Riverton, Willetton
Archdeaconry: Victoria Park (Victoria Park & Perth Deaneries)
Archdeacon: The Venerable Angela Webb
Victoria Park Deanery (7): Belmont, Carlisle-Rivervale, Como-Manning, East Victoria Park-Bentley, Kensington, South Perth, Victoria Park
Oversight: The Venerable Kay Goldsworthy
Archdeacon: The Venerable Angela Webb
Perth Deanery (12): Bayswater, Cathedral, East Perth, Floreat Park, Highgate, Leederville, Maylands, Mt Lawley, North Perth, Shenton Park, Subiaco, University of Western Australia, West Perth
Assistant Bishop: The Right Reverend Dr Mark Burton
Archdeaconry: Stirling (Coastal, Claremont & Gnangara Deaneries)
Archdeacon: The Venerable Terry McAuliffe
Coastal Deanery (7): Carine-Duncraig, City Beach, Karrinyup, North Beach, Scarborough, Wembley, Woodlands-Wembley Downs
Claremont Deanery (7): Claremont, Cottesloe, Dalkeith, Mosman Park, Swanbourne-Mt Claremont, Nedlands, West Nedlands
Gnangara Deanery (6): Balcatta-Hamersley, Dianella, Greenwood, Morley-Noranda, Mt Hawthorn-Osborne Park, Yokine
Archdeaconry: Joondalup (Joondalup & Mirrabooka Deaneries)
Archdeacon: The Venerable Trevor Burt
Joondalup Deanery (8): Heathridge, Joondalup, Kallaroo, Kingsley North-Woodvale, Quinns-Butler, Wanneroo, Whitfords, Yanchep
Mirrabooka Deanery (4): Balga-Girrawheen, Ballajura, Beechboro, Mirrabooka-Nollamara
Assistant Bishop: The Right Reverend tom Wilmot
Archdeaconry: Avon (Avon & Moore Deaneries)
Archdeacon: The Venerable Dr Ric Barrett-Lennard
Avon Deanery (7): Beverley-Brookton, East Avon, Gingin-Chittering, Northam, Toodyay-Goomalling, Quairading, York
Moore Deanery (5): Moora, Morawa-Perenjori, North Midlands, Turquoise Coast, Wongan Hills-Dalwallinu
Archdeaconry: Goldfields (Kalgoorlie & Eastern Deaneries)
Archdeacon: The Venerable Paul Cannon
Kalgoorlie Deanery (2): Esperance, Eastern Goldfields
Eastern Deanery (7): Bruce Rock, Kellerberrin, Narembeen, Merredin, Mukinbudin-Mt Marshall, Southern Cross-Westonia, Wyalkatchem-Koorda-Dowerin
Archdeaconry: Swan (Swan & Armadale Deaneries)
Archdeacon: The Venerable David Bradbury
Swan Deanery (12): Bassendean, Bellevue-Darlington, Ellenbrook, Forrestfield, Guildford, High Wycombe, Kalamunda, Lesmurdie, Lockridge-Eden Hill, Midland, Mundaring, Swan
Armadale Deanery (9): Armadale, Canning, Gosnells, Kelmscott, Maddington, Roleystone, Serpentine-Jarrahdale, Thornlie-Kenwick-Huntingdale, Westfield
PARISHES
Most people encounter the Anglican Church through their neighbourhood church or parish. A parish is the local official gathering of the Anglican church, which has its own local administration and is defined by a geographical area or locality. There are over one hundred parishes in the Diocese of Perth which are located throughout the Perth metropolitan area and the rural and regional areas south of Dongara, north of Mandurah and east to Kalgoorlie, Esperance and the South Australian border.
Responsibility for local decision making by a parish is taken by the Parish Council. The Priest (also called Rector) serving in the parish usually acts as the Chairperson. The Parish Council are elected from the members or parishioners at the annual meeting of the parish. They discuss and make decisions on budgets, building maintenance, local ministry needs and priorities. In consultation with parishioners they will usually look after and coordinate the parish’s approach to ministry, worship, pastoral care, outreach and commitment to overseas mission work.
Contact your local parish if you are looking for somewhere to worship or require information about baptism, confirmation, weddings or funerals.