- Diocese of Winchester
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Diocese of Winchester Location Ecclesiastical province Canterbury Archdeaconries Bournemouth, Winchester Statistics Parishes 306 Churches 410 Information Cathedral Winchester Cathedral Current leadership Bishop Bishop of Winchester (Bishop-designate: Tim Dakin) Suffragans Peter Hancock, Bishop of Basingstoke
Jonathan Frost, Bishop of SouthamptonArchdeacons Michael Harley, Archdeacon of Winchester
Dr Peter Rouch, Archdeacon of BournemouthWebsite winchester.anglican.org The Diocese of Winchester forms part of the Province of Canterbury of the Church of England.
Founded in 676, it is one of the oldest and largest of the dioceses in England.
The area of the diocese incorporates:
- the majority of the county of Hampshire (including the city of Southampton), with the following exceptions:
- the south-eastern quarter of the county (which together with the Isle of Wight constitutes the Diocese of Portsmouth)
- an area in the north-east (belonging to the Diocese of Guildford)
- a small area in the west (Diocese of Salisbury)
- one parish in the north (Diocese of Oxford)
plus
- an area of eastern Dorset
- the Channel Islands (transferred from the diocese of Coutances in 1569, during the reign of King Henry VIII of England)
The diocese is divided into two Archdeaconries:
- the Archdeaconry of Winchester
- comprises the Deaneries of Andover, Whitchurch, Basingstoke, Odiham, Winchester, Alresford and Alton
- the Archdeaconry of Bournemouth
- comprises the Deaneries of Romsey, Eastleigh, Southampton, Lyndhurst, Christchurch and Bournemouth.
The Bishop of Winchester heads the diocese and is assisted by two suffragan bishops, the Bishops of Basingstoke and Southampton, who are responsible as area bishops for the north and south of the diocese respectively (roughly corresponding to the archdeaconries of Winchester and Bournemouth).[1]
The Guernsey and Jersey deaneries are not part of an archdeaconry. Due to their distinctive history and separate civil government, they are not subject to the same methods of governance and systems of canon law as the rest of the Church of England.
The diocese historically covered a much larger area, originally including the greater part of south-eastern England. In the most recent major diocesan boundary changes in 1927, the Archdeaconry of Surrey was removed to form the new Diocese of Guildford, and south-eastern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight to form the Diocese of Portsmouth.
The Bishop of Winchester is ex officio a Lord Spiritual of the Westminster Parliament, one of only five prelates of the Church of England with such automatic entitlement.
The Diocese of Winchester made news in late 2009 after it entered financial difficulty. The diocese faced a £1.4 million shortfall and as a result made multiple clergy redundancies, ceasing to fund their university and college chaplaincies and cutting 15% of the staff at the diocesan offices.
See also
References
External links
Anglican dioceses in the United Kingdom and Ireland 
Church of EnglandBath & Wells • Birmingham • Bristol • Canterbury • Chelmsford • Chichester • Coventry • Derby • Ely • Exeter • Gibraltar in Europe • Gloucester • Guildford • Hereford • Leicester • Lichfield • Lincoln • London • Norwich • Oxford • Peterborough • Portsmouth • Rochester • Saint Albans • Saint Edmundsbury & Ipswich • Salisbury • Southwark • Truro • Winchester • Worcester
Blackburn • Bradford • Carlisle • Chester • Durham • Liverpool • Manchester • Newcastle • Ripon & Leeds • Sheffield • Sodor & Man • Southwell & Nottingham • Wakefield • York
Church in Wales
Scottish Episcopal Church
Church of Ireland
Coordinates: 51°03′39″N 1°18′47″W / 51.0607°N 1.3131°WCategories:- 676 establishments
- Dioceses established in the 7th century
- Diocese of Winchester
- Dioceses of the Church of England
- Anglican diocese stubs
- England stubs
- the majority of the county of Hampshire (including the city of Southampton), with the following exceptions:
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