The Government must work with farmers to encourage good trade deals that preserve UK export standards, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

Archbishop Welby was delivering the annual Henry Plumb Lecture to the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) on Monday night. The NFU represents 48,000 farming businesses around the country.

“In a post-Brexit era, a time of such globalisation, our farming communities can lead the way on food standards, animal welfare, trade and exports that make people’s lives better and more prosperous around the world,” he said.

Since Britain had left the European Union and its trade deals, the farming community had a unique opportunity to be at the heart of building and rebuilding relationships abroad. “Making the most of the overseas market post-Brexit is crucial. We need to get our trade deals right to protect the world-class British standards of farming — bad deals risk exporting environmental and animal-welfare harms and destroying farmers’ livelihoods.

“Government needs to partner with farmers to build global ambition and increase the British food brand identity across the world to grow global markets.”

He continued: “The new Agriculture Act means there is an opportunity for British farming to become a global leader in sustainable, climate-friendly, high-standard food production.”

Farmers, like the clergy and churchpeople, were also well-placed to bridge the gap between rural and urban communities at home, Archbishop Welby said. There was much ignorance in the UK about the realities of farming and rural life, particularly within urban communities — which, he said, need “to understand better the value rural Britain offers”, the challenges it faces, and what is behind the food on people’s plates. (At the start of the lecture, he admitted to learning much about the difficulties of farming life from the Jeremy Clarkson series on Amazon.)

The Church of England should make land available for gypsies and travellers, the General Synod has voted, despite concerns that they bring “a lot of upset and fear”.

Members overwhelmingly supported a motion calling on the Church to donate land from its notoriously large portfolio to the traveller community, just five months after Government ministers revealed they were considering making trespass a criminal offence to stop them moving onto private land.

A Partnership for Missional Church programme developed by the Church Mission Society for local churches, helps to empower lay people, a study has found. The finding came into a report commissioned into the three-year PMC programme which CMS introduced in the UK in 2011. The two key findings in the study are that churches taking part in the PMC programme engaged publicly with their local communities; and that lay people felt empowered to step into positions of leadership within the local church and beyond. The results were found across church traditions and in both urban and rural contexts.

The study was conducted by Liz Clutterbuck and Andy Schofield of the Transformational Index group, who spoke to 82 participating churches from the dioceses of Southwell and Nottingham, Leicester, Oxford and Durham. The research included a survey of church members.

“Seventy-two per cent of respondents said that PMC had made a positive impact on their ability to establish partnerships outside the church, and seven out of 10 said PMC had also made a positive impact on their individual Christian lives, deepening both their personal faith and their corporate spiritual experience,” CMS said in a statement.

The Church of England has launched a strongly worded attack on Britain’s political culture, criticising politicians of all parties for offering only “sterile arguments” that are likely to make voters more apathetic and cynical in the runup to the general election.

In an unprecedented intervention, the church’s bishops have published a joint open letter warning that “our democracy is failing” and attacking the “growing appetite to exploit grievances” and “find scapegoats” in society. They call for “a fresh moral vision of the kind of country we want to be”.

It is the first time the bishops have intervened in this way before a general election, but one said the church had felt the need to counter the “sex appeal” of people such as Russell Brand, who have argued that people should disengage from Westminster politics.

“This piece provides an overview of how England and Wales are multi-faith. According to the Census, our towns and cities are global villages with an extra 2.9 million foreign-born people living in England and Wales since 2001 – most from India, Poland and Pakistan – and an additional 1.1 million Muslims, bringing the total to 2.7 million. Christianity, or at least the number identifying themselves as followers of the largest religion, is on the slide with more than 4 million fewer saying they followed the church than in 2001.

The march of the faithless has also continued with 14.1 million people, about a quarter of the entire population, saying they had no religion at all, a rise of 6.4 million over the decade. The Church of England said the figures “confirm we remain a faithful nation”, but adding that the fall of 4 million in those choosing to see themselves as Christians was “a challenge”. With Justin Welby (the Bishop of Durham) about to take the top job and become the next archbishop, and having turned round the diocese, can he do it on a much bigger scale and transform the way people think about Christianity?”

It is a matter of fact that under the 2001 census there were more active congregations in rural than urban England and it would be interesting to learn how this might have developed over the last 10 years. The 2011 Census can be accessed here.

Another really interesting “story” arising from the latest census releases refers to the role of migrant workers – very important we know in rural England. See also this piece on Boston.