An estimated 90 per cent of parishes are happy with the draft boundaries for 18 new mission areas proposed by Anglicare's research unit, according to the bishop who is running the consultation process.
With more than half of 18 consultations complete, Bishop Ivan Lee says the healthy balance in the draft proposal between retaining pre-existing area deanery boundaries and also changing glaring anomalies has helped win support.
While the NSW Government's Sydney Metropolitan Strategy, local government boundaries, and local newspaper distribution areas have all been taken into account in the Anglicare proposal, Bishop Lee says the Diocese could not completely take things back to "ground zero".
"Anglicare has approached it from a professional demographic perspective," he says. "However, we did constrain them by saying you can't split parishes… that would have been complicated and completely impractical."
Out of the 30 existing area deaneries, Anglicare's proposal splits up six, "so existing boundaries haven't been a overriding factor," Bishop Lee says.
Photo: Natalie Swann and Sue King from Anglicare explain the proposed boundaries to the meeting at All Saints, Nowra. 
The two main concerns raised in the consultations are: "the areas are very large"; and "I don't think my parish is in the right area".
So, if there are concerns the mission areas are too large, can we expect there to be more than 18 mission areas in the final plan?
Bishop Lee says "it is most likely that we will stick with the same number… but it might go up by one or two".
The two main candidates for splitting would be Shoalhaven-Southern Highlands and Penrith-Blacktown, however Bishop Lee is not convinced this is a good idea.
He says mission areas are not about running region-wide events, but for "getting together to pray and to strategically plan about the area".
The strongest reason for keeping the mission areas together as proposed, he says, is the issue of resource sharing. It is important to have a demographic mix of parishes for this purpose.
"If we had 50 mission areas of four parishes, they might be demographically similar but there would not be enough diversity to have the strength of resources necessary to help each other effectively."
Out of the estimated 100 parishes he has already consulted, Bishop Lee has moved only eight into a different mission area. The most significant alteration to date has been the boundary between the Inner West and the Sydney CBD mission areas, with Annandale and Leichhardt moved into the Inner West.
Consultations are continuing on other areas.
