Save our parish priests!

Go to your parish church this Easter, because the clock is ticking for small and rural parishes. Even if the beauty of holiness is conspicuously absent, even if numbers are low and you feel a sinking sense of being the last person standing on the burning deck, go. That is, if your church is still open and you still have a vicar.  

I do – and he will heroically be taking services in all six (!) of his churches from dawn till dusk on Easter Day. However, many of the Church of England’s (CoE) 42 diocesan administrations are cutting paid clergy jobs. In Bath & Wells, 178 parish clergy will apparently become 128; in Hereford, 72 will become 55. Priests are being asked to ‘oversee’ even more parishes. 

Thus, even fewer churches can have weekly Sunday services. The Church’s own growth studies From Anecdote to Evidence and Going Deeper show that parish amalgamations reduce attendance and giving. A 2022 church attendance report confirmed it’s not rocket science: if you don’t hold a church service, nobody comes. Churches left unattended become more vulnerable to crime.  

A new ‘oversight ministry’ model in which the remaining priests are spread thinly, overseeing up to 35 churches (as in the Leicester diocese), allows clergy little time to comfort the broken-hearted or visit CofE schools. It presumes that local people will step into parish priests’ shoes, under the deceptive job description of ‘focal ministers’. This seems unlikely, not least because the Church Times recently reported a volunteering crisis in the CofE.  

As clergy posts are being cut, potential candidates for ordination are dropping. Perhaps we can soon expect virtual priests, digital avatars à la Abba Voyage?  

In February 2021, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York wrote in a co-authored article: ‘There are no plans to dismantle the parish network’. Yet there was and is a plan to ‘reshape existing resource patterns’, grandly dubbed the ‘Vision and Strategy’ plan by the Church. That plan is now well under way. It aims to fund the creation of ‘10,000 new Christian communities’ in the 2020s, without damaging the existing parish system.

Laying out this vision, the Archbishop of York asserted that ‘there is… no conflict between parish ministry and becoming a more mixed ecology church’. Despite his claim, the conflict over resources is already evident in parish clergy posts left vacant and parish mergers happening all around us.     

‘Vision and Strategy’ is effectively a series of projects aimed at redirecting the income stream from the £10.4 billion investment portfolio held by the Church Commissioners (who manage the Church of England’s permanent endowment fund). Until 2016, when there was a decision to change priorities, this income funded priests for poor parishes, avoiding a system of priests only for the rich parishes. 

The funding for parishes has plummeted. In 1990, 85 per cent of then Church Commissioners’ income stream was spent on funding serving clergy. In 2022, only 25 per cent of the amount available for distribution in that year went towards parish ministry.

Money is being redirected into new projects outside the parish system which are intended to attract the young and diverse. Laudable though that objective might be, the Archbishops have not presented any analysis to prove that this reallocation of funding makes strategic sense. In fact, the CofE’s own evidence indicates the opposite.  

The independent Chote report, reviewing extremely disappointing outcomes from all these new projects for five years to February 2022, contained many criticisms, including a lack of ‘specific measurable objectives’ and accountability. This creation of ‘fresh expressions’ of church to attract new worshippers lacks focus.  

An independent report from last year shows that £1.2 million spent on some of these new projects in Wigan, aimed at transforming the town into a ‘missional powerhouse’, between 2014 and 2021 failed to deliver projected outcomes and become sustainable. ‘Transforming Wigan’, as the projects were collectively known, also drove down both attendance and giving in the existing parish system by a third. Now, 19 of Wigan’s remaining 29 churches may close. The strategy clearly damages parishes.

In 2022, the Archbishop of York spoke of his ‘hunches’ and hopes that this funding would encourage a great flourishing of experimentation. Should billions be spent on speculative experimentation? The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said on Times Radio that the church would put more than £3 billion into its parishes. Was he referring to the £3.6 billion over nine years awarded in 2022 from this income stream? At present, little of this is going to existing parishes – although that urgently needs rebalancing, before it is too late to save them.  

Even thriving parishes are being attacked. An Evangelical vicar in Kent retired in December from a long career in his single-church rural parish. By providing a ‘mixed diet’ of services to please different tastes, he had lovingly built up a congregation of 200, including 30 families. Yet he was refused permission to nominate his successor even though long gaps between vicars drive decline. 

In Kent, the now-vicarless churchwardens are being pressurised towards a parish merger. The diocesan administrators, uninspired by the vicar’s success, clearly dislike the ‘single vicar, single parish’ model. Perhaps they think flogging one parsonage and cutting one salary reduces ‘over-investment’, preferring to ‘average’ resources across several parishes – but this is pillage. Communities witnessing wanton, unfathomable destruction find it demotivating.

The national sum total of ‘parish share’ contributions from donors closely matches the national cost of all parish clergy. It is not the parishes but the diocesan HQs which are unaffordable. Who wants money from their collection plate to pay for diocesan Christian distinctiveness officers and mission enablers instead of parish priests? It seems blindingly obvious that the CofE does not need 42 sets of communications officers.

I wonder how the change away from providing priests for ‘everyone everywhere’ will affect the Church’s claim to remain the established church in England. Analysis presented on the website Save the Parish shows that more effective management by dioceses of endowments held for parishes could pay for 1,000 more parish clergy. Surely a major boost to recruiting and training clergy should be dioceses’ top priority? Unless the church leaders change direction, English churches will close, to our lasting detriment.