Anglican Mainstream

The article I posted last Sunday about decline in the Church of England generated quite a lot of interest from readers. As I was on holiday (hooray!) I was avoiding posting any replies to comments, but now that I’m back (are you supposed to boo on returning to the joys of parish life?) I want to pick up some of the issues raised.

As with man-made climate change, the Church of England seems to divide into ‘believers’ and ‘deniers’ regarding whether or not we are facing a staffing crisis and what exactly is its cause.

The believers point to cases like the one in Littlebourne, highlighted by Ruth Gledhill, where a benefice which raises more than necessary to pay a full-time minister was nevertheless told it wouldn’t get one “even if you raise £1million”. The future for such churches and their congregations seems to be more amalgamations into bigger groups of parishes served by fewer full-time clergy, whilst simultaneously facing unchanging, indeed increasing, demands for cash.

The deniers, which seems to be almost everyone in top management down to the level of archdeacon, claim this is due to the lack of people getting ordained, whilst simultaneously pointing to the ‘good news’ of the increasing numbers of clergy, albeit many of them part-time, and the narrowing gap between quota demands and quota payment which indicate an unfailing willingness of people in the pews to pay what is asked of them, even in our current reduced circumstances, which suggest that the old pattern of one-vicar-one-parish won’t be much missed anyway.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is precisely the difference in perspective between the managers and the managed (it would be unfair to say ‘the workers’) in the Church of England itself. From the top, there is undoubtedly some grasp of the overall picture and some sense of a plan which can, to some extent, be thought to be working. At ‘ground level’, things look very different.

Whilst on holiday, I visited a number of churches where, in addition to the ‘features’, I looked around for evidence as to how things were going. One such was an enormous and beautiful building, set in a modest-sized village with a congregation, I was told, of about a hundred —though mostly elderly—on a Sunday morning. The parish magazine, however, told a familiar story.

The existing vacancy was to continue longer than had been anticipated by the congregation when it began: “we shall not have a new Rector until June at the earliest.” But then came this ‘bad news, good news’ assessment:

In the meantime the state of our finances has deteriorated to the point where it is now doubtful whether [parishes X and Y] could afford their own Rector. The realistic position is that there are very few Clergy and not many villages who can afford them anyway. Collaboration with the surrounding villages is going to be the way ahead; this will mean fewer Clergy to pay and therefore less ‘quota’ to pay.