Further to your columns on finance and small churches, we have only £11,000 for the rest of the year, and £9000 of that has to go to the diocese as our quota. It's a nightmare. Is this the ongoing result of the Church Commissioners' fiasco of 20 years ago?

THE "fiasco" of the early 1990s pretty well resolved itself, but our financial situation does relate to about that time. Another scandal (not the Church's) made it evident that companies were prepared to filch money from their employees' pension funds when the going got tough during a recession. The government of the time created a new law to require all employers to put their pension funds beyond their reach, under separate management.

The Church of England then had to change its entire system. Until this time, pensions, as well as salaries, were paid out of current income from the assets held by the Church Commissioners. Now the Church had to have a separate pension fund, holding adequate assets to pay the pensions of all retired personnel, and be accumulating enough for the pensions promised to current employees.

So the Church's historic income was redirected almost entirely into building up that fund. This meant that, suddenly, dioceses had to pay clergy salaries and contribute towards pensions, as the Commissioners could not achieve the targeted pension fund and continue paying salaries. Dioceses' only income is the parishes' income; so, guess what? - suddenly we were all having huge drives to get ourselves out of the "pennies-in-the-plate" mentality into serious stewardship, and percentages of our personal income.

One day, maybe, it will all resolve itself, because the pension deposit that exists when a pensioner dies stays in the fund, and there will be enough assets in the pension pot to cover all pensions, and the Commissioners will again contribute to stipends. It sounds joyous, but are we hopeful?

For better and worse, these changing finances altered the relationship between clergy and PCCs, as the contribution by the PCC towards stipends created a new reality. Did the ones who paid the piper call the tune? Clergy are seen more as employees and less as the pastoral representative of the absent, hard-working bishop.

Stewardship came into its own. The comparative wealth or poverty of clergy in comparison with their parishioners became more apparent. Dioceses ran, and still run, huge cost-cutting exercises. The story continues because the situation has changed the workings of so many relationships between functionaries, individual and collective, of the Church's life and ministry.

The work of finance boards in dioceses can feel very much like the functioning of the local council: collecting tax; absorbing a great deal of it in administration; paying the wages bill; and running a few departments that assist congregations in specialist aspects of life and ministry, in line with that diocese's mission targets.

The old system was paternalistic, and seemingly above question; the new one is still defining itself and discovering the best way to work, but small churches - often village churches - are the ones feeling the pinch. Some further restructuring of the kind that the diocese of Southwark set up, with "fairer shares", would be timely, as a struggling congregation can scarcely establish new lines of mission and ministry when its time is dominated by finding its quota, and it shares clergy input with half a dozen other parishes.

Questions and comments to maggiedurran@virginmedia.com.