SELF-SUPPORTING ministers (SSMs), who make up about 30 per cent of active priests in the Church of England, are to be represented by a lead bishop in the House of Bishops for the first time.

The new lead bishop for SSMs is to be the Bishop of Birkenhead, the Rt Revd Julie Conalty, it was announced on Tuesday. Bishop Conalty is also currently the deputy lead bishop for safeguarding; her three-year term finishes in May 2025.

Before her ordination as priest in 2000, she trained as a social worker and worked for the Probation Service in London for 16 years, and subsequently for the Youth Justice Board, a national charity, and a local authority. She also established a consultancy business.

Bishop Conalty served as a self-supporting minister and minister in secular employment for a decade after her ordination, before entering full-time parish ministry. She was ordained bishop in 2021.

She said on Tuesday that her experience in secular employment had “helped to shape how I inhabit ministry, even today. Self-supporting ordained ministers and ministers in secular employment enrich churches, communities, and workplaces — each in a distinctive and unique way. This is a huge gift to the Church and to society.”

Her priorities, she said, would be to raise awareness of the value of these distinctive ministries, and to help the Church of England to “reshape the templates for ordained ministry so that stipendiary full-time parish posts are not the norm by which other shapes of ministry are judged”.

The next national officer for SSMs was also announced on Tuesday, and is to be the Revd Tony Redman. He succeeds Prebendary John Lees, the first national officer, who stepped down earlier this year.

Mr Redman is a chartered surveyor and historic-buildings consultant who has been a self-supporting priest in rural Suffolk for the past 20 years. He also serves as adviser to the Bishop of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich on the subject.

He said that his intention was to raise awareness of the vocation and deploy the national guidelines on self-supporting ministry which were issued in 2022. “It is a complementary ministry to those who have chosen stipendiary ministry as a lifelong professional decision. Self-supporting ministers have one foot in the secular world, and that enriches and complements the work of their stipendiary colleagues.”