THE poor will always be with us, but will we always be with the poor? For centuries, the Church of England has known that poorer parishes cannot be expected to fund their ministry purely from their own resources. Queen Anne knew this and set up an endowment: the famous Queen Anne’s Bounty “for the augmentation of the Maintenance of the Poor Clergy”.
Parliament got in on the act with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and the two endowments are now joined and looked after by the Church Commissioners. Their portfolio stands at more than £10 billion, and the income from that money is supposed to be ring-fenced and spent, to quote the governing statute, “with particular regard to . . . the making of additional provision for the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required”.
But, as churches close and merge, and parishes are stripped of clergy, one pattern has started to become clear: the brunt of this is being borne by the poor. The Church Buildings Council has shown that 40 per cent of church closures take place in the ten per cent most deprived parishes, and that churches in the ten per cent most deprived are five times as likely to close as churches in the least deprived quintile.
WE KNOW, now, clearly what the consequences are of these closures and mergers and stripping parishes of priests: dramatically reduced numbers.
The Church’s official report on the disastrous “Transforming Wigan” project — in which 29 parishes were turned into one benefice, and the clergy were slashed from 18 to 13 (having been 24 in 2013) — showed that giving and attendance collapsed by one third (News, 29 September 2023). In Launde, in Leicester diocese, another pilot project, giving has dropped by one half. This month, the report New in the North showed that, in churches where the number of services were cut, attendance fell by 14 per cent, while in churches where the number of services was increased, attendance rose by 21 per cent (News, 17 January).
You might think that these findings should be obvious. It is really useful, however, to have them in black and white, because there is a reason that these mergers and closures have been happening so often recently, and that the poorest parishes are the worst-hit.
This is a direct consequence of the decision in 2016 that the Church of England would “stop subsiding decline” (as the former finance chair of the Archbishops’ Council, John Spence, put it). Money has been redirected away from funding parochial ministry on a sustainable basis towards making short-term grants for new church projects. This led to the withdrawal of hundreds of millions of pounds from funding parochial ministry, with all the consequences that we can see today.
Depressingly, we also know that the redirected money has not brought the success that was promised. Having estimated that the £176 million earmarked for strategic development funding would bring in 89,375 new disciples, a report by Sir Robert Chote, the former head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, showed that only “12,704 have been witnessed to date” (News, 11 March 2022) (latest figures suggest that this has gone up to 27,000, although none of this factors in the numbers lost as provision was withdrawn to fund this).
How was this allowed, given the strict rules limiting what the Commissioners’ money can be spent on? The answer is a small clause in the Miscellaneous Provisions Measure 2018: “The Church Commissioners may make grants out of their general fund to the Archbishops’ Council for the purposes of the Council’s functions.”
Although the General Synod was told that this Measure dealt only with “uncontroversial matters that do not merit separate, free-standing legislation”, it has apparently justified the total redirection of the Church’s endowment away from its primary purpose. Only £33 million a year is now spent on the Lowest Income Communities Fund, and, in 2022, of that, only 61 per cent makes its way to parishes.
Since the Synod is not able to vote on the detailed budgets of the Archbishops’ Council or the Commissioners, the enormous decision to defund the poorest parishes of the Church has been taken without the agreement of the Church gathered in the Synod — until now.
AT THE forthcoming group of sessions, we will finally have the chance to vote on the new National Church Governance Measure. Now, church governance tends to send people into a coma, but it is high time to awake out of sleep. Finally, the Synod can put back into legislation what it had not realised that it was taking out: that, when the Church is spending the Commissioners’ endowment, it should do so “with particular regard” for the purposes that it was left for: the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required.
Rebalancing our funding to avoid the demise of poor parishes will not mean that everything else has to come to a stop: it just means that the Church absolutely has to consider whether those poorest parishes, which will never be able to fund themselves, are properly provided for. Then it can spend the rest of the money elsewhere.
This is not “subsidising decline”: this is the Church continuing to be present where it is most needed, and where our Lord would most be found. A Church that has abandoned the poor and retreated to the gardens of the rich does not deserve the name “Church”, and will have earned the judgement that will surely come for it.
The Revd Marcus Walker is Rector of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, in London, and a member of the General Synod for London diocese.