ALMOST £100 million was allocated to dioceses by the Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board (SMMIB) last year, with plans to “revitalise” 300 parishes among the goals.
Besides the £98 million allocated via the Diocesan Investment Programme, £32.4 million went via the Lowest Income Communities Funding, which seeks to support ministry in about 2000 parishes.
The Board’s annual report, published last week, says that its investments to date — through both the Strategic Development Fund (SDF) (£180 million allocated between 2014 and 2022) and SMMIB funding (including £256 million allocated through the Diocesan Investment Programme) — have resulted in 46,000 people “newly participating in different church settings”.
The original goal of the SDF programme was to create 89,375 “disciples”. The Chote review of the programme, in 2023, recommended that the Archbishops’ Council should “revisit its quantitative objectives and the methodology used to present measures of new disciples witnessed and expected”. A new Shared Outcomes Framework is now being developed; its measures include “numbers new to faith”: the number of baptisms, confirmations, and other “first-time public confessions of faith”.
The report says that “rich learning” has emerged from earlier programmes, and that the Board is “committed to sharing learning widely”. Among the 13 evaluations completed in 2025 is a review by Brendan Research of two SDF-funded projects that ran in the diocese of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich between 2019 and 2025.
The project Growing in God in the Countryside (£2.23 million) aspired to grow 1200 new disciples by the end of 2024 “in a context of small populations, ageing congregations, limited provision for children or young people, clergy isolation and the burden of building maintenance”. It did so through developing a community of small ecclesial groups and fresh expressions known as the Lightwave Community, which operated as one of the first diocesan-wide Bishop’s Mission Orders.
The evaluation praised “an amazing piece of work in a difficult-to-change culture”, which had “brought change and disruption by its mere existence”. It reported 657 new disciples, almost half of whom are children. As of last year, 60 out of 111 benefices had received support from Lightwave for mission. The project also enabled the development of a new Rural Chaplaincy Team. Among the learning points was that “a parallel structure with no parish boundaries in a context where parish boundaries are deeply cherished is incomprehensible to some and therefore threatening”.
Another evaluation made public is the Church Army Research Unit’s review of Sheffield diocese’s Centenary Project, which used a “centrally employed, locally deployed” model to place children, youth, and family workers in economically disadvantaged areas, backed by £1.8 million of SDF. Nearly all the original targets set were met or exceeded. Of more than 6000 children and young people “regularly engaged over the lifetime of the project”, 1330 became regular attenders of discipleship groups.
Of the money allocated in 2025, 57 per cent has gone towards the outcome of “parish system revitalised for mission”. A report by Eido Research, What Can Be Expected of Parish Revitalisations?, records that there have been at least 221 church revitalisations through planting in the Church of England. Sending churches tended to be Evangelical and Charismatic, it says, and receiving churches are most commonly described as “traditional, liturgical, and middle-of-the-road”, before they come to resemble the sending church.
Church House spokeswoman said this week that the 300 revitalised parishes planned through SMMIB last year would see a “range of interventions, including new roles for ministry and mission within parishes”, and that they “increasingly involve churches from across traditions”.
Featured in the SMMIB annual report is All Saints’, Hove, an inclusive Anglo-Catholic parish designated alongside St Peter’s, Brighton, as a resource church as part of a five-year £2.5-million SDF project in 2021 (News, 21 May 2021). It currently hosts 140 children, parents, and carers at its midweek Little Fishes playgroup; most of those who attend are new to church and 20 of them attend on an average Sunday. Last year, 17 children were baptised: the highest number in more than 15 years.
The diocese of Carlisle reported last week that St Aidan’s, Cumbria, part of a £6.8 million SMMIB project announced last year (News, 14 March 2025), had grown to 40 people, the “vast majority” of whom had not gone to church before. About half the congregation are under 18.
It is now 13 years since the Resourcing the Future Task Force recommended a shift to a grant-based system of resourcing dioceses, which resulted in the move to SDF in 2017. A survey of dioceses carried out by Mark Kitson Consulting last year found that the Diocesan Investment Programme entailed “catalysing a rapid and extensive culture change”; one respondent reported that “it makes you think a lot about why you are proposing to do the things you are doing”.
But it also heard from “vehement detractors”. One diocesan respondent said: “You know the power imbalance is massive and, unfortunately, it’s reinforced unhelpfully by a system of bids and grant giving that mean we’re begging for money.” There was, Mr Kitson told a webinar last year, “a general sense of disempowerment from a majority of people we spoke to”.
A response from the SMMIB speaks of “the tension between empowerment and being evidence-based”. It continues: “There is no one way to be fruitful and a wide range of approaches, contexts and traditions have been invested in. However, there are values which evidence shows are connected with fruitfulness and we have seen approaches fail elsewhere — it is not empowering for a diocese to fund this (even before thinking about the value for money for the Church).”