What future for the Anglican clergy?

A short while ago, I had a conversation with a friend who is going through ‘Continuing Ministerial Education’ —what use to be called Post-Ordination Training, or ‘Potty’ by some wit. He had phoned me to express his concern at what seemed to be the message coming from diocesan management about the future of Anglican ministry, which envisaged significant changes in the nature and deployment of clergy.

That conversation has left me musing on what the church might look like in a decade or two, but also on the whole approach of the church’s ‘managers’ —its leaders and policy makers —to issues which affect ministry at the ‘grass roots’.

Clergy cuts
Behind this current thinking is a recent diocesan report which confronts the declining numbers of stipendiary clergy with proposals for a decreasing deployment of full-time clergy in the parishes. (This, of course, is not being driven by money —it is simply a lack of people coming forward, let the reader understand.)

The clergyperson of the future will thus need to be, above all, a team leader, since he or she will be in no position to do personally the work that used to be presumed of clergy in the past. Only such team players will be affordable as stipendiary clergy. The individual ‘specialists’, apparently, will have to work on a self-supporting basis.

Clergy deployment
At the same time, therefore, clergy will have to be capable of being more widely deployed than is currently the case, ready (my friend was told) to work outside their ‘comfort zones’. What I think this means is that the old concepts of ‘churchmanship’ will no longer apply. Catholics will have to be able to slum it with the low church, and liberals to lead charismatic worship-fests —or something of that sort.

This also seems to imply, however, that the deploying will be done rather more actively than at present, with diocesan managers being more able to send clergy where they are ‘needed’ or ‘suited’.

The good side
Those of us brought up on the old understanding of parish ministry, who also happen to have an innate cynicism towards diocesan management, may react to these suggestions with instinctive hostility, but some of them do make sense.

It is a welcome suggestion, for example, that clergy need to be team leaders. Indeed, my last six months spent overseeing a Benefice of three parishes has not only demonstrated the importance of this, but shown what a great job was done by the previous two vicars.

The earlier of the two, for example, with the permission of the then diocesan bishop, set up a preaching team. This means that we can now draw on anything up to half a dozen laypeople who can, and do, preach on a regular basis. Most of them have learned to do this ‘on the job’, and they are not half bad!

Similarly, we have laypeople leading most of our services, so that the one regular service I do lead in its entirety is BCP Holy Communion, and that not at every venue where it is held.

However, I am painfully aware that so much lay involvement needs a level of input which is currently hard to provide. People need training and supervision, yet there is still the expectation that clergy will be hands-on with traditional parish ministry, especially visiting anyone and everyone who ‘needs a visit’. Deploying clergy as team leaders will need some explaining in a culture which does not understand the church as a team needing to be lead.

The down side
And then there is the down side of these proposals —or rather of the thinking behind them. I am especially suspicious of the emphasis on deployability and deployment. Of course there are potential advantages to clergy being deployed across a wider range of theological situations. In some cases, it will mean good, conservative, biblical preaching going places where it has never gone before. But I wonder if the desire for clergy to be deployable in the terms envisaged will mean in future recruiting only those with a ‘middle of the road’ theology which is inevitably quasi-liberal.

As to the deployment itself, does this mean bishops and archdeacons moving clergy around like those little markers on maps that they used to use in the Battle of Britain? This could only be done effectively if the bishops and archdeacons were themselves situationally aware in a way that I doubt is currently the case, given the lack of contact one has with them on a day-to-day basis. Given that my only two experiences of taking jobs on a bishop’s recommendation were both disastrous, I will need some convincing!

Consultation
My biggest worry when I heard about these proposals, however, was how much consultation they reflected with the ordinary parish clergy. Have diocesan management been interviewing clergy to see what they think about the job, or what resources they wish they had? If so, it has rather passed me by, but that does not mean it is not happening.

My suspicion, however, is that most of the theorizing and planning is being done by those who move largely in the cloisters of power, rather than by those who face the daily challenges and demands of the typical parish.

Independence, authority and money
I am also concerned that the thinking behind these proposals will, almost by definition (given that it seems to be coming from our present managers), fail to allow those tasked with putting them into practice the tools they need for the job.

It is the natural tendency of management to want to manage. In an hierarchical church, this is exacerbated by the view those managers sometimes have of themselves as divinely ‘gifted’ with managing. I remember one bishop, now retired, who believed that at his consecration he was actually given by the Holy Spirit the ability to discern trends and movements.

Of course, some people do have greater gifts than others in such areas, but I am instinctively worried about someone who claims to have these gifts ‘because they are a bishop’. (I would be rather less worried if I could be persuaded that the system made people with such gifts into bishops, but I am not yet convinced.)

In fact, I would say that for quite some time leadership skills as such have hardly been a requirement for the English episcopate, where the motto seems to be ‘Moderation in All Things’ rather than ‘Who Dares Wins’.

This innate tendency to conservatism and control sometimes leads to bureaucratic farce. For example, everyone who administers at communion in our diocese (ie who gives out the bread or wine during a service) needs a ‘card of authorisation’ from the bishop and is to be given “careful instruction ... before they begin this ministry.”

For heaven’s sake! You’re giving people a piece of bread or a sip of wine. It isn’t bomb disposal. What could go wrong? Yet I have been in a church vestry where the wall is covered with such cards. Is it inconceivable that the incumbent just might be able to spot a good ‘un from a wrong ‘un in this ‘ministry’?

The fact is that if the clergy of the future are to be team leaders, they must also be allowed to be team managers, and this means being allowed independence to exercise local initiative, authority to commission local leadership and financial control to fund what they propose doing.

And that is where the problems will come, because I cannot see the Church of England’s current hierarchy allowing any such thing. What we will have instead, I fear, is centralized control, outside interference and fiscal starvation. In that case, for Anglican clergy, the future’s bleak, the future’s purple.

Revd John P Richardson
25 January 2010

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

‘Anglican Decline’: the views from the top and the bottom

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.

— to which one can only respond with a pantomime shout of “Oh no it doesn’t!”

What this illustrates is the difficulty many congregations have in grasping the real situation, even after, in this case, a face-to-face conversation with the local bishop. They can understand the message that there are fewer clergy to go around, and they are all-too-aware of their own financial difficulties. But they still believe that somehow they are ‘paying for their clergy’, and that therefore if the provision of clergy is reduced (as they have grasped it will be), then the financial demands on them will ease (which they almost certainly will not).

It is a natural assumption in life that you ‘get what you pay for’. Of course, ‘giving to charity’ falls outside this framework —that is why it is considered morally different. But congregations do not automatically see giving to their diocese for the provision of parochial ministry precisely in terms of ‘giving to charity’ —in other words, they do not understand it as an area where they should give irregardless of what they get. And when they do grasp that this is what is being required of them, they do not automatically rise to the challenge.

And this is particularly true where the sums raised are disproportionate to the ministry received. I mentioned before that our own deanery will soon be paying close to three-quarters of a million pounds for fewer then eight full-time clergy. That figure, it should be noted, does not include any ‘parish costs’, nor does it include upkeep of buildings, which I estimate at £10-12,000 per church per annum.

If both trends continue in their present directions —the demands for money going up and the provision of ministry going down —the system must eventually collapse. At that point, the ‘goose which lays the golden egg’ will expire and the knock-on effect will be felt throughout the diocese.

The point is, the present system —by which I mean the subsidising of substantial areas of ministry by churches with very little ministry provision of their own —is unsustainable.

The first aim of a coherent ministry-funding strategy must be to make as many ministries as possible effectively ‘self-funding’.

The second aim should be to make the connection between the supporters of ministry and those who are supported as direct and personal as possible. This is because generosity is linked to a perceived value and effectiveness in the work being supported.

When people give to charities, it is because they have a personal interest in the charity concerned —the work it is doing resonates with their own concerns, and they are happy to give because they value what is being done with their money. At the same time, their giving is appreciated by the charity itself, which provides feedback in the form of newsletters and so on.

Contrast this with the picture in most dioceses! Our own Diocese of Chelmsford now operates a ranking system for the payment of ‘Parish Share’, listing parishes as Platinum, Gold, Silver or Bronze. The last group are those who have paid less than 96% of their ‘Share’ but have made some effort to rectify the situation. Then we get this gem in the official presentation:

A parish that did not meet the Bronze classification (by 2010) would be considered a ‘Won’t Pay’ parish.

A ‘Won’t Pay’ parish would:

1. Be ineligible for diocesan loans.
2. Be ineligible for Mission Opportunity funding.
3. Be brought to the attention of the London Over the Border Fund with a request that the classification be taken into consideration.
4. Not be eligible to receive a curate.
5. Not be considered for any improvements to a clergy house (not including normal maintenance/repairs).
6. Have this taken into account at the next vacancy and consideration given to the viability of the parish and potential pastoral reorganisation.

Quite apart from the misleading suggestion that if you pay you quota you might actually become eligible for a curate, it takes some kind of leadership ‘anti-genius’ to come up with this sort of scheme!

The problem in so many diocesan funding schemes is that the people from whom they make their demands are regarded as potentially the ‘enemy’. Yes, they can be incentivized to pay. And provided they pay what we want, when we want, how we want, we’re happy (we’ll even give them Wizard-of-Oz style ‘award’ —meaningless, but it’ll make them feel warm). But woe betide the late payers! They will see what an organized diocesan response really looks like —visits from the archdeacon and the financial ‘crash-team’ will follow, until they get their act together, when we can go back to ignoring them like we usually do.

Do I sound a tad jaded?

Once again, it comes back to the division between the managers and the managed. No doubt, on the Bishop’s Council this particular idea looked good. But at ground level, where you’ve just been told you’ll be getting one less clergy-person —but by the way, we need another few thousand pounds —it is a different matter.

More to follow!

Revd John P Richardson
5 December 2009

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.

The CofE and its clergy: decline is not inevitable

The Times on Saturday chose to run with the ‘news’ that the number of stipendiary Anglican clergy is in decline. According to their article, the Church of England will lose “as many as one in ten paid clergy in the next five years”.

Of course, for many Anglicans, this is not news at all, especially if they are in rural areas (which means anywhere outside an urban environment). Typically, rural ‘parishes’ now consist of agglomerations of individual parishes, even into double figures. Recently I met a clergywoman from Norfolk looking after no less than fifteen. And the number of parishes involved is no guarantee of a full-time minister. In our local area another clergywoman is overseeing five parishes whilst holding down a part-time diocesan post.

Typically, urban churches tend to be protected from such amalgamations by the size of their populations. In our diocese, the ‘cap’ is now something like 3,000 people per full-time minister, which means that most urban parishes are safe —for the time being. However, the ‘cap’ is constantly increasing, so that eventually even the urban parishes will have to be merged.

There are, however, two schools of thought as to why this situation has come about and continues to worsen. The official line is that this is essentially a matter recruitment. The Times quotes a typical (though anonymous) church spokesman saying that, “The bigger pressure is the really quite encouraging number of ordinations is not as big as the number of those retiring.”

But this is slightly misleading, for the ‘encouraging number’ of ordinands includes an increasing proportion of part-timers. Moreover, when the difference between part and full-time clergy is taken into account, a significant demographic variation emerges. Amongst the part-timers, a disproportionate number are female, over forty, training on part-time courses. Amongst the full-timers, a disproportionate number are male, under forty, and training on full-time courses at evangelical colleges.

There is thus a correlation between the intended work-pattern and what might be called the ‘socio-theological’ profile of the candidate.

And this hints at another, alternative, explanation of the decline in clergy numbers, which is that it reflects a fiscally-constrained, socio-theological agenda. In other words, those running the Church of England are planning for a declining workforce on the principle that, whilst it is all they believe we can afford, they also do not believe it particularly matters for the overall ministry of the church.

Whether this is indeed the case, and whether they are right in their analysis, is a matter for debate. At the grass-roots, however, the people responsible for finding the money —the laity in the pews —are quite clear in their own minds that the willingness to recruit manpower, not the ability to raise money, is the real problem. And, ironically, I think they are convinced of this precisely because, despite raising large amounts of money, they see little return by way of ministry. From their point of view, the manpower is definitely there —after all, this, they are told, is why their money is needed —it is just somewhere else!

They see their money going out, and they know how it is being spent, but they see little in return, most especially if they are in one of the typical multi-parish rural benefices. (Next year, our own deanery of some thirty parishes will pay £625,000 for 8.7 stipendiary clergy —a staff level which is about to be reduced by 1.)

This being so, the institution needs to take account not just of the fiscal implications of its current policy but the psychological implications. It is not enough simply to tell people that ‘X’ costs ‘Y’, and then expect them to find the money with unfailingly good grace, even in a good cause.

In order to get the best (and, dare it be said, the most) out of them, people need to see a connection between their giving and others’ receiving. The Bible speaks about ‘koinonia’ —fellowship —as the basis for giving to other Christians (2 Cor 8:4), but that sense of fellowship has to be sustained, and it has to be seen to be fair. Too many congregations feel as though they are paying taxes, whilst being deprived of ministers.

And this impression is reinforced by the resolute refusal of diocesan officialdom to change the basis on which money is raised and disbursed. Despite evidence for its inefficiency, most dioceses insist on a ‘quota’ based arrangement, where parishes pay a sum, set by the central authority, into a diocesan ‘pot’, from which money for stipendiary clergy is then disbursed, via the Church Commissioners.

The argument for this system is that it is ‘fair’ —‘rich’ and ‘poor’ parishes alike pay as they are able and receive as they need. In practice, however, it is neither particularly fair nor at all effective.

To begin with, the notional ability to pay often overlooks the actual situation in a congregation, since it is often assessed on the basis of local income and deprivation levels for the area, not the church members, whose disposable income may be quite at variance with that of the local population. Thus in supposedly ‘rich’ rural areas, many congregations consist of retired people with correspondingly restricted disposable wealth, whereas in ‘poor’ urban areas, congregations may contain a disproportionate number of relatively well-off members, compared with the local population.

Furthermore, the ‘need’ for ministry cannot simply be estimated on the basis of either population density or social deprivation. The fact is, an individual clergy person can reasonably deal with a a congregation of perhaps 120-160 adults. Research done back in the seventies showed that beyond that point, congregations typically grew only to the extent that they could add on more pastoral workers. Once a congregation reaches this size, the size of the parish population becomes more or less irrelevant.

Figures derived for our own diocese (Chelmsford) suggested that beyond a certain size, the larger a parish becomes the more people are simply unreached by the parish church. Thus the population ‘cap’ becomes basically irrelevant. If a church, or group of churches attracts a certain number of adults, the minister is effectively at full pastoral stretch, whether the parish is large or small, urban or rural.

Part of the trouble is that the Church of England’s ‘managers’ have in many cases committed themselves to a model of ministry which denies that the clergyperson is ‘chaplain to the congregation’. Ministry is conceived as being to the ‘whole parish’, and since need is seen in material terms, a large parish in a deprived urban area is defined as more ‘needy’ than a small parish in a well-off rural area.

The problem with this model is that the ministry of the Church in the urban area is simply not able to deal with the ‘needs’ so-defined. It can alleviate some of them, but very few. And in any case, the very fact that this is set within a parish environment, with the usual paraphernalia of services, congregations and PCCs says that the model is not even coherent. The minister is expected to be both chaplain to the congregation and, somehow, a ‘parson’ to the whole community —and often fails to be effectively either.

What is needed are new approaches to the recruitment, funding and deployment of ministers. The basic unit of ministerial funding needs to be seen as the viable congregation (or group of congregations), with those congregations giving as directly as possible to the funding of their own ministers. Instead of stretching ministry more and more thinly, resulting in the demoralization and decline of congregations, especially in rural areas, the Church of England needs to establish strong centres which are then given the vision to support an expanding ministry in other, weaker, situations which are not, initially, able to support their own ministry. Once again, however, the link between giving and recipient parishes needs to be kept as direct as possible.

Unfortunately, one of the reasons why this is resisted seems be a central fear of losing control. Proposals that ministers should be paid for locally are rejected as ‘congregationalist’, as if Congregationalism were a matter of accountancy rather than theology!

The time must be fast approaching, however, when the pips being squeezed for the funding of the Church’s ministry do, in fact, squeak, and the people in the pews begin to start asking hard questions about the policy which is so manifestly failing. Perhaps it is time for some rich benefactors —and such do exist —to begin funding the modern equivalent of the ‘lecturers’ who dotted the landscape in Puritan times. Whatever may be the outcome, what is desperately needed is initiative and boldness, not further cuts, leading to further reductions. If we were a business, the shareholders would be demanding answers from the management. We are not a business, but that is no excuse for not being businesslike, especially in the service of our Lord.

John Richardson
29 November 2009

Anonymous users wishing to paste in the comments box need first to select 'preview', then close the preview box. When posting your comments please give a full name and location. Comments without this information may be deleted.