It is the poor who are hard­est hit by Church’s fin­an­cial bungling

by Marcus Walker, Telegraph

“THE poor will always be with you,” said Christ in St Mat­thew’s Gos­pel, but will the Church always be with the poor? This is an exist­en­tial ques­tion for the Church of Eng­land as it decides how to pick itself up and dust itself down after two gen­er­a­tions of decline.

It will come as no sur­prise to learn that some churches are rich and some are not. From the early days of the Estab­lished Church, we knew that the poorest par­ishes were not able to fund them­selves, and Queen Anne set up a per­man­ent endow­ment “for the cure of souls in par­ishes where such assist­ance is most required”. That endow­ment now stands at £11.6bn. Endow­ments man­aged by the Church’s dio­ceses stand at £6.1bn. In 2024, an enorm­ous £653m was dis­bursed from the total income gen­er­ated.

Yet only £85m found its way to sup­port par­ish min­istry. This is a dir­ect con­sequence of past decisions to open up the uses of these endow­ments for any of the pur­poses of the

Arch­bish­ops’ Coun­cil (effect­ively the Church’s “Cab­inet”). And the fruits can be seen in the stats: in the first 20 years of this cen­tury, the num­ber of paid clergy has fallen by 20pc, as has the num­ber of bene­fices.

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