By Madeleine Davies, Church Times
Candidates elected for the new quinquennium have called for greater investment in parish ministry and reform of Church of England finances
DEMANDS for a redirection of the Church Commissioners’ largesse to parish ministry will be widely and strongly voiced in the next quinquennium of the General Synod, election statements from successful candidates suggest.
Save the Parish (STP) reported this week that 77 candidates who had signed up to its manifesto had been elected, and about 20 others had told the group that they supported it. In addition to those advertising STP support, election statements calling for reform of church finances in support of parishes, read by the Church Times, transcended churchmanship, age, geography, and support for other causes and campaigns.
“We do not need any more top-down vision statements and shiny new diocesan led projects,” Paul Ronson (Blackburn), the treasurer of Together For the Church of England, wrote. “What we need is more full-time, parish-based clergy and staff to serve as the core critical resources in the local communities in which they are physically present.”
“I share much of the frustration of the Save the Parish movement with the frontline cuts, the creation of mega-parishes and the abandonment of the poor,” the Revd Jago Wynne (Southwark), one of the five directors of The Alliance elected, wrote. “There needs to be a reduction in centralised costs to allow for a focus on frontline ministry in parishes up and down the country.”
Next July, the Synod will debate how national funding is disbursed — a response to a motion carried last year, which noted “the precarious financial position of many dioceses, concerns about the approach to national funding, and the challenges of sustaining stipendiary ministry in dioceses”.
Criticism of the current grant-based approach was articulated in statements, including those of candidates whose dioceses or projects had received funding.
“I fear that a pervasive neoliberal ideology, making dioceses compete for resources, while metrics are fetishized and an ever-burgeoning central bureaucracy grows to measure it all, has created a gaping ecclesiological deficit in our life together,” Canon William Lamb (Oxford) wrote.
Robert Hammond (Chelmsford), who served as the chair of the business committee in the last quinquennium, wrote in his statement: “It is ridiculous that the National Church allocates half a billion pounds a year from its £11 billion assets which is bid for and generally goes to large ‘growth’ projects at the expense of paying the stipends of vicars in ‘ordinary’ parishes. If distributed directly, it would almost pay the stipend of every clergy person in the Church each year.”
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