by Julian Mann, The Daily Sceptic
A new report calling on the Church of England to stop wasting money on “extravagant” Net Zero and reparations projects and refocus on parishes echoes what front-line clergy have been saying for years, says Julian Mann.
In early 2019 I was sitting in the choir stalls of a large medieval church in Sheffield with a group of somewhat stressed-out fellow clergy being told by the then new Bishop of Sheffield that the diocese couldn’t afford us and that our numbers had to be cut.
One vicar had the temerity to suggest to Bishop Pete Wilcox: how about cutting the number of bureaucrats at diocesan headquarters to save money? He also suggested that dioceses could be merged, thus cutting the number of bishops and archdeacons. Both suggestions were dismissed with an episcopal wave of the hand as irrelevant to the topic under discussion, namely that some of us needed to lose our jobs.
Now the suggestions then put in private by my former colleague have hit the national press. On Friday the Daily Mail ran a story on a new report on the Church of England, Wasted Money in a Diminishing Church, by two academics, Canon Robin Gill and Professor John Craven.
The report suggests cutting the number of bishops and dioceses by about a third to 30 and cutting the number of diocesan bureaucrats.
The Mail reports:
Now, the report Wasted Money in a Diminishing Church has urged the CofE to take “ruthless” action by cutting bureaucracy and make parishes its “first priority”.
The authors cited a “crisis” of falling attendance, donations and ordinations, with the number of dioceses with financial deficits now at 37 out of 42 – up from 18 in 2019.
Excessive bureaucracy was also branded an issue – given dioceses now employ 80% more staff than in 2005, with the total having risen from 1,300 to 2,300.
New roles include Net Zero officers, racial justice leads and safeguarding experts – with some dioceses now said to have the same number of staff and ministers.
The report said: “We want to break this silence because we are convinced that the Church of England is heading for financial disaster.
“More and more of its funds are being spent on administration in every diocese while churchgoing continues to decline, and less and less is spent on supporting parish clergy.
“As clergy are spread ever more thinly in urban and rural areas, services are less frequent, congregations are getting smaller, and less money can be raised in church collections from people who wonder what they are getting for their money.”
The authors of the report cannot be so easily dismissed with a supercilious episcopal brush-off. Canon Gill, Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent, was theological adviser to two Archbishops of Canterbury: Robert Runcie and George Carey. Professor Craven, a former professor of economics, was a member of the C of E’s executive body, the Archbishops’ Council, from 2006 to 2013. The report has been published by the Centre for Anglican History and Theology at the Universities of Kent and Christ Church Canterbury.
The report is withering about the Church’s 2030 carbon Net Zero drive and its £100 million Project Spire scheme to pay out slavery reparations to businesses and NGOs in the Caribbean and West Africa. It calls these projects “costly” and “extravagant” and seen as “unsustainable and deeply depressing” by congregations.