by Ian Paul, Psephizo
Last weekend, in an online conversation, someone highlighted to me the most recent ministry statistics, which were released in June, but seem to have gone under the radar. I certainly did not spot them, and I don’t recall anyone commenting on them. They show that 47.5% of current C of E stipendiary clergy are aged 55 or over, which of course means that they will all have retired in 12 years’ time.
12 years might sound like quite a long planning horizon—but at the sessions of General Synod this year, we have been projecting over the next three rounds of the triennium planning cycle, which is therefore a nine-year horizon. And anything connected with demographics is long term, or at least generational; those who are due to retire in the next decade will mostly have entered training between 20 and 30 years ago, or more. This is a reminder that decisions we make now about training, ordination, and appointments will leave a very long, generational, legacy.
I casually posted about this on Facebook on Sunday night, and there followed a very long and active thread about it which lasted for the next couple of days.
Coincidentally, at yesterday’s meeting of the Archbishops’ Council, these figures were revisited under the item on training for ministry. (All the figures are in the public domain, so I am not sharing anything confidential here.)
The current projection (in round terms) is that the number of stipendiary clergy in the C of E will fall from 7,000 now to 5,500 by 2035. That assumes that we will return to the annual figures of ordaining 400 clergy for stipendiary ministry each year, together with around 200 for non-stipendiary ministry, an annual total of 600. Currently, although the total numbers have slightly increased this year to 417 (from an average of 358 over the last three years), this is still a long way short.
This is sobering at so many levels. I was taken aback to discover that I had done an analysis of such projections in 2016, when the statistics department produced a detailed model of the age profile of clergy. There were dire warnings about the consequences of the expected drop in stipendiary numbers, which were expected to fall from the then 8,098 to the shocking figure of 7,179 by 2035 if nothing was done! Here we are, half way through that 20-year projection, and have already fallen well below that, and are now expecting to have 23% fewer clergy by 2035.