by Emily Retter, Telegraph
While the Church struggles with overstretched clergy and dwindling congregations, some are optimistic about the future of their vocation
[…] Cranmer trains around half the number it did around six years ago, admits the college’s lead, the Rev Nick Moore. “It has been quite a dramatic drop off, and it has probably affected the majority of colleges,” he adds. Most are in their 30s, whereas when he trained the demographic was 20-somethings. This is partly a reflection of declining congregations, and younger members within them, he believes, but he feels historically the Church went through a period of preferring ordinands with “life experience”, helping to create an age gap. “The church has not always been on top of having a really strategic approach to how it encourages vocations,” he says.
This month a report by the campaign group Save the Parish labelled Church of England parish priests an “endangered species”, highlighting the numbers training to become a vicar had dropped from a high of 591 in 2020 to 442 last year (the target is 630). Meanwhile, statistics reveal retired ministers make up the majority of active clergy in the Church. There are 8,368, compared to 6,682 in paid positions and 2,440 in self-supporting roles. Within this, nearly half of paid priests are over 55 and approaching the mandatory retirement age of 70. “There’s a kind of baby boomer demographic time bomb,” says Moore.
Calculations have predicted the mix of ageing clergy and decreasing ordinations could cause the number of full-time priests to fall to 5,400 by 2033, 40 per cent of 2000 figures, leaving some communities without an Anglican presence. “The British vicar is becoming an endangered species, leaving the nation’s poorest communities without regular priestly care,” stated the report.
Moore highlights growing stress placed on vicars as a key catalyst for declining numbers, increasingly the result of vicars being expected to oversee multiple parishes. “There’s clearly quite a significant challenge around clergy stress and wellbeing [and] partly inevitably it gets compounded when you are amalgamating parishes into ever larger benefices,” he says. Deepening this dent has also been the “long tail of Covid” which left many “exhausted”.