by Ian Paul, Psephizo
The harsh reality of demographics means that the numbers of stipendiary clergy will continue to decline significantly over the next ten years. What will that mean in practice for the future of the Church? What issues does it raise—and is anyone actually facing up to these questions?
Save the Parish, who are campaigning (not least in the context of General Synod elections) for a return to a ‘traditional’ conception of parish ministry, have produced a report on the crisis in stipendiary clergy numbers, and you can download it and read it here. They have done a fantastic job of getting it publicised, launching it in the House of Lords and getting widespread media coverage, including in the national press and Radio 4.
They have also done a great job of considering a wide range of issues (the report is not very long and will only take a couple of minutes to read it) and the reason is that it came out of a consultation in March this year in which they genuinely involved people from across the range of traditions in the Church of England. You can read the list of names of those who participated in the report, and I was genuinely impressed by the breadth. (You would need to recognise the names and know their tradition to see this.)
In this article, I was intending to comment on the main points of the report, which I mostly agree with, and on each of which I have myself been writing and campaigning for a long time (if you don’t believe me, just search for ‘clergy’ in the search bar to the right). But there is one major issue they do not consider, which has ended up taking up most of the space, and there are some consequences from their report which I think are seriously questionable.