by Tim Wyatt, The Living Church
Vicars are now an endangered species
Use them or lose them: why we need to save our parish churches
The crisis in clergy numbers
The headlines in the British press have not made for happy reading for Anglicans in recent weeks. Every week it seems there is a fresh bombshell about the parlous state of the Church of England, and in particular its clergy. But what’s really going on here?
It is certainly true that the C of E does not have as many priests as it would like. There are about 20,000 clergy on the church’s national register, which includes everyone who is authorized to minister in some capacity (including those engaged in ad hoc ministry in retirement). That amounts to roughly one cleric for every 3,000 English men, women, and children. But only about 6,700 of those are actually paid vicars leading parish churches (both full and part-time).
This figure has been in decline for a long time, and all current projections suggest it will continue to drop steadily in the coming years. The average age of those paid vicars is now 52, and even to maintain numbers as this current crop retire would require about 630 new ordinations each year. After a big push about a decade ago, the C of E managed to get this figure up to 591 in 2020 before it promptly fell back again, all the way to 370 in 2024 (it has since crept upwards once more). In the most recent year of data, the number of clergy retiring or resigning from paid roles hit 657, comfortably higher than new recruits entering the pipeline.
The impact of the dearth of clergy is evident in almost every deanery in every diocese. While it is true that in its 1,500-year history the C of E has almost never produced enough vicars to give every parish their own priest, it was still commonplace well into the latter 20th century for most vicars to be solely responsible for one parish. Today, the average priest is responsible for four churches, and benefices that encompass ten or more parishes are unremarkable in rural areas.