Parishes need to be liberated from the bureaucratic burden
by Julian Mann, Christian Today:
The next Archbishop of Canterbury after Justin Welby inherits a national Church in numerical meltdown and groaning under a bureaucratic burden.
On Thursday 5 December, the Church of England published its mission statistics for 2023. The Church’s all-age average weekly attendance, which includes Sunday and midweek attendance, was 693,000 people in 2023 – 598,000 adults and 95,000 children aged under 16.
The number of adults was 19 per cent lower than in 2019, though 4.5 per cent higher than in 2022. The number of children was 24 per cent lower than in 2019, though 4.9 per cent higher than in 2022.
The C of E has thus declined in numerical weekly attendance by more than a fifth since 2019.
The latest mission statistics came the day after think tank Civitas published a report on the C of E warning that it is overspending on ‘human resources’ (HR) bureaucracy and diversity officers at the expense of parishes.
The report – Restoring the Value of Parishes: The foundations of welfare, community, and spiritual belonging in England – by academic researcher and consultant, Esmé Partridge, found that a “managerial turn” in the Church in the past two decades has left ordinary parishes “struggling to survive”.
Her report said the Church’s 42 dioceses had taken on “large numbers of staff” since the turn of the millennium while merging parishes and reducing clergy numbers to cut costs.
These administrative positions include HR jobs and a series of “politicised roles” such as diversity, social justice, LGBT and net zero officers.
This trend means that “dioceses across the country now employ so many people that, on average, there is one administrator to every three-and-a-half priests”.
The report found that 21 per cent of diocesan spending is now going on administrative costs, almost double that of large charities such as Oxfam (10 per cent).
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
