Church bureaucracy is out of control

Why does the Cofe cull parish vicars, instead of reducing bloated top ranks and managerial layers?

During a public Zoom webinar hosted on Saturday by the General Synod (the Church of England’s elected governing body) the Archbishop of York, the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell, presented an update on his “Vision and Strategy” in the wake of Covid. According to this plan, “every member matters” and resources should go to the first line of the ministry, with only basic costs for central bureaucracy. Yet Chelmsford Diocese (the district where Mr Cottrell was previously bishop) has already announced a morale-sapping plan to reduce its parish vicars by 61 this year, while continuing to recruit for new diocesan managerial posts.

Although the Church is not a profit-making business, it is critical that it be financially viable. However, its approach to expenditure is incoherent. Since it is overwhelmingly financed by its parishes, reducing parish vicars (who are central to attracting financial support) sits oddly with recruiting more diocesan staff and new ordinands, and spending £270million in a 10-year programme of “strategic development funding” for new initiatives, such as church plants.

This increases the public perception of remote, empire-building leaders. In his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, the historian Paul Kennedy coined the term “imperial overstretch”, noting that declining empires tend to take cuts out on front-liners, rather than attacking the proper area for shrinkage: central costs.

The Church lost income during the pandemic. It already needed to reduce its cost base. The overdue reduction of the duplicative administration of its 42 dioceses, requested by the General Synod in 2018, makes an obvious way to economise. A parish treasurer recently noted in the Church Times that nearly 30 per cent of his church’s “parish share” bill from the diocese, supposedly to pay for a parish priest, was for diocesan (and central) costs.

The Church is not being localised, or even centralised; it is being “middleised”. Vicars write ruefully: “Please, no more diocesan strategies! No more Five-year Plans!” Parish volunteers complain that onerous paperwork increases their workload and expenses.

Meanwhile, heading the Church’s 42 dioceses are ranks of senior clergy. Long attrition in church attendance has left the Cofe conspicuously top-heavy. The Army, with about 80,000 soldiers, has 65 generals. The Church, with some 6,800 stipendiary (paid) clergy now, has 116 archbishops and bishops (in 1836, there were only 26). A bishop’s stipend, housing, staff and ministry costs would finance multiple vicars.

What is a bishop for? “When we had 25,000 stipendiary clergy, we had fewer bishops and archdeacons, and no assistant archdeacons; and they attended to the spiritual,” comments a retired vicar. “Now, with many fewer clergy, the management has burgeoned and they seem preoccupied with the secular.” Even 130 years ago, with fewer bishops and many more parish clergy and churchgoers, Gilbert and Sullivan proclaimed: “And bishops in their shovel hats/were plentiful as tabby cats/in point of fact, too many!”

Common complaints are that today’s bishops are all appointed by one person and mostly “out of the same stable”, increasingly from Evangelical training colleges and courses. Stirring, intellectual Christian moral leadership could have been comforting in the pandemic. However, the professorial bishops of old have been replaced by managerial bishops. Few have studied theology to postgraduate level.

Yet the Cofe seems tragi-comically incapable of trimming down. Merging three dioceses into the Diocese of Leeds in 2014 failed to save costs, indeed it created an extra bishop.

Like many parish volunteers, I support the Church financially by monthly standing order. Rural parishioners like me are dismissed as “traditionalist” or “conservative” for liking our parish churches and vicars (rather as patients favour doctors and hospitals). So, why should my views be of any interest to the archbishops?

Perhaps I might borrow from the words of my great-great-great grandfather (a Northamptonshire parson with a deeply impressive beard), writing to my great-great grandfather (a wayward son with a fashionable moustache): “Sir, if you wish to take my money, I feel you should take my advice.”