The report, Parish Ministry: Addressing the crisis in stipendiary clergy numbers in the Church of England, is due to be launched in Parliament on Thursday.
It followed a consultation held by Save the Parish at St George’s House, Windsor, in March. Those who attended included principals of theological-education institutions (TEIs), bishops, archdeacons, directors of ordinands, and parish clergy.
Among the challenges identified are what the report describes as the “mixed messages” sent about the vocation to ordained ministry: a call to more ordinands alongside the message given when “nearly bankrupt dioceses” cut the number of stipendiaries they have.
“Our entire project to attract, train and retain clergy relies on a strong and confident theological understanding of what it is to be an Anglican priest, which will be what inspires a postulant and supports a minister throughout long years of service,” the report says. “Confident and joyful priestly ministry will itself engender vocations whether to ordained ministry or to lay callings.”
Without a rise in the number of ordinations, the number of stipendiary clergy in the Church of England will fall to 5400 in 2033 — more than 2000 fewer than the target set under Renewal and Reform, and a 40-per-cent reduction the number in 2000, projections by the Church’s national Ministry Development Team suggest.
The Ministry Council has forecast that the Church needs 630 new clergy per year to achieve the outcomes in the Vision and Strategy projections; but, after a peak, after 13 years, of 591 in 2020, numbers fell to 329 last year. This year, 442 began training.
The severity of the problem has been acknowledged at a national level. In the latest annual report of the Archbishops’ Council, its Secretary-General, William Nye, writes of plans to work with dioceses “to tackle the impending crisis in ministry numbers, to prevent or mitigate a projected decline in stipendiary clergy numbers”. Among the latest developments is a rise in the national minimum stipend.
In recent years, a number of dioceses have announced cuts in stipendiary posts, as they face structural deficits. Restructuring has also prompted debates about what a stipendiary priest does: several dioceses are moving to an “oversight” model.
The Save the Parish report describes the clergy as feeling “undervalued, under-resourced, overworked, frustrated and vulnerable”. There is a need, it suggests, to “challenge secular ideas of success and failure and value the advice and experience of clergy and their parishioners”. The latest Ministry Statistics record that 379 serving clergy resigned in the past year, while 278 retired. A note adds that this does not represent people who have permanently left ministry but includes moves into self-supporting ministry, chaplaincy and PTO roles, among other shifts.
The report also records a concern about the state of theological education, suggesting that “too much utilitarian training is pushing out the nourishing biblical, historical, liturgical and theological knowledge and understanding that will sustain ministry over time and within an often hostile and challenging secular context.” Among the recommendations is the creation of a course on “Anglican basics”, open to anyone.
This week, the Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge, the Revd Dr Isabelle Hamley, who attended the Windsor gathering, agreed that the Church had “lost confidence in articulating what it means to be clergy and why we need clergy”.
This was caused partly by financial pressures, she said. “But I also wonder whether, because the place of the Church in wider society is changing, we haven’t quite found a way of articulating a distinctive Anglican understanding of what it means to be a priest in a changed and changing landscape.”
The General Synod was told last year that, from 2014 to 2024, the percentage of new ordinands joining a residential TEI had fallen from 46 per cent to 20 per cent. Dr Hamley spoke of being “deeply worried” by the “utilitarian approach” taken to training. There was a tendency towards talking about ministry as a “set of skills” and asking “How do we get the jobs done?” rather than a process of being “formed as a person”, she said. She sensed a loss of “a sense that the priest is a really complex and demanding role and that we have to train people for it”.
The changing nature of ministry was a factor in vocation numbers, she suggested. “A lot of people want to go into this vocation because they want to care for people and do mission, to teach and preach; but, actually, more and more, the sheer weight of governance and management of buildings and finances is changing your job away from the thing that you really want to do.
“There is something really odd happening, where we are talking about pushing the tasks of ministry — the things that people really want to do: being spiritual leaders — on to lay people, while clergy do the stuff that actually they don’t need to be clergy to do.”
The Save the Parish manifesto for the elections to the Synod includes pledges to “completely halt cutting stipendiary posts as a tool to balance budget deficits” and “work to limit the size of benefices to no more than five manageable parishes”.
This week, the Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Revd Richard Jackson, welcomed the latest report. “Dioceses do not cut clergy posts willingly but driven by impossible financial pressures,” he said. “But, as the conference articulated, that sets up negative feedback loop with all the current detrimental impacts on clergy wellbeing. I hope this work will encourage us in a national journey to a healthier and balanced financial ecosystem: a virtuous circle and a much more hopeful church.”
“So many of the answers to our problems of attracting and retaining clergy come down to a loss of a sense of the importance of having time to love one another,” the report observes. “We give clergy multiple churches to care for, in which they struggle, making it ever harder to be a true parson: a person, whose vocation is to ‘be’ in a place and fully present to it.”