The recommendations are set out in a new report, Wasted Money in a Diminishing Church, which says that “radical thinking” is necessary to interrupt a cycle of decline which has left many parishioners and clergy “deeply dispirited”.
“We want to break this silence because we are convinced that the Church of England is heading for financial disaster,” write the authors, Canon Robin Gill and Professor John Craven. “More and more of its funds are being spent on administration in every diocese while churchgoing continues to decline, and less and less is spent on supporting parish clergy.
“As clergy are spread ever more thinly in urban and rural areas, services are less frequent, congregations are getting smaller, and less money can be raised in church collections from people who wonder what they are getting for their money.”
Canon Gill, Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent, was theological adviser to Archbishops Robert Runcie and George Carey. Professor John Craven, a former professor of economics, was a member of the Archbishops’ Council from 2006 to 2013. The report has been published by the Centre for Anglican History and Theology at the Universities of Kent and Christ Church Canterbury.
The diocesan-finances review produced for the Archbishops’ Council in 2024 showed that, across dioceses, attendance was down between 25 and 40 per cent since 2015; that parish share was down almost 30 per cent in real terms since the pre-pandemic era; and that, in the same period, the number of ordinands had fallen by 40 per cent. Save the Parish has highlighted a 28-per-cent reduction in the number of full-time stipendiary posts since 2000.
In their report, Professors Gill and Craven chart the expansion that has taken place at diocesan level. They calculate that, in the 21st century, staff numbers almost doubled from about 1,300 in 2005 to 2,300 in 2025, including 220 in safeguarding alone. Dioceses have multiplied from 22 in 1800 to 40 (mainland) today, while the number of bishops is now four times what it was in the Victorian era.
No diocesan reorganisation has taken place since the creation of the diocese of Leeds in 2014. In 2022, a leaked paper for the College of Bishops, produced by the Archbishops and the then Bishop of London, suggested that the Church would have to “surrender much that we have held dear, but which we now believe may well now be hindering our mission” — by considering, among other things, the amalgamation of dioceses.
Two years later, however, the College of Bishops was told that the Dioceses Commission had “agreed with the Archbishops that there will be no ‘big bang’ or centrally-led approach to restructuring or combining dioceses at this time”.
Professors Gill and Craven argue that the Commission should be “reinvigorated, and charged with reducing the number of dioceses to around 30 dioceses by 2032 with a parallel reduction in the numbers of bishops, senior clergy and administrators”.
Concerns about the costs of diocesan officers were among those set out in the leaked 2022 paper, which suggested that they should be kept “as lean as possible to allow as much resource as possible to be focused on frontline mission and ministry”. Save the Parish has calculated that many dioceses employ an average of one staff member to every 3.5 parish clergy, and that “in some cases, this has slipped over the one to one mark.”
Professors Gill and Craven argue in their report that one driver of continued decline is that “money is spent and costly decisions are taken remotely from churchgoers,” many of whom regard aspirations such as the Net Zero target as “unrealistic, extravagant, unsustainable, and deeply depressing”.
Dioceses today are “too remote to make detailed decisions about ministry at local level”, the authors argue. “The difficult task of spreading ministry across a number of thinly populated areas should be tackled locally and transparently by the deanery concerned. They could deploy the number of full-time or part-time clergy that they are willing to fund using the resources allocated to them.”
Under their suggested model, funding from historic resources would be allocated to deaneries on the basis of their relative deprivation. This would include much of the Strategic Investment in Ministry and Mission (SMMIB) from the Archbishops’ Council plus all of Lowest Income Community Funding it allocates.
Acknowledging the possibility that “a deanery will reach the conclusion that it can no longer afford to pay for all the clergy for whom it has previously paid,” they proposes that the Church Commissioners establish an “insurance” scheme that would “guarantee every deanery-based priest (say) two years of continued pay after their deanery had given notice that they needed to reduce their clergy numbers”.
In recent years, several dioceses embarking on restructuring, including Truro, Manchester, and Gloucester, have tasked deaneries with developing local plans, including proposals for clergy deployment.
Asked whether the model would increase bureaucracy and whether deaneries had the required expertise and administrative capacity, Canon Gill said that each one would need “some admin support, either provided by competent volunteers or paid for — and more deprived deaneries should be supported centrally to do this.”
If deaneries ran administration, he said, “those who pay for the whole or a part of the cost of their administrators will know exactly what they are getting for their contribution. There is no objection in my mind to supporting necessary administration, but only if those who pay for it also control it.”
Among the report’s other recommendations is a call to “make a career as a parish priest attractive financially and professionally”. The authors call for an “explicit national commitment that ‘parish priests, not bishops or diocesan administrators, are our first priority’”.
While acknowledging that their recommendations are unlikely to reverse a “widespread decline” that had already set in by the late-Victorian period, the report suggests that the Church today has “opportunities to help people to find meaning in a changing or threatening world” — but only if the Church “changes its priorities radically”.
This would be in keeping with its history, they write. “The Church of England has always been rich in money and skills. It has been ruthless at times in redirecting that wealth towards the needs of a changing society. That ruthlessness will be needed again in the future.”
A copy of the report can be obtained from: rgjc2026@gmail.com