This deceptively simple question highlights some of the complexities within Church of England structures and the challenging and lack of agreement over which decisions should be made where. These are important considerations which deserve rigours debate, reflection and discussion – which we do not have space or time for here!
Our role is to recognise and work within the current reality. If we wish to access significant national funding, we can only do this through a diocesan wide mission development strategy that aligns with key national priorities and aspirations.
Fortunately, we do not feel that these priorities and aspirations are unreasonable or contradict our own local vision and prayers.
We have also seen the real tangible benefits of the diocesan team working in partnership with local parish and benefice leaders in crafting and delivering new plans. Working together in this way is something we would wish to aspire to and support, regardless of how funding flows throughout the Church.
If we are successful in this bid and strategy development, it could results in millions of pounds extra being invested across the parishes of our diocese in the coming years.
First, it’s important to note that in this context the term ‘benefice’ includes single parishes benefices.
Our suggestion to focus investment, support and intervention at benefice level is due mainly to practical considerations.
- Each benefice is under the leadership and care of an incumbent status post (vicar, rector, priest-in-charge, or Team Rector.) By asking each benefice to develop plans, it enables our clergy to work on developing ideas in a joined-up and coherent way across their areas of responsibility.
- We have seen through the Growing Rural Parishes Programme the huge benefits in working at benefice level – especially for our smaller parishes. New ideas and plans that might be beyond a single PCC, become possible when the resourcing and supporting can be shared with their neighbours.
- With 236 parishes, ranging in size from just 39 people to nearly 50,000 people, developing parish level strategies and funding programmes becomes monumentally complex.
This is our current thinking, but we are of course very open to feedback and comments on this.
The data we’ve used is primarily stats and financial returns provided to us by each PCC every year. Due to the long timescales involved in accessing parish data, we are always using figures that are a couple of years out of date. We therefore started this work clearly with that risk in mind and have done our best to accommodate it in our thinking.
It should be noted however, that the primary purpose of the data has been to help identify trends and patterns at a diocesan level. If some statistics are a little bit out in a few parishes, it is unlikely that it would have had a significant impact on the overarching results.
We are however committed to ensuring this exercise is repeated every year with the latest data available being collated and shared back to our parishes to help inform the development of local plans and strategies. This will enable us to track progress, ensuring the quality and consistency of the data improves with each iteration.
This figure is an estimate at the current time, designed to recognise a few realities:
- Not all benefices will wish to engage. Although the offer of funding maybe attractive, the need for any funding to be linked to agreed targets and objectives may discourage some benefices from wishing to engage further. We wish to respect that and not force support and intervention on any benefice.
- Some benefices may not need support. We are already actively working with a number of benefices through existing strategic programmes and therefore there may not be such an urgent need to provide further support in the coming years.
- Not all benefices are sustainable. Whilst very difficult to discuss, we need to recognise with honesty and openness that not all our current benefices can be made sustainable in their current form. The reasons for such situations will be varied and complex. We do not anticipate that this will be a large number, but it is a reality we will need to face with compassion and fortitude.
Potentially!
If there is a clear cogent argument for increased ordained stipendiary ministry in a benefice development plan, that, supported by evidence and detailed modelling, would lead to greater long term missional and financial sustainability then we would love to look at using some of the funds to increase our clergy headcount further.
Our Resource Churches and subsequent church plants have been a huge blessing to several of our parishes and communities over recent years. With each new revitalisation, we have all learned much, seen new people come to Christ, and new outreach into the community.
We don’t yet know!
The detailed work of costing these plans has not yet been undertaken as didn’t want to progress to that stage until our consultation process had concluded.
That being said, we would anticipate that a programme of this scale over the proposed timescale would require a significant budget of many millions of pounds.