THE Clergy Support Trust has questioned why it had to provide financial help to at least one fifth of the serving clergy prior to now yr.
The trust gave £2 million in grants for “essentials” — including home appliances, laptops, and energy costs. As a result, the charity’s chief executive, the Revd Ben Cahill-Nicholls, asked this week whether it was “complicit” in a wider failure to take care of the clergy properly.
Speaking before the charity’s annual festival of thanksgiving, to be held in St Paul’s Cathedral on Tuesday, Mr Cahill-Nicholls spoke of the privilege of meeting the needs of the clergy, but in addition of his concern that the high percentage now receiving support — 22 per cent of the serving clergy last yr — was indicative of an “unacceptable narrative” taking hold within the Church. “Why is it that £2 million of charitable funds are being spent on things that basically are pretty basic to day-to-day living and ministry?”
The trust gave out 6802 grants last yr: a 25-per-cent increase on the previous yr. In 2018, the entire was 1185. In total, it supported 2711 households — greater than double the 2020 figure, and almost five times the 2018 figure. In five dioceses, the share of clergy supported was 30 per cent and better.
Well-being grants made up 42 per cent of the entire, followed by emergency grants (for general living expenses and a variety of situations) at 25 per cent. Holidays accounted for nearly £2 million in grants; £156,000 was allocated for appliances; £217,000 for energy costs; and £648,000 for car-related costs.
In recent years, the charity has got down to expand its grant-making, setting a goal in 2019 of doubling the variety of clergy families supported by 2022 (News, 15 March 2019). The charity’s 2022-25 strategy features a goal to assist 3000 families with financial support annually by 2025. It expects to supply a minimum of 6500 grants per yr.
The rise in grants could partly be attributed to improvements within the running of the charity, Mr Cahill-Nicholls said: it was much easier to use for a grant; a “kinder experience” was offered; and there had been extensive efforts to “get on the market” and communicate the organisation’s existence. Other issues were the recent Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.
Another a part of the context, nevertheless, was the state of the Church. “It is increasingly clear to me that we’re simply not taking care of our people in addition to we must always be,” he said. “The emotional burdens in parish ministry are enormous, post-pandemic.” The stipend had not risen according to inflation, he identified (News, 9 February). And there have been “enormous ecclesial pressures on people . . . an expectation of professionalisation but without the resource that goes with that. . . That is at the guts of why numerous people, who perhaps five or ten years ago wouldn’t have reached out to us, are doing so now.”
Historically, the charity had been “quite a quiet organisation”, he said. The cost of living had tended to “ebb and flow”, and the charity had been there to “hold the umbrella up when it rains”. It was becoming louder, nevertheless, to advocate on behalf of its beneficiaries. As an organisation that was “contained in the Church but outside the Church”, it was in a position to speak to church leaders and the national church institutions and say things that a person parish priest may not give you the chance to say.
His chief concern was the £2 million spent on “the essentials”: “either things that ought to be reasonably priced on a basic income” or things that were “completely essential to the ministry we predict people to give you the chance to do”, similar to laptops. This was “enormously problematic for the Church”.
He asked himself: “Have we actually turn out to be complicit in a narrative that’s unacceptable?” He was aware that one bishop had referred to the charity as “the bank of mum and pop”. The challenge, he said, was that being stricter about what the charity funded would have a detrimental impact on applicants. The charity was, as a substitute, attempting to have a “way more mature and nuanced conversation with the Church about who ought to be doing what”.
This was going well, and powerful relationships were in place, he said. But it was vital to not be “too close” to the Church, on condition that it was the charity’s total independence that meant that applicants felt “protected” to approach it. In a recent Living Ministry survey, which found that one third of the incumbents questioned exhibited signs of clinical depression, one third of the respondents said that they didn’t trust the diocese to take care of their well-being (News, 23 February).
Last yr, the Trust awarded greater than £1 million in financial-support grants, assessed according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Minimum Income Standard, described by Foundtation as “the income that folks need to succeed in a minimum socially acceptable lifestyle within the UK today, based on what members of the general public think”. The 2021 Clergy Remuneration Review reported that the clergy stipend was “sufficient for many clergy to be above the minimum income standard — taking account of free housing”, but not for some larger families (News, 24 June 2021).
Among the clergy supported by the Trust is the Revd Dr Melanie Harrington-Haynes, Vicar of the Kew Benefice, who’s married to a different priest and has three children. The charity has funded two laptops: one through an emergency grant, to enable her daughter to do schoolwork in the course of the pandemic, and one other work laptop for her own use. It has also contributed to a family holiday.
“I don’t think we might give you the chance to go on holiday if it wasn’t for the Clergy Support Trust,” she said this week. “In parish ministry, it’s so vital to get away, because we’ve a public presence in our parishes, and to properly rest we’d like to give you the chance to go some other place, to recharge our batteries, and things are increasingly expensive.” She praised the pastoral skills of the charity’s staff in receiving applications, and advised those with financial worries, who were concerned about eligibility, to contact them to speak through their situation. “We are very, very grateful.”
The Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy was founded by the sons of clergymen in 1655 to lift funds for destitute Anglican clergy who had lost their livings under Oliver Cromwell. In 2012, it was formally amalgamated with one other charity, Friends of the Clergy Corporation, founded within the nineteenth century. The latest name got here into use in 2019.
Its most up-to-date annual report (2022) said that investments had doubled in a decade. Total investment funds stood at £105.4 million, which implies that the charity doesn’t actively fund-raise, aside from through the annual festival service. In 2022, expenditure exceeded income by greater than £2 million, reflecting what’s described because the trustees’ “planned policy to start a period of operating deficits after a few years of annual surpluses”.
While acknowledging the strength of the charity’s funds, Mr Cahill-Nicholls observed that “enormous wealth is just enormous when you don’t spend it,” and highlighted the far greater size of the Church Commissioners’ assets: “Presumably, quite numerous it’s to revitalise parishes up and down the country, and I might argue that clergy well-being ought to be a really significant a part of that.
“We have, as a Church, to stop seeing clergy well-being as nice to have, as a side issue, as something peripheral to what’s really happening,” he said. “The only option to evangelise a nation and to construct the Kingdom of God is to have people who find themselves willing to be the evangelists; and, in case your evangelists aren’t staying within the job, or think that they’re too badly paid or sorted to make it value their while to get ordained in the primary place, we aren’t going to evangelise the nation, we aren’t going to construct the Kingdom of God on earth.”
While much had modified since 1655, he hoped that, were the founders to attend the Festival, they might “see something that felt different enough to challenge them and similar enough for them to feel protected, and like something vital had grown from their very humble origins”.
