DISTRIBUTING large sums of the Church Commissioners’ funds to dioceses through the Strategic Investment in Mission and Ministry Board (SMMIB) is a mistake, the Bishop of Hereford, the Rt Revd Richard Jackson, said this week.
Bishops would favor to have sufficient funds to stop further cuts to stipendiary clergy posts and pastoral reorganisation.
“When I seek advice from my colleagues, I feel the fact is that plenty of them are applying for grants from SMMIB for projects they should not that convinced are going to make an enormous difference to the lifetime of their diocese,” he said on Wednesday. “What they would like is, ‘Just give me some more cash so I can keep my stipendiary head-count up.’ There could be very clear evidence that maintaining levels of stipendiary clergy results in church growth.”
Bishop Jackson was speaking two days after the Triennium Funding Working Group announced how the allocation from the Commissioners — £1.6 billion over the following triennium — could be distributed (News, 13 June). The total distributed by the SMMIB is ready to rise to £416.4 million.
On Monday, the chair of the Board, Carl Hughes, defended the model. The aim was to “encourage dioceses to think strategically in the long run somewhat than simply focusing every little thing on day-to-day challenges”, he said. Outcomes from investment in diocesan projects were “very positive”.
In April 2024, Hereford diocesan synod carried a motion calling for a capital redistribution of Commissioners’ funds, and the usage of the interest from that capital to support stipendiary ministry. The motion had been carried in seven dioceses (Hereford, Gloucester, Coventry, Bath & Wells, Blackburn, Chichester, and Lincoln), by the point the Bishop of Bath and Wells, Dr Michael Beasley, brought it to the General Synod in February (News, 31 January). The debate was adjourned and is scheduled to start again in July.
On Wednesday, Bishop Jackson said that Hereford had “moved on in some sense. . . We recognise that asset transfer isn’t realistic.” He was not calling for the abolition of SMMIB, he said, but believed that “to place such an unlimited quantum of cash through the SMIIB process is a mistake.”
The proportion of the entire needs to be “very significantly lower” and funding needs to be channelled to diocesan stipend funds “to make sure we are able to keep clergy numbers up somewhat than always cutting and reconfiguring parishes and claiming it’s a clever missional strategy”.
While there was “some evidence” that a number of the SMMIB-funded projects had proved successful, there was “no control” against which to match this, he said. “If you were to have spent the identical amount of cash on maintaining clerical numbers so that you don’t must go to more multi-parish benefices, I believe that that may have had a greater effect on church growth and parochial revitalisation.”
He was not advocating a return to the Darlow formula, based on which dioceses got block grants, he said. His preferred model was for “a ring-fencing of a specific amount of the disbursement, specially for diocesan stipend funds. It’s for the supply of clergy, which is definitely what the Church Commissioners’ assets are primarily intended for in the primary place.”
Accountability could come from “regional bishops’ groups” somewhat than “an incredibly complicated mechanism via people on the centre of the Church of England”, he suggested. The episcopal bench had “moved on quite a great distance within the last thirty years”, he said. “I feel we’re all very keen on growth . . . It is fundamentally a difference of opinion about methodology. Because, in the mean time, all of the control of that vast amount of money is from a really small group of individuals. . . I just don’t feel comfortable with that. We needs to be trusted.”
The current approach was “still rooted in John Spence’s mantra that giving money to dioceses is subsidising decline”, he suggested — a reference to Mr Hughes’s predecessor as chair of the Archbishops’ Council’s Finance Committee. In 2014, a task force chaired by Mr Spence determined that the Darlow approach was “subsidising decline”, had “only a superficial link to growth”, and “failed the poorest communities” (Features, 21 October 2016).
This phrase — alongside others — had had “quite a poor effect on clergy morale”, Bishop Jackson said on Wednesday. As a former chair of the trustees of Trinity College, Bristol, he had seen ordinands training for stipendiary ministry resolve to take the NSM route and retain secular employment, considering “I’m undecided I actually have sufficient confidence within the long-term contract of moving into this vocation and having a post until I retire.”
There was much to welcome in Monday’s announcement, including, he said, the rise within the stipend and pension and “the commitment of the Commissioners each to preserve their asset values and likewise to make very substantial distributions”.
But there was also “a specific amount of smoke and mirrors occurring”, he suggested. While diocesan apportionment was to be eliminated and Lowest Income Communities funding increased, dioceses could be paying into the ministry-training fund and covering the associated fee of a rise within the stipend. Calculations he had made along with his diocesan secretary suggested that his diocese could be just “£1000 higher off”.
The transitional support offered by the Commissioners — £200 million over a nine-year period — was “incredibly welcome”, but was set to taper “really quite savagely”. He estimated that, “in three to 5 years, we will probably be worse off than we’re in the mean time.”
In January, the national review of diocesan funds presented the £200 million as a way to “provide respiration space”, helping dioceses to “address short term financial pressures and fund existing ministry costs whilst waiting for missional interventions to translate into improved financial health” (News, 31 January). It would help to “prevent short-term non-optimal decisions”.
“For all of the trumpeting about increases within the Church of England’s attendance over the previous few years, now we have not yet recovered to the extent of the long-term decline that we might have seen if we hadn’t had Covid,” Bishop Jackson said on Wednesday. “I feel the fact is that, given our age profile, now we have a certain percentage of decline baked in annually as individuals are promoted to glory . . .
”What will stabilise things is a well-motivated clergy workforce which is well-supported and well-financed. . . You get a well-supported gifted cleric, they’ll turn a parish around . . . It’s not projects that deliver latest converts [or] discipleship: it’s local parish churches doing what they do rather well. And to ensure that them to do this, they should have the clerical resources to deliver it.”
The diocese of Hereford — largely rural — received a grant of £450,000 from the SMMIB last 12 months (News, 28 March 2024) after a single Strategic Development Fund grant in 2017. Last 12 months, it confirmed that “extensive consultation” had resulted in a commitment to maintaining “current front-line ministry numbers for so long as we are able to afford it” (Features, 18 October 2024).
It had initially been proposed that numbers be reduced from 72 to 55, given the diocese’s financial challenges. A 2022 presentation on the diocesan vision for the 2020s reported that, of 404 churches, only 17 had a usual Sunday attendance of greater than 50, while 250 had fewer than 20 people. Outside urban areas, the common Anglican is aged 72.
Bishop Jackson said on Wednesday that his views were “quite widely shared” amongst his episcopal colleagues, even amongst those that had received “substantial tranches of money. . . If we got an absolute selection, we might somewhat be ready where we’re not having to chop clerical posts and amalgamate parishes and reduce our headcount. We would somewhat be ready where we are able to have a level of stability and possibly even increase within the numbers.”
In a paper introducing the Hereford motion in February, Dr Beasley warned of “catastrophic inadequacies of diocesan stipendiary funds” which might “fatally undermine” the national Vision and Strategy. Cuts to clergy posts achieved through pastoral reorganisations with the creation of ever more and bigger multi-parish benefices were “devastating to the workload and morale of clergy, church officers and parishes”.
In March, the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Jonathan Gibbs, told his diocesan synod that “the renewed and strengthened emphasis on SMMIB and the Diocesan Investment Programme, with resources going only to special projects approved by the Board, further exacerbates the sense of control by the centre. . .
“Many of us feel that dioceses themselves at the moment are significantly better placed and equipped to work out how and where the cash would best be spent for the sake of mission locally” (News, 21 March).
The Church Commissioners have been contacted for comment.
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