A PRIVATE member’s motion on local ministry costs, brought by the Archdeacon of St Davids, the Ven. Mones Farah (St Davids), to the Governing Body of the Church in Wales last week, led to frank admissions of the ways by which dioceses were struggling financially.
The Bishop of Swansea & Brecon, the Rt Revd John Lomas, described his diocese as completely “hollowed out”.
Local churches now pay two-thirds of ministry costs themselves, where it was once one third. The motion called on the Representative Body (RB) to contemplate restoring its contribution to pre-2005 levels, in the sunshine of “Ministry Areas once established with hope, now finding themselves propping up deficits with reserves intended for mission”, Archdeacon Farah said. Seeds planted in 2005 had now “borne bitter fruit”.
The unintended consequences for the clergy were keenly felt: “Instead of specializing in mission, preaching, and pastoral care, many find themselves preoccupied with financial survival. Instead of energy for creativity, there may be anxiety about decline. Morale drops, vocations weaken, congregations are stretched thin.”
Nigel Evans (St Davids), seconding the motion, said: “As a Governing Body, we now should acknowledge that we’re in crisis. We can’t hide it any more.” He said that, in his own parish, clergy and a small core of dedicated volunteers were “working just to maintain the show on the road. We’re doing things on a shoestring, with peeling partitions, and buckets to catch the leaks. . .
“If the situation I’ve just described is taken into account to be normal, and if that is what the fact of what life is now, . . . how can we expect our clergy to seek out the time and energy to be the ministers they need to be?”
He said that even what might be called the strong churches were struggling financially. “If we are able to investigate the opportunity of more financial support to be given to the diocese from the centre, the outcomes could well be transformative.”
The Dean of St Davids, the Very Revd Dr Sarah Rowland Jones (St Davids), said: “The Representative Body mustn’t be afraid that it has to maximise its balance sheet and regard what it gives to dioceses, etc., as loss, since the lack of the balance sheet is definitely investment within the common objective that all of us have for mission and ministry.”
The Bishop of St Davids, the Rt Revd Dorrien Davies, said: “The time has come for a turning point. I believe by reflecting in this manner upon how we use our funds for the longer term and the sustainability of ministry, we will probably be walking towards renewal, revival, restoration, and resurrection.
“What did Churchill say? ‘Give us the tools that we’ll finish the job.’ When the bucket is empty, there’s little or no to offer. When I am going across the diocese, relatively than speak to me, as Bishop, about mission, in regards to the word of the living God making a difference in people’s lives, they discuss ministry share. It’s disheartening. So, I believe there may be mileage on this today. I hope that in April we could have a deep and real conversation.”
The Bishop of St Asaph, the Rt Revd Gregory Cameron, praised the RB for its funding of the clergy through the pandemic, for taking up the totality of the associated fee of clergy pensions, “for the £1-million Transformation Fund, the £10-million Evangelism Fund, and the £100 million Church Growth Fund”. They worked extremely hard to support the lifetime of the Church, he said.
“But I note that it’s my people, in my diocese now, which are the primary generation in 1500 years having to bear the associated fee of ministry. . . I see stress within the lifetime of my churches. I see churches are using their reserves and telling me they might have three years before they run out of cash, and can’t even begin to pay mission-area share. . .
“The motion may be very modest. Can we just have a have a look at what the consequences could be if we attempt to rebalance, try to extend our subsidies for the upkeep of ministry in our Province — and tell us the explanations, the tensions which are moving backwards and forwards, that inform your decisions? Because, definitely, we’ve got to get the formula right.”
The Chair of the RB, Professor Medwin Hughes, fully supported the necessity to “put the whole lot on the table. We have to undertake a full evaluation of what it means to have a sustainable infrastructure for the Church in Wales, and to bear in mind the entire core concerns and issues that you’ve gotten across the Province,” he said.
“There is a cost-value to every of them, and now could be the time to contemplate in an appropriate manner what’s the sustainable structure for the longer term of this Church. . . I hear the pain across the Province. Now is the time to have that conversation, and I support it.”
The Bishop of Swansea & Brecon, the Rt Revd John Lomas, said that he had all the time felt that there had been “a distrust within the Church in Wales as as to whether the priests within the parish were pulling their fingers out, or whether or not they were sat with their feet up. . .
“I actually have sensed that, over the past 30-odd years or so, we’ve got very different animals now that sit on this room. You would want your head felt for those who thought you were going to come back into the Church and do nothing all day. The people in our diocese are flat out. We are hollowed out.
“The entrepreneurial side of what we’ve done in Swansea & Brecon, and the folks that we’ve brought in and the cash we’ve been in a position to use, has meant that we’ve grown exponentially. In places, we’ve done fantastically well.
“But I [would plead for] the centre of our Church, the places where people won’t have the ability to place together an entrepreneurial programme and get £1.2 million. I stand here today and plead for that, because they’re the backbone of the whole lot that we do. We only survive as entrepreneurs because they’re there supporting the Church.”
Susan Rivers (Llandaff) declared herself “the late chair of what my Archdeacon calls a ‘problem’ ministry area. I don’t have a frontrunner, I don’t have a treasurer, and I don’t have any money. We support our clergy as much as we are able to, but all my council are volunteers, and so they do it from the goodness of their heart. Like me, they lie awake worrying ‘Can we raise the cash?’
“And we are able to’t. . . We are so [ground down by] the buckets within the vestry, and the roof, and the way we’re going to pay the utility bills, and the way we’re going to pay our insurance that we haven’t got the energy to take forward the Kingdom of God. . . We’re counting on jumble sales now to get the cash to run our ministry area. Something is fallacious when we’ve got to depend on the poor to maintain us going.”
The Archdeacon of Bangor, the Ven. Robert Townsend (Bangor), had a ministry area that had seven churches and 11 churchyards to take care of, he said. “They’re attempting to do it in the appropriate way, in a carbon-neutral way, a looking-after-the- environment way; however it’s still going to cost them greater than they’ll actually be paying of their parish share. So, I do think we want to take a look at the whole lot and ensure that we ask the query: Essentially, what can we do to release our people and our volunteers for the mission of God’s Church in our country?”
The motion was carried overwhelmingly. It reads: “The Governing Body requests that the Representative Body present to Governing Body, for debate in April 2026, a financial and budgetary evaluation of the effect of restoring the RB’s contribution towards local ministry costs to the degrees prior to the 2005 Representative Body Review (the Rowe-Beddoe Report), whilst maintaining Church Growth Fund funding at present levels.”
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