A £22-MILLION ten-year strategy agreed by Chichester diocesan synod — to increase church-planting and revitalisation, rebalance the supply of stipendiary ministry towards areas of highest need, and reduce stipendiary clergy numbers while expanding “focal” ministry — has secured in-principle funding of £11.1 million from the Archbishops’ Council.
Of the initial £1.9 million awarded by the Strategic Investment in Mission and Ministry Board (SMMIB), £1.2 million is capability funding, paying for employees support in parishes and to run the programme. The strategy states that it “isn’t our desire to extend the team at Church House, but to a limited extent we are going to have to achieve this with a view to provide the programme management that’s required to deliver this ambitious programme, and to satisfy the needs of the national church.
“The money will extend the posts of three members of staff who’ve helped the develop the strategy, funded with an earlier grant of £599,764, until 2030. One member will serve in a more deprived deanery.”
The remaining £588,000 will likely be spent on a Mission Fund — to which all parishes can apply — and plans to commission “focal ministers” in no less than 30 smaller churches, “to supply focused local leadership with the expectation of modest growth in these churches despite a discount in stipendiary ministry”.
Chichester is about to undergo pastoral reorganisation over the approaching decade, “reluctantly” reducing the supply of stipendiary clergy “to a more sustainable level”.
“Whilst pastoral reorganisation with a lower level of stipendiary ministry allocated is not going to result in missional growth, it could result in a more sustainable position,” the strategy states. “However, if the reorganisation is accompanied by the appointment of 1 or two Focal Ministers, then there’s every prospect of no less than holding, if not growing, numbers.”
Last week, the diocese gave several examples of churches that had recorded growth and where lay people functioned as focal ministers. A conventional Catholic parish had grown from 49 to 62, largely due to a churchwarden’s efforts; in one other parish, a lay apostolic employee had seen a congregation of three grow to greater than 40.
The diocese has not stipulated what number of stipendiary posts are resulting from be lost in the approaching years, but refers to rebalancing the supply of stipendiary ministry towards areas with higher levels of deprivation, that are less well resourced and have larger populations. These include what the diocese calls “the coastal strip”, Crawley, and Hastings.
The £1-million subsidy currently provided for essentially the most deprived parishes is predicted to proceed. A diocesan spokesperson said that the numbers cut would depend upon parish-share contributions. Between the 2023 and 2026 budgets, the variety of budgeted posts had fallen from 222 to 215.
The reductions were announced as a response to “sustained shortfalls in parish share contributions”. In 2024, the Bishop’s Council set a goal to scale back the budgeted deficit by £1.5 million, with £550,000 to return from potential post reductions, “making the most of the suitable opportunities as and once they occur”, in response to a diocesan-synod paper of May 2024. Last week, the spokesperson said that the diocese was focused on reducing the deficit operating budget, which in 2025 had come right down to £723,000.
ST MATTHIAS’S, FIVEWAYSST MATTHIAS’S, FIVEWAYS
A paper on the diocesan strategy presented last November said that Chichester had been in a position to sustain a “relatively high variety of stipendiary clergy in comparison with population size”: one stipendiary priest for each 9414 people, compared with a median of 11,416, although this varied significantly by area.
Between 2011 and 2023, average weekly attendance fell from 43,700 to twenty-eight,000, although, previously 4 years, one in five churches had grown numerically. The growth strategy envisages that numbers might grow over the last decade by between 3000 and 4000, including as much as 1600 children and young people. The diocesan bid from the SMMIB was for £11.7 million, along with investment of £5.1 million from the diocesan board of finance, and a goal of a £5-million optional contribution from parishes to meeting the associated fee of kids, youth, or family (CYF) employees.
The SMMIB has agreed to contemplate an in-principle award of £9.2 million for the revitalisations and CYF strands of the strategy. Between 2017 and 2022, the diocese was awarded £4.2 million in Strategic Development Fund grants for the revitalisation of churches through “Apostolic Partnerships” (the diocesan term for church-planting). This included investment in All Saints’, Hove, an “inclusive” Catholic parish; and St Peter’s, Brighton, and St John’s, Crawley, each within the Holy Trinity, Brompton, network.
Of ten existing partnerships listed within the strategy, eight are a part of the HTB network and largely chargeable for generating the 104-per-cent growth in adult and 167-per-cent increase in child attendance previously decade. They include St Richard’s, Hollingdean, which is on a Brighton housing estate, and had been closed for nearly a decade when it reopened in 2021. It now has greater than 100 people attending every Sunday for worship.
The recent strategy says that, while fruitful, these SDF projects have “consumed a big amount of energy and focus, and we’ve not had the financial or human resource to supply similar focus elsewhere, with the result that we’ve seen above average decline in lots of other areas across the diocese. We now need a diocesan-wide strategy that can provide growth in a big variety of parishes, concurrently making them more sustainable.”
While in search of growth across all traditions and contexts, there will likely be a concentrate on children and young people, and people communities “where a smaller than average percentage of individuals come to church, especially where there’s a high level of deprivation”. It goals on the “reinvigoration” of least 23 churches in the primary phase of the programme, and 13 within the second phase, including an extension of the prevailing SDF programmes. There are plans to extend paid children’s and youth employees in 37 churches.
Overall, it is predicted that 170 parishes will likely be “strengthened”, the funding “primarily focused on the supply of additional paid resource”. The strategy says that “prioritising doesn’t mean an exclusive focus and other parishes will receive investment where there’s a transparent case for this.” The goal is to extend the Mission Fund to £950,000.
A 2022 diocesan paper on apostolic partnerships suggested that the term was more “helpful” than “planting”. “When a partnership requires a priest of 1 tradition to minister inside one other tradition, careful and sensitive preparation and ongoing support is needed, so that they’ll inhabit and honour the theology and spirituality underpinning the liturgy and worship where they minister.”
