THE status of the clergy as office-holders “must not be used to position increasing demands and expectations on clergy without offering reciprocal support structures and accountability of those making the demands”, the chair of Church of England Clergy and Employee Advocates (CEECA) said this month.
The Revd Sam Maginnis, who chairs CEECA, a part of Unite the Union’s Faithworkers’ Branch, is the Team Vicar of Horsham. He was responding to a letter in today’s Church Times requesting a discussion about “whether parish priests really are ‘office-holders’ with less job security than most secular employees, or whether it’s a convenient management fiction”.
The letter, from a parish priest who requested anonymity, lists working conditions for the clergy, including: working “on average longer hours than most employees”; being “canonically obliged to stay inside certain types of wording in carrying out certain duties”; and being “compulsorily subject to each a draconian disciplinary system and a system of particular motion outside that system with none appeal or redress rights”.
It says: “Instead of improving freedom for priests-in-charge and diocesan officers who don’t have any freehold, continuing office-holder designation seems more designed to minimise the mutuality of obligations usual elsewhere, evade a proper duty of care, and preserve an autonomy of management conduct which might not be tolerated in modern secular employment structures. The Church seems to lag behind secular society markedly by way of justice and accountability.”
The letter calls on the Church to “release in full the assurances that it has given the Charity Commission in recent times on office-holder-status vulnerability and the eligibility of priests for safeguarding inclusion after they are faced with emotional assaults in the shape of repeated vexatious lay accusations”.
In his response, Mr Maginnis said: “Many stipendiary clergy value the liberty to develop their very own ministry and vocation which being an office-holder brings. However, frontline ministry makes incredible demands on clergy’s physical and emotional resources and, without proper care and support from the dioceses and church hierarchy, incidence of stress, burnout, and breakdown amongst clergy will only increase.”
Among current concerns were the proposals to interchange the Church’s housing provision for retired clergy (News, 2 February), which “represent a radical break within the covenant of care between the C of E and its clergy, fuelling further anxiety and the broader perception amongst clergy that their ministry isn’t any longer understood or valued by the institutional Church”.
Office-holders (including most stipendiary and self-supporting parish clergy, and a few chaplains who shouldn’t have a contract of employment or earn a salary) make up the only largest category among the many clergy, although there are contractual elements to their ministry under common tenure.
This status has been subject to legal challenge in recent times. In 2015, the Court of Appeal rejected claims from Unite that beneficed clergy with freehold needs to be treated as employees or employees, within the case of the Revd Mark Sharpe, who resigned from his post as Rector of Teme Valley South in 2009, claiming that he was bullied by his parishioners and hounded out of office (News, 8 May 2015).
In his summary, the judge gave an in depth précis of the history of the law surrounding clergy appointments, going back so far as the Investiture Contest between popes and Holy Roman Emperors within the eleventh century; and continuing right as much as the introduction of common tenure within the Ecclesiastical Offices (Terms of Service) Measure 2009.
Church House guidance on common tenure notes that “the nice majority of office holders may remain in a specific post until they resign or retire” and lists quite a few rights accrued to clergy office-holders, including the suitable to utilize a grievance procedure. But it also notes that there may be “no resort to an employment tribunal if an office-holder is dissatisfied at the top of a grievance procedure”.
It also states that office-holders cannot claim constructive dismissal, as this “depends upon the existence of a contract of employment the terms of which have been breached by the employer. Office-holders under Common Tenure don’t serve under a contract of employment.” Office-holders have the suitable to appeal to an employment tribunal provided that faraway from office after a capability procedure.
The Government, it notes, “has power to offer the rights of employees to those in work who will not be employees (including clergy, most of whom are office-holders), and is able to impose laws on the Church”.
Last yr, an employment judge ruled that a former curate in training, David Green, while not an worker, was a “employee”, and that his case against Lichfield diocese might be dropped at an employment tribunal (News, 18 August 2023). Mr Green is regarded as the primary clergy office-holder to bring a whistle-blowing detriment claim since a Supreme Court judgment in 2019 granted whistle-blowing protection to office-holders.
In 2020, a judge considering Dr Martyn Percy’s case against Christ Church, Oxford, where he was Dean, ruled that “an office holder might be in an employment relationship with an alleged employer”, and that his case could proceed (News, 6 October 2020).
Alongside legal challenge, recent years have seen the publication of theological and pastoral studies exploring each the freedoms and the vulnerabilities inherent in office-holder status and the “covenant” fairly than “contract” model.
The Covenant for Clergy Care and Wellbeing was made an Act of Synod in 2020 (News, 21 February 2020). A theological reflection by Canon Margaret Whipp, then lead chaplain of Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, observed that “contractual frameworks, resembling role descriptions, by stipulating predetermined limits and safeguards, may provide some useful protection against the worst abuses of covenantal generosity” (News, 5 October 2018).
But she warned that “an unduly legalistic emphasis on entitlement and duty” could “subtly debase and undermine the valuable relational and gratuitous element which, inside a totally theological understanding of covenant, is crucial to our relationships of service and stewardship within the Church of Jesus Christ”.
During the formation of the Covenant, a working group on clergy well-being noted that “agency and skilled office-holder status mean that boundary management is within the hands of the office holder which puts more pressure on clergy in complex and infrequently isolated roles”.
A Living Ministry study published by the Ministry Council last yr, Covenant, Calling and Crisis (News, 13 January 2023), further explored the covenant model, because the “primary basis of clergy working relationships”. It was, the study said, “vulnerable to exploitation each by clergy (in the event that they prioritise autonomy over accountability) and of clergy (if accountability is privileged over autonomy in excessive demands and self-sacrifice)”.
In February, the General Synod carried a personal members’ motion that sought the sanctioning of lay officers for bullying (News, 1 March 2024). The Draft Clergy Conduct Measure will allow for restraint orders to be applied against vexatious complainants (News, 14 July 2023).
Read the letter here
