All Flesshe ys Grasse

On another day, Reg’s funeral would have dominated my thinking yesterday (as it did until the evening). It’s not every funeral service that begins with a preamble from the departed laying out his thinking behind how it’s put together and the spirit with which we should all approach it. His outline notes include the instruction ‘Eulogy (if deserved)’: I have no idea what one does to ‘deserve’ a eulogy, and it’s not my place to decide anyway. The love and honour in which Reg was held was palpable, as was his sense of gratitude and joyousness – though shot through with the extremity of the way he died. I spoke to one of my predecessors as Rector for whom Reg had served as churchwarden in the 1960s: his predecessor had told him how ‘this is such a good parish. You’ll love them into heaven.’

As an antidote, in the evening I went with our treasurer to a meeting about the new Parish Share system the diocese is proposing. Now, this is all a bit complex, but bear with me. The Diocese of Guildford derives more of its £11.7M income from its parishes than any other Church of England diocese, 94% (in Lincoln it’s just over 40%), because it lacks the historic endowments and landholdings the older dioceses have. This means that if churches are subsidised for any reason, the money basically has to come from all the other churches, essentially reallocating resources from a handful of larger evangelical churches to smaller ones. The distortions arising from this system have in recent years been mitigated by a complex arrangement of caps and floors on the annual changes in the sum the diocese demands from each parish. It all means that how the figure for any parish is arrived at is opaque to say the least. The diocese also reckons that the actual cost of each stipendiary clergyperson has been significantly underestimated. ‘It’s not fair!’ the Bishop outlined at the start of the meeting: the system should not ‘penalise growth or reward decline’.

So there is to be a new system. Each parish’s quota will be calculated on what it gets (a vicar, for instance, calculated as costing £55K per year), a share of the common costs of the diocese, and an adjustment based on the relative prosperity of the parish. There will continue to be cross-subsidies, but they will be apparent and transparent rather than covert, and seen explicitly as ‘an investment for growth’. In the future, if a parish in Guildford Diocese is subsidised, it’ll know it.

Well. It struck me that this shift marks another stage in a huge process of centralisation which has gone on for decades. Once upon a time each parish in the Church of England was a virtually independent unit, financially and administratively; occasionally a bishop would turn up to confirm people or to discipline a naughty Anglo-Catholic clergyman but that was basically it. Then in the 1960s clerical incomes were standardised as the parishes handed their historic endowments over to the dioceses to be put into a central pool, possibly the greatest single act of Christian charity in this country’s history and one that nobody really talks about. Gradually clergy also began sending their fees for marriages and funerals into the diocesan pot as well. This financial centralisation should be seen alongside the long effort by the bishops to get more control over the patronage process, that is, who has the right to present a candidate to be incumbent of a parish; and the abolition of the Parson’s Freehold, the incumbent’s absolute security of tenure which is now (except for those who, like me, were already in place) replaced by licences for a term of years. Freehold gave clergy the freedom to innovate without worrying about being slapped over the wrist, but it also gave them the freedom to be alcoholics, depressives, oddballs, or plain idle buggers. Put all this together and the picture that emerges is of a massive and decades-long process in which the parish ceases to be the strategic unit for the mission of the Church of England, and is replaced by the diocese. The diocese’s hand may still be relatively light and respectful of the traditions of each parish, and bishops certainly tend not to behave with the brutal high-handedness that some once did, but the striking thing is that it has a hand at all. This is a shift from a situation in which parishes are given a priest and then left essentially to get on with it, to one in which strategic direction is set centrally and then implemented locally.

I said this, and the chaps from the diocesan offices didn’t like it at all, which suggests to me that I’m on to something. I didn’t at the time take the further step of summarising the proposed change, which I characterise – possibly caricature – as a shift from saying ‘every parish needs a priest and we will provide one’ to saying ‘every parish will have a priest if it earns one, and, if it can’t pay, we will decide what “earning” means’.

The change probably won’t cripple Swanvale Halt church. I and the treasurer guess that, when the new system comes in, we’ll have to find another £5-10K per annum, a challenging but not impossible amount. But far worse and more depressing than the shift in balance from parish to diocese, which is perhaps an inevitable process, is the managerialist and results-driven ideas behind the bishop’s statement about ‘penalising growth and rewarding decline’. What morally pejorative terms those are. The assumption is that a church can grow if only it tries, and therefore if it’s not growing it must be complacent and idle. This new model is very much ‘salvation by works’ rather than ‘salvation by grace’ – payment by results, rather than needs. It works entirely against everything we tell people about their essential value, about God valuing the lowly and weak. Whether centrally-directed strategy and incentivisation will ‘work’ better than hands-off universal provision, or will just accelerate decline, is an open question.

And it’s on God that I try to focus. Ultimately my value comes from him, from what I am in his eyes, not in the eyes of the Church of England. It doesn’t make me feel that good, though.