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 prefer to have sufficient funds to prevent further cuts to stipendiary clergy posts and pastoral reorganisation.
“When I talk to my colleagues, I think the reality is that a number of them are applying for grants from SMMIB for projects they are not that convinced are going to make a huge difference to the life of their diocese,” he said on Wednesday. “What they would really like is, ‘Just give me some more money so I can keep my stipendiary head-count up.’ There is very clear evidence that maintaining levels of stipendiary clergy leads to 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 next triennium — would be distributed (News, 13 June). The total distributed by the SMMIB is set 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 term rather than just focusing everything 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 use 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 time 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 begin again in July.
On Wednesday, Bishop Jackson said that Hereford had “moved on in some sense. . . We recognise that asset transfer is not realistic.” He was not calling for the abolition of SMMIB, he said, but believed that “to put such an enormous quantum of money through the SMIIB process is a mistake.”
The proportion of the total should be “very significantly lower” and funding should be channelled to diocesan stipend funds “to ensure we can keep clergy numbers up rather than constantly cutting and reconfiguring parishes and claiming it’s a clever missional strategy”.
While there was “some evidence” that some of the SMMIB-funded projects had proved successful, there was “no control” against which to compare this, he said. “If you were to have spent the same amount of money on maintaining clerical numbers so you don’t have to go to more multi-parish benefices, I suspect that that would have had a greater effect on church growth and parochial revitalisation.”
He was not advocating a return to the Darlow formula, according to which dioceses were given block grants, he said. His preferred model was for “a ring-fencing of a certain amount of the disbursement, specially for diocesan stipend funds. It’s for the provision of clergy, which is actually what the Church Commissioners’ assets are primarily intended for in the first place.”
Accountability could come from “regional bishops’ groups” rather than “an incredibly complicated mechanism via people at the centre of the Church of England”, he suggested. The episcopal bench had “moved on quite a long way in the last thirty years”, he said. “I think we are all very keen on growth . . . It is fundamentally a difference of opinion about methodology. Because, at the moment, all the control of that vast amount of cash is from a very small group of people. . . I just don’t feel comfortable with that. We should 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 decide to take the NSM route and retain secular employment, thinking “I’m not sure I have sufficient confidence in the long-term contract of entering into this vocation and having a post until I retire.”
There was much to welcome in Monday’s announcement, including, he said, the increase in the stipend and pension and “the commitment of the Commissioners both to preserve their asset values and also to make very substantial distributions”.
But there was also “a certain amount of smoke and mirrors going on”, he suggested. While diocesan apportionment was to be eliminated and Lowest Income Communities funding increased, dioceses would be paying into the ministry-training fund and covering the cost of an increase in the stipend. Calculations he had made with his diocesan secretary suggested that his diocese would be just “£1000 better 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 five years, we will be worse off than we are at the moment.”
In January, the national review of diocesan finances presented the £200 million as a means to “provide breathing 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 the trumpeting about increases in the Church of England’s attendance over the last few years, we have not yet recovered to the level of the long-term decline that we would have seen if we hadn’t had Covid,” Bishop Jackson said on Wednesday. “I think the reality is that, given our age profile, we have a certain percentage of decline baked in each year as people 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 can turn a parish around . . . It’s not projects that deliver new converts [or] discipleship: it’s local parish churches doing what they do really well. And in order for them to do that, they need to have the clerical resources to deliver it.”
The diocese of Hereford — largely rural — received a grant of £450,000 from the SMMIB last year (News, 28 March 2024) after a single Strategic Development Fund grant in 2017. Last year, it confirmed that “extensive consultation” had resulted in a commitment to maintaining “current front-line ministry numbers for as long as we can 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 more than 50, while 250 had fewer than 20 people. Outside urban areas, the average Anglican is aged 72.
Bishop Jackson said on Wednesday that his views were “quite widely shared” among his episcopal colleagues, even among those who had received “substantial tranches of cash. . . If we were given an absolute choice, we would rather be in a position where we’re not having to cut clerical posts and amalgamate parishes and reduce our headcount. We would rather be in a position where we can have a degree of stability and maybe even increase in the numbers.”
In a paper introducing the Hereford motion in February, Dr Beasley warned of “catastrophic inadequacies of diocesan stipendiary funds” which would “fatally undermine” the national Vision and Strategy. Cuts to clergy posts achieved through pastoral reorganisations with the creation of ever more and larger 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 are now much better placed and equipped to work out how and where the money would best be spent for the sake of mission locally” (News, 21 March).
The Church Commissioners have been contacted for comment.
