AMONG the speeches that brought laughter to the General Synod chamber this week was the Revd Marcus Walker’s in the debate on the distribution of the Church Commissioners’ funds. “Please forgive me if I sound like something I have never sounded before . . . a Marxist,” he said, as a former president of Oxford University’s Conservation Association. “Where does power lie?” It was an enquiry that surfaced repeatedly at a meeting when the Synod was warned that the Church faced an “existential crisis”: £60 million in diocesan deficits, cuts to stipendiary posts (leaving clergy covering larger areas), long vacancies, and a slump in vocations. While the Synod welcomed spending plans for the next triennium totalling £1.6 billion, reservations lingered. “All dioceses have become dependent on central funding over which they have no control,” observed Julie Dziegiel, an accountant serving on the Oxford diocesan board of finance. “This is wrong. If we want a centrally controlled Church, we should debate the concept properly.”
Her analysis echoed comments made elsewhere. In a paper four years ago, the Gloucester diocesan secretary, Benjamin Preece Smith, wrote: “This side of the grave, money brings power — the financial flows of the past 25 years have disrupted the ancient balance of authority in the Church, this should not be ignored.” The decision to transfer responsibility for future clergy pension contributions from the Commissioners to dioceses in 1997 had been funded by the sale of historic assets, he reported. Clergy had been “at the sharp end of merged benefices, sold parsonages and a parish share that increase inexorably above inflation year on year over decades”. In the early 21st century, there had been “a large scale disendowment of the local church”.
Meanwhile, with impressive returns, the Commissioners have accumulated a £11.1-billion fund, and with financial strength comes decision-making power. Ten years have passed since the Commissioners announced their plans to break their inter-generational equity rule, releasing millions of pounds in strategic development funding for which dioceses would bid. There is, at diocesan level, an “increased dependency” on the NCIs, the recent review of the dioceses’ finances concluded. And, in in York, frustrations were expressed in every House. A parish priest, tired of feeling like a failure, recalled the “ever receding horizon of cost-of-ministry payments”. The Bishop of Hereford identified an “unpleasant subtext that says that local diocesan leadership teams are incompetent to make . . . decisions”.
For their part, the Commissioners and Archbishops’ Council point to the generosity of distributions, the largest in their history, their desire to work in partnership with dioceses, and the results of strategic investment to date. Attempts by members to use legislation to shift money back down the chain failed, amid warnings of financial liabilities and unintended consequences. For now, the new balance of power that Mr Preece Smith identified appears unassailable. A renewal of trust between the local Church and its national institutions is now the prize on the table.
