Save The Parish's Third Birthday
A message from Save The Parish founder, Marcus Walker
Three years ago Save the Parish was founded on August 3 at a public meeting at my church of St Bartholomew the Great. From our inception we have been a grassroots movement and have been entirely volunteer-run. This gives us the strength that comes from being close to the realities of life on the frontline, and the weakness that comes from relying on the free time of people who are already busy – often trying to save our own local parishes as well as doing our bit for the national church. On this three year anniversary, I would like to reflect on a few things that have happened over these three years.
1. We have organised. General Synod elections occurred less than three months after we launched and over 150 candidates were elected using our logo or identifying themselves with us in a clear way. Of these around 80 regularly vote with us in Synod, although General Synod does not have a formal whipping system and each vote is stand alone. We’re nowhere near a majority (not in this Synod at any rate) but our presence seems to have shifted a lot of the language that the national church uses. In her address to the Save the Parish conference in Bristol this year, Alison Milbank explored why the language we use about our parishes and our church matters and how it informs action, which can be read here:
2. We have done the maths. At our launch one of the groups of people I said was most important to come forward and volunteer were people who know how to analyse accounts. This call was well and truly answered and we have been lucky to have a team of people, our Financial Scrutiny Committee, who have dedicated time and effort to explore the accounts of all 42 dioceses, the National Church, and the Church Commissioners. Among them are an auditor of the European Commission, a partner of one of the Big Four accountancy firms, a number of forensic accountants, a number of business people, and the former Second Sea Lord and Commander of the Fleet. The most significant impact of our work was to persuade the national church to follow suit. When we did a forensic analysis of the entire economy of the church, it became clear that no such project had been run recently centrally, and the finance team at Church House agreed to conduct one. This is incredibly welcome as they have access (we hope) to a level of detail which we, working only from published accounts do not. You can find their report here, and it makes depressing reading:
Read diocesan financial review here
You can find our analysis here:
Read STP financial analysis here
You may note a startling similarity between our homegrown diagram explaining the church’s finances and that used by the church finance team. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery…
3. On the back of this, we’ve really started working out where the money comes from and where it’s going. The biggest challenge to the viability of parishes comes from their financial situation, and the disastrous financial situation of the dioceses. The closure and merger of parishes is done more in sorrow than in anger, but generally with the line that “There is no alternative”. What has become very clear is that there is an alternative, that the poorest parishes in the country, the ones least able to fund themselves, have always had provision from the national church, and that the money – the income from the Church Commissioners’ £10.2 billion endowment –is there waiting to be used for its proper purpose. The Act of Parliament which governs how the money should be spent specifies that it should be used to support “the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required” but it has been repurposed and wasted in enormous quantities. Here’s an article I wrote on this very topic last year:
4. At heart we all want the same thing, which is healthy, thriving, sustainable churches. The trouble is the plans being imposed on the church (in remarkably similar projects, despite denials that there is any national plan) simply don’t work. We know this because the vast expenditure on Strategic Development Funding (using £176 million of money earmarked for parishes to inject large sums in short-term projects, none of which could be used to support any continuing ministry, and none of which could be spent in rural areas) failed – attracting only 12,400 of the predicted 89,000 “new witnessed disciples” promised by the recipients of the money. We know this because the millions spent remodelling the Wigan deanery into one mega benefice, with fewer priests, a shift away from regular communion, and the removal of local power and responsibility led to a collapse in worshippers by a third in under a decade and a collapse in giving by £500,000. Emma Thompson wrote about what these changes mean spiritually and theologically in The Times, here:
Read Emma’s article on why people need a shepherd and not a focal minister
I explore the tragedy inflicted on Wigan here:
5. The Diocese of Truro is the first diocese to see a fight back against the plans being imposed upon it. Plans to gut parish ministry and dramatically to reduce clergy numbers are explored in this article in the Spectator:
Is the Church of England giving up on Sunday worship?
Save the Parish Cornwall is the first local group to be set up and is very active. Rather than just accepting their fate, and rather than just moaning about proposed changes, they have put their money where their mouths are and made a serious proposal for a completely new start for the diocese. Although the diocesan structure appears set upon their current course, there is a small chance the new bishop, when he or she is appointed, might have new ideas. Here is their plan:
Over the past three years we have moved from being an insurgency trying to get heard to an established group trying to change the whole way in which the Church of England thinks about and funds its parishes and its mission in England. This has been down to the hard work of those who give up a ridiculous amount of time to serve on our Steering Committee, on the Financial Scrutiny Committee, on General, Diocesan, and Deanery synods. There is much more that we need to do – not least to have a significant presence on all of these representative bodies, and to build up local organisations as they have done in Truro.
Just in case you are up at 07.20 tomorrow morning Sir James Burnell-Nugent should be on Radio 4 discussing the finances of the Church of England.
We also need money – although all our work is free there are costs such as maintaining a website, organising a conference, and contracting legal advice. We made the decision not to be a paid membership organisation, mostly because managing that would be a full-time job that none of us would be able to commit to, but that means we don’t have sources of income other than one-off acts of generosity. If you were able to support us on this our anniversary, we would be very grateful – you can click here to do this electronically.
https://www.savetheparish.com/
I hope this gives you a flavour of where our campaign is, and a hint of some of the work we have been doing over these last three years. I look forward to the time when we can say the campaign has been a success and we can all go home to a revived and revitalised parish system. I would like to thank all of you for your generous support over the last 3 years.
With best wishes,
Marcus Walker
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