Update from Save The Parish founder Rev Marcus Walker

 A message from Save The Parish founder Rev Marcus Walker:

Happy new year! We have entered a curious day in the life of our church, as we move into a period of time without an Archbishop of Canterbury. I hope we will all be praying that the man or woman raised up to be the next Archbishop will be a person of deep prayer and have a love for the Church and its people. Emma Thompson, a member of our Steering Committee, has written an excellent article in The Times which you can read here. It concludes with these excellent words:

“We need someone who wants to spend time loving and caring for the “downstairs church”. By this, I mean the local places where people actually participate in and fund the Church. The “upstairs church” of bishops, bureaucracy and bluster has become inward-looking and detached from the parishes. It has grown on an indefensible scale. We need a parish-facing, pastoral archbishop, someone with the willingness and leadership ability to halve the “upstairs church”, scaling it back to a more appropriate and affordable level of overheads. There might then be some hope of reversing the decline that has been accelerated from within.”

Over the last year Save the Parish has been at work nationally, campaigning in the press for the church’s focus to return to the local. We have been at work locally, supporting parishes facing merger or closure by one-size-fits-all mega-church schemes. We have been at work in General Synod, raising key issues relating to the thriving of parochial ministry and trying to mitigate legislation as it comes up.

One incredibly important piece of work has been the proposed National Church Governance Measure. This is legislation that looks, on the face of it, incredibly boring but will  completely alter the way the Church is run. This might sound like a good thing, but it will have a material effect on how the top of the Church operates. The measure has just finished its “revision stage”, which is a bit like the “committee stage” of a bill in Parliament – it is where detailed amendments can be proposed and considered in a small group. This is really the first opportunity Save the Parish has had to be involved in such a process since getting elected to Synod and I felt it would be useful to brief you on what has happened.

First of all, if you are the type of person who enjoys reading legislation, you can find the draft Governance Measure  all here. If you’re not, I’ll pick out the key points we debated as we go.  Even this is complicated but some of it is very important to those of us who wish to see parishes prioritised in the allocation of resources.  Please read my two final substantive paragraphs, even if you skim the rest!

There were two matters which I am pleased to say were definite “wins” – where we managed to persuade the committee and those drafting the legislation to change their mind.

The first was the most egregious. In the creation of a new body which would govern the Church – to be called CENS, the Church of England National Services – the legislation defined what its work would be and consequently what it could fund. Nestled away within the text – in section 3, clause 7 – it states that

For the purposes of this section— (c) a parochial church council is neither a diocesan body nor a charity with a Church ethos.

This would have removed the possibility that, in the future, the church could have returned to funding parochial ministry directly, as the Church Commissioners did in recent memory. I am delighted to report that the whole section was rewritten and the offending subclause completely removed.

The second major change was over the Mission, Pastoral & Church Property Committee. This is currently a committee which sits within the Church Commissioners – and is therefore independent of the Archbishops’ Council– which adjudicates any disputes between dioceses and parishes over proposals to merge, split, or close parishes. For us it is one of the most important committees in the church.

The original proposal moved the committee over directly under CENS and proposed that is membership should be:

(a) one person appointed as chair by His Majesty,

(b) six persons appointed by the Appointments Committee, and

(c) six persons appointed by CENS.

This would have given the body which sets the Vision and Strategy of the Church of England control over the committee which adjudicates disputes under it. Independence would have been completely obliterated. Trust in its role as a quasi-judicial body would have collapsed.

I am not sure that those drafting the legislation had appreciated quite how badly this would go down and I am pleased that they were very open to discussions about alternative models. By the end the committee completely changed the proposal, so that its membership would be selected entirely by the Appointments Committee of General Synod which, while not perfect, provides for a much more independent process than proposed. This was a real win and should result in a system that is considerably more fair towards parishes than it would otherwise have been, and might even be better than the system as it stands.

The biggest question, however, revolves around money. It’s sad but inevitable as this is the root cause of so many of our problems. In short: the church has, for centuries, known that poorer parishes need support in order to survive. The Crown and Parliament created large endowments to do this, which now make up the bulk of the Church Commissioners’ assets –over £10 billion the last time I checked.

When the Archbishops’ Council was set up in 1998 it was given the power to spend the income from that endowment, providing that it had “particular regard … to the making of additional provision for the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required” and that funds were only applied to purposes for which the endowment was available prior to 1998. The desire to spend that money on multiple other projects got sufficiently great that in 2018 a small  clause was slipped into a Miscellaneous Provisions Measure (which was expressly stated by Explanatory Memorandum GS 2064 as being part of “a series of Miscellaneous Provisions Measures dealing with uncontroversial matters that do not merit separate, free-standing legislation”):

“The Church Commissioners may make grants out of their general fund to the Archbishops' Council for the purposes of the Council's functions.”

This, they now claim, allows the total bypassing of the provision to respect the Church Commissioners’ pre-1998 funding purposes and have particular regard for the cure of souls in parishes. I am not remotely sure that using a form of measure that is supposed to be only for “uncontroversial” matters can justify the redirection of a £10 billion endowment, and clearly they are not sure that this would stand up to a challenge either, given they are using the National Church Governance Measure to  legislate on this matter (i.e. a question which relates to funding rather than governance and which is unnecessary if –as is suggested – it is merely confirming the current position). 

A new clause has been popped in during the revision stage which says,

(2) The amount to be paid by the Church Commissioners under subsection (1)

consists of—

(a) amounts which could have been paid to the Archbishops’ Council under section 2 of the National Institutions Measure 1998 (provision for cure of souls in parishes where help most required) immediately before the transfer of the Council’s functions under that section by virtue of section 9 of this Measure, and

(b) amounts which could have been paid to the Archbishops’ Council under section 1 of the Church of England(Miscellaneous Provisions) Measure 2018 (grants for any of Council’s functions)immediately before the repeal of that section by subsection (11) of this section.

This, as they clarified during the meeting, was to make clear that the new CENS can basically spend the church’s endowment for parishes on anything it wishes (within the scope of its charitable objectives). They also agreed that this was a policy position for General Synod to take, and welcomed the idea that this would be debated in full when the time comes.

When it does come, it is really important to push very hard for all the spending of the new CENS, when it uses the Church’s endowment, to have “particular regard” for making provision for the cure of souls in parishes and to respect the pre-1998 funding purposes of the Church Commissioners. This is what the money was left for; this is what the money should be spent on. Anything else is a heist. That is the big battle for the months to come and we may be coming back to you as it develops.

Until then, I wish you a very enjoyable, peaceful, and prosperous new year.