The Church of England and Conservatives need to decide
Andrew Selous, Conservative MP and Church Commissioner in answer to a planted question from Alex Stafford, Conservative MP, last month confirmed what every thinking person has known for a good while; the Church of England is going broke.
A predicted shortfall of income of £500m over the next five years for building repairs was the given reason to suggest a government bail out is needed, but the problem goes much deeper than this as I’m sure he knows. The national church bodies request aid for building repairs while the Parish Church Councils who maintain the buildings complain more bitterly about the Parish Share their Diocese demands from them.
The Church of England is at heart a business and one with a broken business model. Most of the income the church receives comes ultimately from parishioners, those members of the church who are willing to pay to be part of a church congregation and their numbers are plummeting. Yet costs continue to go up. Why? Because of the commitments the Church of England has long signed up to provide in return for being the ‘establishment church’. A parish for every part of the land with birth, deaths and marriages performed on demand for the people who live there, whether church members or not. So costs go up and numbers go down, accelerating the financial demand in a vicious circle.
You can see the problem; commitments remain high while income drops, hence bankruptcy looms. Parishes do get merged and churches closed but at nowhere near the scale needed to balance the books, and as parishes merge service quality drops too, leading to further decreases in income and making sustainability ever harder to achieve. So what would work? I see two stark choices:
Firstly; the government ’nationalizes’ the church, having judged it ‘too big to fail’. They take over financial management and use increasing amounts of taxpayer funding to cover the shortfall. This has been the stop gap approach for quite a while with grants and increasing Gift Aid generosity plugging the widening financial hole, but to provide stability this would need to be a take over. You could even argue this is simply returning to the position of 150 years ago when the CoE had tax raising powers to fund churches, until they reluctantly lost the power through taxpayer revolt.
Secondly, the church accepts the inevitable; give up their establishment role and the commitments that go with it, then rationalise down to a manageable size where costs match demand. A focus on evangelical support from a much smaller but more committed number of adherents would balance the books and secure a future.
Which path will be chosen and by whom? We wait to see.
