Rethinking Stipendiary Ministry

Some reflections on the Save the Parish report and the future of parish ministry

When I was installed as rector of my first church in Maryland, it was a small congregation. It offered a modest stipend, but only enough for me to cover a one-bedroom flat, frugal living expenses, and my seminary student loans (yes, British ordinands, we had to pay for our own training!). When my old car finally gave out and I needed a loan for a replacement, I took a part-time job at the local Barnes & Noble.

Fortunately, God blessed the church’s work: during the following year, the congregation grew, a few of my co-workers even joined, and our finances improved dramatically. Eventually, the church could support me full-time again, so I gave up bookselling and returned to being a full-time priest.

I was the same priest throughout. That sounds obvious, but it points to a real difference between my American experience and the way we tend to think about clergy in England. What changed wasn’t my ministerial status, but the financial circumstance of the church I was serving.

That may sound like semantics. I don’t think it is.

The dilemma we’re facing

Last spring, I took part in the Save the Parish consultation at St George’s House, Windsor, which brought together a remarkably wide range of people to consider the crisis in stipendiary clergy numbers. I came away enormously encouraged. People who disagree about plenty else found real common ground, and the resulting report deserves to be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested.

Its diagnosis is compelling: loss of confidence in vocation, shallow and utilitarian formation, poor clergy wellbeing, administrative overload, and a damaging reliance on crude numerical measures of success. What the Church needs instead, the report argues, is a confident account of what a priest actually is, so that priests can be formed deeply and supported as “walking sacraments”.

But Ian Paul has recently argued that the report doesn’t sufficiently account for demography. His cohort analysis shows the consequences of the Church’s decision, a generation ago, to raise the average age of ordination by around a decade. We now face a retirement cliff edge that no recovery in confidence or funding for formation can quickly overcome. However well we address the crisis of vocation, we’re not going to reproduce the historic number of full-time stipendiary clergy within any of our working lives.

Paul also points out that Save the Parish has campaigned against parish mergers, including those in Truro’s Kerrier Deanery, while often calling for more national money. His point is blunt: money can’t manufacture ordinands who don’t exist.

But I think there’s a deeper problem that’s masked by two interrelated assumptions: how we fund stipends and how we provide clergy for parishes.

The first is a familiar English arrangement. Stipends are paid through diocesan structures, with parochial giving and fundraising providing much of the underlying funding, supplemented by diocesan and national resources. National arrangements establish a minimum stipend and benchmark, while actual levels are set by dioceses. In principle, this works much like the NHS: a parish’s ability to contribute doesn’t determine whether it receives priestly ministry, just as healthcare isn’t supposed to depend on the wealth of your postcode. It’s a powerful expression of the Church as one Body, even if many of those the local church is called to serve don’t appreciate it much.

This system was largely developed in an era when a stipendiary priest was the normal expectation for a parish. As stipendiary numbers have declined, we’ve struggled to preserve that model while supplementing it with increasing numbers of self-supporting priests. The debate about clergy numbers resembles the debate about the NHS itself: a system designed around plentiful provision is having to sustain its underlying principles when both money and people are in short supply.

This is no longer a marginal question. Self-supporting ministry has moved from being a relatively small supplement to stipendiary ministry to becoming a substantial and growing portion of the Church of England’s ordained ministry. The question, therefore, isn’t whether the Church should tolerate SSM as an expedient, but whether we should rethink what we mean by the relationship between priesthood and the financial circumstances in which priestly ministry is exercised.

Perhaps the time has come to adapt the model itself. If the number of stipendiary priests will continue to fall, the question isn’t simply how to preserve the old pattern by adding more SSMs. It’s whether we can develop more flexible ways of providing and funding ordained ministry while retaining the common purse and the mutual responsibility that lies behind it. In the midst of all this, we also need to maintain—and, indeed, improve—standards of clerical formation.

To do that, however, we have to face another uncomfortable reality: the culture of dependency that has grown up around the way we fund and provide ministry.

A culture of dependency

One of the things I’ve noticed about the Church here is the assumption that there’s always a pot of gold somewhere else. If a church needs building work, there are charities and government programmes to apply to. If it wants to develop mission, there may be a diocesan fund to draw on. The same is often true of youth workers and children’s ministry. And while parishes work hard to pay their Parish Share, there can be a similar expectation that, however well or poorly they do, the diocese will provide them with a vicar. This is understandable: Parish Share is deliberately designed to prevent the ministry available to a parish from simply depending on what that parish can afford. But the very success of that principle can make it harder for a congregation to see its own giving as a direct expression of responsibility for the Church’s ministry in its place.

Some of this dependency is necessary. Ancient churches are enormously expensive to maintain, and shared resources allow ministry to continue in places that could never support it on their own. The Church Commissioners themselves deliberately target funding towards areas of need, including poorer communities that can’t meet the full cost of ministry. But a system designed to express our interdependence can, over time, create a sense that provision comes from somewhere else. When parishioners read that the Church of England holds billions of pounds in historic assets, it’s hardly surprising if they wonder why their own giving should matter very much. As a result, too many of our debates about the future of ministry are about what the Church can afford.

There is a theological problem here as well as a financial one. We can begin to imagine “the Church” as the bureaucratic institution that provides things for local churches, rather than understanding the parish itself as a local manifestation of the Church. The parish church starts to look like a local NHS surgery: an essential point of service within a much larger organisation, whose buildings, staff, programmes, and funding are ultimately someone else’s responsibility. That’s a long way from understanding the local church as the Body of Christ gathered in a particular place, responsible for its common life, and sharing in the resources of the wider Church.

This brings me to the elephant in the room: giving.

When I first entered ministry here, I was shocked to discover that annual giving per person was less than a fifth of what it had been at my church in the States. At that level, I couldn’t imagine many churches with fewer than 200 regular worshippers sustaining a full-time stipend. What I’ve since learned is that in the Church of England, wherever two or three are gathered together, there’s a fundraiser, usually a tombola, but rarely a stewardship campaign.

What this reveals is a pervasive sense at parish level of being recipients of the Church’s ministry rather than active participants in sustaining it. People can come to feel that ministry is something done to them by the institutional Church: others set their Share, others determine the pattern of ministry they receive, and others decide whether their church can continue. In order to placate these agents, often elderly parishioners spend much of their waning years desperately organising fundraisers to avoid a reduction in ministry or, worse, closure. It makes for an unhealthy relationship governed by negative incentives: raise the funds or suffer the consequences.

One priesthood, different circumstances

This is where my American experience is useful, though I don’t think the American congregational model can simply be transplanted into England. In the Church of England, the parish is embedded both in its local community and in the life of the diocese, with clergy funded through diocesan structures. The financial arrangements are therefore very different.

But I wonder if there’s something to learn from the American distinction between priesthood and the financial circumstances of a particular post. In the diocese where I served, ordinands weren’t divided into stipendiary and self-supporting candidates. Everyone met the same canonical requirements and was formed for the same priesthood before ordination. Afterwards, priests applied for posts that might be fully funded, partly funded, or unfunded. The financial circumstances of the post could change without changing the status of the person serving it.

In theory, the Church of England believes that there is “no difference in ordination or recognition” between stipendiary and self-supporting clergy. Yet the distinction can still become deeply embedded in how people experience their vocation. Research has consistently shown that SSMs describe themselves as being viewed as “second class”.

The Ordinal, of course, knows nothing of such distinction within the priesthood. Priests are ordained to proclaim the gospel, sustain the Church through word and sacrament, exercise pastoral care, and share with the bishop in the oversight of the Church. None of that becomes more or less real because a priest receives a stipend. The designation of stipendiary, SSM, OLM, or whatever is purely a managerial category with no theological weight.

What if then we stopped treating stipendiary and self-supporting ministry as different kinds of priesthood, and started treating them as different circumstances in which the same priesthood is exercised?

Some posts would be full-time and stipendiary; others part-time, House for Duty, or largely self-supporting. Crucially, these needn’t become permanent classifications of either priest or parish. A priest might serve a post with little financial provision at one point, a part-time post later, and a full-time post after that. The change might be because the priest moved, but it might equally be due the circumstances of the parish improving. In either case, the priest would remain simply a priest with no other designation than rector, vicar, priest-in-charge, or similar title.

Shared Responsibility

That doesn’t mean turning ministry into a market. I think the common purse is a vital part of the system here, precisely because priestly ministry shouldn't be allocated simply according to what an individual congregation can afford. The question isn't whether a parish can buy its own priest, but whether the Church can sustain an appropriate pattern of priestly ministry in a particular place, taking account of both local capacity and local need.

The question, then, isn’t simply whether a parish can afford its priest. The question is what pattern of priestly ministry the common purse can sustainably support in a particular place, taking account of that place’s needs, capacity, and the needs of the wider Church.

This wouldn’t require a crude formula in which raising a certain amount buys a fraction of a priest, nor should financial capacity ever be the only consideration. A prosperous parish may need less diocesan support; a poor parish may have enormous pastoral need despite having little capacity to contribute. The common purse exists precisely because the Church is one Body, and some members will always need to be supported by others. Keeping a standard stipend for full-time ministry would avoid the congregational models problems of offering overly-generous stipends.

What this might allow is for dioceses to be more intentional about recognising changes in local capacity. If a parish becomes more financially capable through growth, greater generosity, better stewardship, or simply changing circumstances, that could make it possible to move from largely self-supporting ministry to part-time, or from part-time to full-time priestly ministry. Conversely, declining capacity might require a different pattern. The point isn’t to reward success, but to give congregations something to work towards: greater responsibility for sustaining the ministry of the Church in their own place.

At present, it can be difficult for a congregation to see how its own financial life contributes to the Church's ministry in its place. Parish Share can feel like a diocesan tax rather than a way of sharing responsibility for the Church’s common life. What I’m suggesting is that we make that relationship more visible. A congregation that has the capacity to take greater responsibility for priestly ministry should be encouraged and enabled to do so, while its greater capacity also helps sustain ministry where another congregation can’t. A poor parish doesn’t become less deserving because it can’t raise much money. A wealthy parish doesn’t get to buy a better priest or provide a higher stipend. Without the common purse, we risk creating a market in which rich churches purchase clergy and poor churches go without. With it, we have something closer to Christian mutuality: greater capacity means bearing more of the common burden, while the whole Church remains responsible for ensuring that priestly ministry is available where it’s most needed.

I saw something of this in my own first parish in Maryland. As the church grew, my parishioners could see how hard I was working and began to feel a growing responsibility to care for the priest who was caring for them. Eventually they were able to support me full-time. What changed wasn’t my status. Even when I was only part-time, I was their rector. What changed was the congregation’s capacity to sustain the ministry we shared, and with it a deeper sense of mutual care and responsibility.

There are, of course, practical questions. The Church’s legal framework rightly protects clergy from having their financial arrangements casually altered, and any change to a particular office would need to be handled properly. The principle matters more than the mechanism. The changing capacity and needs of a community should be visible, alongside the needs of the wider Church, when decisions are made about what pattern of priestly ministry can responsibly be sustained there. Greater local capacity shouldn't buy a better priest, but it should create an opportunity for a congregation to take greater responsibility for sustaining priestly ministry in its own place.

And this, finally, is why I think the shortage of stipendiary clergy needn’t force a choice between abandoning parish ministry and pretending demography doesn’t exist. Who knows, we might even begin to build back full-time stipendiary ministry as the parochial norm. We can also strengthen lay ministry without pretending lay and priestly ministry are interchangeable. And we can preserve the common purse without allowing it to turn congregations into passive recipients of ministry rather than communities that take responsibility for the Church’s life in their own place.

In this way, we can make sacrificial giving, and providing for the sacramental ministry at the heart of our faith, central to the discipleship of all who claim the name Anglican. The status of the priest doesn’t change, but the way we share responsibility for sustaining him or her can. We belong to one another, and so we’re also responsible for one another.