Saving the Parish

Saving so much more

At 11am this morning, at St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, Save the Parish launches its manifesto for the General Synod elections. Supporters are gathering from every corner of the country. I am not among them, for reasons too tedious to record, and this piece is written as penance. Mea Maxima Culpa. Whether it is adequate to the offence, the reader may judge. What I can promise is that the anger, at least, is sincere.

The venue is not an accident. St Bart’s is the oldest parish church in London, founded in 1123 by Rahere, courtier and jester to Henry I, who fell sick on pilgrimage to Rome and vowed a church to the saint who spared him. Nine hundred years on, the building he raised has outlived its priory, the Reformation, the Great Fire, the Zeppelins and the Luftwaffe. More recently it outlived Covid, which is more than can be said for the moral authority of the Church of England’s central leadership.

That last survival owes much to its Rector. When England’s churches were locked in the spring of 2020, it was not the state that turned the key hardest. The Government banned public worship. Archbishop Welby and his colleague at York went further, instructing priests not to enter their own churches even to pray alone at their own altars, so that the Eucharist was broadcast from kitchen tables while the houses of God stood dark behind locked doors. In the worst season of death and fear in living memory, the national Church bolted itself out of the very buildings that exist for death and fear, and did so with an eagerness that suggested relief. Fr Marcus Walker thought this was a scandal and said so, in print and in public, at a moment when saying so did a man’s preferment no good whatever. His argument was not complicated. A parish church is not a branch office to be shuttered by memo from head office. It is the house of God in a particular place, and in a plague, of all times, its prayers should rise from its own altar. He kept saying it until the doors reopened, and nobody now defends the ban he opposed. It took courage to say in April 2020 what everyone concedes in retrospect, and the concession has never been accompanied by anything so vulgar as an apology.

What he has done since matters more. St Bart’s under Walker has become one of the most compelling stories in English Christianity. The congregation has grown, and grown young. Adults present themselves for baptism and confirmation in numbers that would have seemed fanciful twenty years ago. The liturgy is unashamed, the music glorious, the incense thick, the preaching literate, and the whole enterprise conducted with a good humour that disarms the cynic at the door. Walker wears the faith lightly and holds it firmly, which is the oldest Anglican trick and hard to pull off. The renaissance he is genially spearheading rests on the one thing the age cannot manufacture for itself, beauty in the service of truth, and the young converts filling his pews are not there for a rebranding exercise. They are there because something ancient turned out to be alive.

So much for the good news. Now for the reason Save the Parish exists, and the reason its manifesto reads less like a churchwarden’s circular than a charge sheet.

Full-time stipendiary parish clergy have collapsed to 6,295, the lowest figure ever recorded, down 28 per cent since the millennium. In 2025 more priests resigned from ministry than retired from it, 379 against 278, which is not a recruitment problem but an institutional failure of retention, a church that burns through its own priesthood. The Living Ministry survey found 29 per cent of active clergy exhibiting symptoms of depression, 35 per cent of incumbents likewise, and 40 per cent enduring chronic loneliness. Precisely 3.9 per cent of frontline clergy regard the national or diocesan leadership as a source of hope. Read that figure again. The men and women at the coalface of English Christianity have been polled on their own hierarchy, and hope scored under four per cent.

And while the frontline starves, the centre feasts. The Church Commissioners sit on £11.6 billion, an endowment built up across three centuries, Queen Anne’s Bounty at its root, given for one purpose, the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required. That legal ringfence was quietly dissolved in 2018, and the money has been sluicing away from parishes ever since. Just 8 per cent of the Commissioners’ planned annual distribution is now guaranteed for parish ministry. Save the Parish’s auditors have done the sums the Church would rather nobody did. In 2024 the historic endowments of the Church, Commissioners and dioceses together, generated £653 million of distributable income. Once you subtract what the parishes themselves sent up in parish share, the net contribution of all that inherited wealth to actual parochial ministry was £85 million. Eighty-five million, out of six hundred and fifty-three, from a church that claims the parish as its beating heart.

Where did the rest go? Some £176 million went into Strategic Development Funding, the grant regime by which the centre replaced steady formula funding with competitive bids for projects aligned to the national Vision and Strategy. Sir Robert Chote, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, was asked to review it. He found the schemes had projected 89,375 new disciples and delivered 12,704. In any other national institution a scheme that missed its target by a factor of seven, at nine figures of cost, would end careers. In the Church of England it was renamed and refinanced. Meanwhile diocesan overheads have ballooned 29 per cent in three years to £154 million. One diocese grew from 69 employees in 2014 to 134 in 2025, and only eight of the additions were safeguarding officers. The average diocese now employs one member of headquarters staff for every three and a half parish clergy. The charity sector average is one to eight. At least one diocese has crossed the line entirely and employs more full-time staff than it has stipendiary priests to support. There are 980 clergy working in diocesan and national headquarters. Nearly a thousand ordained men and women administering the decline of the six thousand.

Against all this the manifesto sets six commitments under three plain words, parish, priest and people. Restore the Commissioners’ funds to their founding purpose and re-enshrine the parish priority in law, the amendment Save the Parish already won once before Parliament blocked the whole governance measure. Direct the parish share to mission and the cure of souls. Adopt a Charter of Care for clergy, with an immediate halt to the use of clergy cuts as a deficit tool and a limit of five parishes to a benefice, because the mega-benefices of twenty and thirty churches now being bolted together are a cure no priest can serve. Renew theological education that is ordinand-centred rather than budget-centred. Adopt a Churchgoers’ Charter for the volunteers, with a one in, two out cap on new compliance and strict limits on the deliberately prolonged vacancies dioceses use to bank unpaid stipends while congregations wither. And reform the Mission and Pastoral Measure so that a parish facing closure gets legal representation, keeps its rights of appeal, and sees some of the money when its own vicarage is sold from under it. This network stopped the Church Closers’ Charter outright in the last Synod and forced a full review of national funding. It is not a ginger group. It wins votes.

Beneath the arithmetic sits the older question. What is the church for? Trollope knew. The Barchester novels are comedies of preferment and intrigue, yet what holds them together is the close itself, the cathedral, the parishes, Mr Harding at Hiram’s Hospital with his violoncello, a whole society ordered around sacred ground and the unglamorous, unmeasured care of particular souls. Trollope could satirise the Proudies and Slopes of his day precisely because the thing they schemed over was solid and worth having. Our modern Slopes have improved on their ancestor. They no longer scheme for the close. They scheme to sell it, monetise the vicarage, amalgamate the benefice, and replace the whole inherited landscape of place-based faith with a strategy document and a dashboard. The dismissers of the parish call it a relic, a drain on mission, a museum piece. But Christianity is stubbornly incarnational. It does not happen in general. It happens somewhere, among neighbours, and the parish is the Incarnation expressed as geography, a church answerable for every soul within its bounds, not merely its members, baptising your children, marrying your lovers, burying your dead, and asking nothing at the door. Parishes generate an estimated £55 billion a year in social value on the Treasury’s own methodology, and hold 45 per cent of England’s Grade I listed buildings, but the ledger is the least of it. A parish church is not a heap of historic stones. It is a repository of place, of faith, of commonality through the ages, the names of Agincourt and the Somme on its walls, the rude forefathers of the hamlet in its yard, the same psalms rising from the same spot for eight centuries. It is a spine, running down through the strata of the past and reaching forward into a future we shall not see, and a nation that snaps its spine does not stand straighter afterwards.

As Fr Marcus says,
“If we want there to be a thriving parish system in a generation’s time, we have to get up and do

something. Starving the local church of money has led to a doom spiral of parish mergers, church cuts, clergy depression and volunteers quitting. We need to break this spiral. With prayer and trust in God, and backed by the Church’s own studies, we can hope that putting proper investment back into parishes will give us the chance to thrive and grow again.”

Five years ago Save the Parish began with a handful of voices. Since then we have stopped the Church Closers Charter, restored a legal priority for parish ministry in Church governance, secured a bigger Lowest Income Communities Fund for our poorest parishes, and won a complete review of how the whole Church is funded. That is what five years of organising can achieve, and this manifesto is how we build on”

Remember, then, the fact worth carrying away from Smithfield. Because of the parochial system, everyone in these islands has a church that is theirs and a priest who is theirs, whether they have darkened the door in decades or never once. Whether to use them is your decision alone. Whether they survive to be used is also a decision, and it is being taken now, in Synod elections most churchgoers ignore, by people counting on your inattention. Save the Parish has stopped being inattentive. Having failed to turn up this morning, the least I can do is say so, and commend the fight to you with all the force I have. Those standing for the Synodial elections need your support. The doors Fr Marcus forced open in 2020 must not be quietly closed by accountants in 2026.