A new report from Robin Gill and John Craven, Wasted Money in a Diminishing Church, has been doing the rounds, and it has touched a raw nerve. (It was extensively reported in last week’s Church Times though I found it very odd that the report itself was not published online. You can read it here. [1 MB PDF])
The authors are no lightweights—one a former Professor of Applied Theology and adviser to three Archbishops of Canterbury, the other a former Professor of Economics, Vice-Chancellor and member of the Archbishops’ Council (though he finished in 2013, two years before I joined). They have pulled together a great deal of history and data, and their diagnosis is stark. Dioceses have nearly doubled their administrative staff in 25 years, while parish clergy have fallen by a third and attendance by more than 40%. The Church, they say, is caught in a cycle of decline, and the cure is to shift money and decisions away from dioceses and bishops and into the deaneries.
There is much here I want to agree with, and I will come back to that. Many parish clergy will read it and nod vigorously, particularly those supporting the Save the Parish agenda. But when you look closely at the argument—and in particular when you test it against the authors’ own numbers—it begins to come apart. And the remedy it proposes would, I think, make things worse rather than better.
Does the report’s own data support its case?
The whole argument rests on a causal claim. Diocesan administration has grown, parishes have been starved of resources, and decline has followed. If that is true, then the dioceses that grew their central staff the most ought to have seen the steepest falls in attendance. Helpfully, the appendix to the report gives us figures for all 40 dioceses from 2000 to 2025, so we can actually test this.
When I ran the numbers, the correlation between growth in diocesan staff and change in average weekly attendance came out at effectively zero (r = 0.01). Against change in parish share received, it is a weak 0.19. In other words, how much a diocese expanded its central staff tells you nothing at all about how its congregations fared.
The individual cases highlighted make the point vividly.
- Leeds grew its staff by only 4%, which the report itself notes with approval. Its attendance still fell by 52%.
- Manchester grew its staff by 14% and fell by 50%; Lincoln grew by 27% and fell by 59%.
- London grew its staff by 135%—and had the smallest fall in the country, 19%, with parish share actually rising by 10% in real terms.
- Southwell and Nottingham, where I minister, roughly doubled its central staff (up 104%), yet its weekly attendance fell by 39%, noticeably better than the national figure of 45%. More than that, in the last year our adult weekly attendance grew by 8% and our child attendance grew by 11% in just one year.
It is worth pausing on that. The authors have given us the data to test their thesis, and the data does not support it. Whatever is driving growth and decline in the Church of England, it is not the size of the diocesan office.
It matters what central posts are for
The reason the report’s thesis fails is that it counts heads without asking what those heads are doing. Every diocesan post is treated as overhead, whether it is a compliance officer or a youth evangelist.
Take Southwell and Nottingham again. When the 2024 attendance figures came out, I noted that the number of children attending in this diocese had returned to their 2019, pre-Covid, levels, and grew 11% last year. In Canterbury, the figure was half what it had been. Canterbury happens to show the largest growth in central staff in the whole table (up 336%). So it is not the number of people employed centrally that makes the difference. It is what the diocese is trying to do, and whether its central posts serve that aim.
Work with children and young people, support for church planting and grafting, curacy training, vocations work—all of this shows up in Gill and Craven’s figures as diocesan bloat. Yet it is exactly where much of the growth we have seen has come from.
That does not mean every central post is justified, and here I find myself in agreement with much of what the report says. I have noted before that between 1959 and 2020 the number of parochial clergy fell by around 45%, while the number of archdeacons and bishops actually rose from 219 to 235. I have recounted the conversation with a friend whose bishop turned the diocese round ‘by not cutting clergy posts, and not appointing an archdeacon’. I have questioned the appointment of racial justice officers in dioceses where there was no evidence of a problem. And I agree entirely that the £100m set aside for Project Spire is money that cannot be spent on parishes, whatever has been claimed to the contrary.
So the dividing line is not between ‘central’ and ‘local’. It is between posts that equip parishes for mission and those that serve institutional agendas. The report has no means of distinguishing the two, and so its diagnosis misses the point.
And the recruitment process for such diocesan posts raises the question rather starkly. As Adrian Hilton notes, a recent advert from Oxford highlighted that half the diocesan staff were not even practicing Christians—apparently in the name of ‘inclusion’!
The questions the report doesn’t ask
At root, Gill and Craven treat decline as a problem of allocation. Move the money from the diocese to the parish, and things will improve. But they never ask the more uncomfortable question of why the money isn’t there in the first place.
Giving. The Church of England set a target in 1978 of members giving 5% of their income to and through the church. Nearly fifty years on, we have never come close; when I last looked at the national figures in detail, average giving stood at just 3.3% of income. The Church’s own national giving survey found that a third of regular Anglicans give nothing to their church at all. The report simply takes this as a given and asks how to divide a shrinking cake. Yet notice that, in real terms, parish share has fallen by 20% while attendance has fallen by 45%. Those who remain have, on average, been giving more. Our financial problem is not mainly that dioceses spend too much; it is that we have lost givers. And that is a discipleship problem, not a structural one.
Faith. The report quotes David Voas and Laura Watt’s finding that decline is driven by the failure to pass on faith from one generation to the next. But having quoted it, the authors do nothing with it. Their chapter on mission draws instead on Hartmut Rosa’s sociology of ‘resonance’, in which religion is one possible sphere of meaning alongside music, art and the natural world. There is nothing here about the gospel, about conversion, about evangelism, or about making disciples.
This matters, because we actually know quite a lot about what makes churches grow. The Church’s own research has shown that the single biggest factor is having stipendiary ministers who are competent and intentional about growth. And the churches that are growing now—in what some have called the ‘quiet revival‘—are those which offer a real sense of encounter with God, and what David Goodhew calls ‘full fat faith’, which is distinctive and counter-cultural rather than an echo of political positions people can find elsewhere.
The report is right to call for more parish clergy. But it treats this as a matter of pay, security and freedom from micro-management. It never asks what those clergy are for, or why so many in our churches show so little interest in sharing their faith.
Deaneries are not the answer
The central proposal of the report is that deaneries should become the principal budget-holders. They would receive historic funds weighted by deprivation, deploy as many clergy as they can afford, own and maintain the parsonages, manage lay staff, and pay into an insurance scheme to cover clergy redundancy. This is where the report is weakest.
It contradicts its own principle. The complaint throughout is that functions are needlessly duplicated forty times across the dioceses. The remedy is to hand budgets, deployment, housing and HR to around 600 deaneries. Each would need a treasurer, an administrator, someone to manage property, and a mechanism for paying insurance premiums. The duplication would be multiplied fifteen-fold. The report even concedes that deaneries would probably want to collaborate in engaging agents to manage their housing—which is, in effect, to reinvent the diocese.
Deaneries have no capacity. Area deans are unpaid (for this role), and usually already run a full benefice. Deanery synods are widely regarded as the least effective layer in the Church’s whole structure (if you are not convinced of this, I suggest you visit one). The report does not say who would actually do all this work.
We have seen this before. When I wrote about Leicester’s move to ‘minster communities’, Tiffer Robinson recalled that Sheffield diocese had paid for administrators at deanery level to free clergy up for mission and ministry. The result was that the clergy were all much happier—but did not do much more mission and ministry. Leicester’s scheme is itself a version of the deanery idea, and it has hardly been greeted as a liberation of the parish.
It would freeze mission across boundaries. Church planting, resource churches and grafting all depend on moving people and money across local lines. A deanery funding only those clergy its own parishes will pay for has every incentive to protect existing congregations against a new plant next door. That would entrench decline in places with no vision for growth, rather than reversing it. More fundamentally, the whole question of vocation, training, and deployment needs to be national, not local. There has always been a serious imbalance between dioceses that generate vocations and are ‘net exporters’ and those which import. Demarcating by deanery will just make this worse.
It is not even new. In Southwell and Nottingham, the diocesan synod already sets the common fund ‘to be raised from the deaneries’, and many other dioceses work in a similar way. The report presents as radical something that much of the Church already does—albeit in a limited way.
Some further problems
There are several other weaknesses worth noting briefly.
- There is no theology of oversight. Bishops appear only as a cost to be cut, never as guardians of doctrine or leaders in mission. That is odd, since the issues the report itself highlights, such as LLF and Project Spire, are failures of episcopal leadership, not consequences of the size of diocesan offices. As I have said before, I think we have two many bishops—but I also think we are asking them to do the wrongs things in a way which is simply unachievable.
- The localism is selective. The authors want safeguarding, payroll and clergy training run nationally, but deployment run locally. That may be a sensible judgement about scale, but it shows that ‘localism’ is not really a principle for them.
- Investment in mission is waved away. The Strategic Mission and Ministry funding certainly needs proper, independent evaluation. But the report never acknowledges that much of the growth we have seen has come from just these kinds of initiatives.
- The authors admit the limits of their own plan. They concede that their reforms are unlikely to reverse two centuries of decline. Read alongside their own data, the honest conclusion is that structures are not the main lever at all.
A better way forward
Gill and Craven are right that something has gone badly wrong, and right that parishes and parish clergy are bearing the cost. But the remedy is not to rearrange the structures yet again. If we want to see the Church of England renewed, I think we need to do five things.
- Protect and increase parish clergy who are intentional about growth. The evidence is clear that this is the single biggest factor in whether churches grow. To plan for fewer stipendiary leaders is to plan for decline.
- Test every central post by whether it equips parishes for mission. Some diocesan roles do exactly that, and the dioceses that are doing better show it. Others serve institutional agendas, and those should go.
- Teach generous giving as part of discipleship, not as a levy. Paul’s approach to the Corinthians (2 Cor 8–9) is not to demand a quota but to point to the grace of Jesus, who ‘though he was rich, yet for your sake became poor’ (2 Cor 8.9). Giving flows from that, or not at all.
- Stop spending money and attention on divisive agendas. The headlines generated by LLF, Project Spire, and ‘racial justice’, even ‘net zero’ put people off, and the money they consume is money not spent on mission.
- Make the passing on of faith the measure of success. Jesus’ commission was to ‘go and make disciples’ (Matt 28.19). Whether we are doing that, in families, in churches and in our communities, is what actually determines the future.
God is at work in our country; people, and especially young people, are asking questions about faith in a way we have not seen for a generation. The question is whether the Church of England will be ready to meet them.
That will not depend on whether budgets sit with dioceses or deaneries. It will depend on whether we have leaders and congregations who believe the gospel, live it, and are eager to share it.
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