The harsh reality of demographics means that the numbers of stipendiary clergy will continue to decline significantly over the next ten years. What will that mean in practice for the future of the Church? What issues does it raise—and is anyone actually facing up to these questions?
Save the Parish, who are campaigning (not least in the context of General Synod elections) for a return to a ‘traditional’ conception of parish ministry, have produced a report on the crisis in stipendiary clergy numbers, and you can download it and read it here. They have done a fantastic job of getting it publicised, launching it in the House of Lords and getting widespread media coverage, including in the national press and Radio 4.
They have also done a great job of considering a wide range of issues (the report is not very long and will only take a couple of minutes to read it) and the reason is that it came out of a consultation in March this year in which they genuinely involved people from across the range of traditions in the Church of England. You can read the list of names of those who participated in the report, and I was genuinely impressed by the breadth. (You would need to recognise the names and know their tradition to see this.)
In this article, I was intending to comment on the main points of the report, which I mostly agree with, and on each of which I have myself been writing and campaigning for a long time (if you don’t believe me, just search for ‘clergy’ in the search bar to the right). But there is one major issue they do not consider, which has ended up taking up most of the space, and there are some consequences from their report which I think are seriously questionable.
The major issue which the report seriously underplays is demographics. In fact, it wrongly suggests that other factors are more important (in a previous consultation “clergy well-being far outweighed demographic changes”). I first started drawing attention to this just over ten years ago, drawing on my background as a personnel manager in industrial business.
If you are responsible for maintaining a workforce, the basic reality you have to engage with is cohort analysis. For each grade, and for each age group, how many are joining (through promotion and recruitment) and how many are leaving (through promotion, resignation, retirement) and therefore what will each group look like in future? The problem with the C of E is that, until very recently, no-one has been asking that centrally or doing the analysis which has controlled decision making. It is part of the problem of each diocese being (for most issues) independent and autonomous, when issues around the ordination and deployment of clergy have always been national.
The root cause of many of our problems was the disastrous decision by those in what was then called the Advisory Board for Ministry (ABM) to push the average age of ordination up by ten years over about ten years. Just pause for a moment, and reflect on what that does to the age profile of clergy. To illustrate: when I entered ordination training in Nottingham in 1989, I was 27, and was pretty much slap bang in the middle of the age profile of ordinands at the college. When I left in 1994 (having started a PhD), age 32, I was pretty much slap bang in the middle of the age profile of ordinands at the college. When I returned as a tutor in 2004, aged 42, I was pretty much slap bang in the middle of the age profile of ordinands at the college. In my first term back, the most common question ordinands asked me was ‘So which course are you doing?’
This decision has had a catastrophic effect on the age profile of the whole clergy cohort—but of course it is an effect that would not (in the 1990s) be felt until all those ordained over those ten years, who all happened to be the same age but ordained at different times and at correspondingly different ages, would be facing retirement 30 years hence—which is now.
I first wrote about this 10 years ago, and I am not sure many people really paid attention then. I have to give credit, though, to David Keen (who has just moved from ministry in Yeovil to Jersey) who was doing the sums even earlier, in 2012, when he asked ‘What would the church look like with only 5,000 stipendiary ministers’.
When I wrote about this in 2016, the statistics unit of the C of E was producing age profile graphs for clergy, and projecting the looming crisis (I am not sure they have continued with this). Here is what it looked like then:
You can see the cliff edge creeping along year by year. Here is a rather cruder version from the less detailed statistics released in June, this time grouped in five year age bands. The last non-trivial column is the age band 65–69, and the tallest is 60–64. There are four things worth noting. First, peak has shifted ten years (in ten years) from mid-50s to mid-60s. No surprises there! Secondly, the concave slope before the peak has been filled in, and this is the result of older ordination of those in their 40s and more in the last few years. Thirdly, the quite steep drop off between the last two bands, reflecting the fact that very, very few clergy now continue to 70, most preferring to retire as soon as they can in their 60s.
But the fourth striking feature is that the cliff drops off even more steeply. If we have had a problem with declining clergy numbers in recent years, that is only going to get worse in the next five to ten years, regardless of what happens with ordination numbers. Both I and David Keen have been pointing this out for a long time!
I asked two AI agents what we would need in terms of ordination numbers to sustain a stipendiary clergy cohort of 10,000, and I got two different answers.
ChatGPT started with a blank sheet of paper, and did the kind of analysis of wastage and recruitment that I did as a personnel manager.
A reasonable steady-state assumption would be:
- Average effective ministry career after ordination: 25–30 years
- Therefore annual wastage through retirement, death, resignation and movement out of parish ministry: roughly 3–4%
- On a stock of 10,000, that means replacing about 300–400 clergy per year.
So the answer is roughly 350 ordinations a year
For good measure, it threw in the C of E’s own assessment from 2016:
And the Church’s own 2016 projections are useful as a reality check: it concluded that increasing candidates for ordination from about 500 to 750 annually was required to produce a stable pool of around 7,600 FTE clergy, given the then age structure and wastage.
The difference here points to our current problem: we are not starting with a blank sheet of paper, but with a massively skewed age profile. Claude took the trouble to read my blog (!) and so took this into account.
The core idea is a stock-and-flow one: in a genuine steady state, the number ordained each year has to equal the number leaving parish ministry each year (through retirement, resignation, ill-health, death in post, or moving into other work). So the answer is essentially:
Ordinations needed per year ≈ target headcount ÷ average time a clergyperson actually spends in active parish ministry.
The tricky part is that “average time in ministry” for the C of E is shorter than you’d guess from career-length alone, because entrants skew older (many are second-career vocations, so average ordination age is often into the late 30s/40s rather than the mid-20s) and there’s meaningful “wastage” before retirement — resignations, health-related departures, and people moving out of stipendiary roles — on top of the retirements that cluster around age 65–66 even though the formal retirement age is 70.
And it comes to this conclusion:
For context on scale: the Church currently ordains around 400–430 people a year for stipendiary ministry in total (its best year in over three decades), which is already short of what’s needed to sustain even the current, shrunken clergy body of under 7,000 — let alone get back to 10,000, a number last seen around 1990 when there were just over 11,000 stipendiary clergy.
So, in short: to maintain 10,000 clergy in steady state under the Church’s own typical wastage assumptions, it would need to ordain roughly 600 people a year — around 50% more than its current best annual intake.
There’s the old joke: ‘How do I get to the Albert Hall from here?’ ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here!’ How do we recover to the historic level of stipendiary clergy? The realistic answer is that we cannot, starting from here—at least not in the short or even medium term. How long does it take to change the age profile of a cohort that spans 40 years (from age 30 to 70)? Answer: 40 years. Or perhaps 30 or 20 to make a significant change. Even with significantly higher ordinations, the number of clergy will certainly continue to fall for the next 10 years.
What does all this mean for the Save the Parish report, and our approach to ministry?
My first comment is that I do think that all the issues that the report raises are quite right, and need addressing anyway. I won’t copy and paste them here; do go and read the report for yourself. The key issues they raise are the question of vocations, the mixed messages given when dioceses foolishly cut clergy numbers, the need for better, less pragmatic, and more clearly Anglican ordination training, and addressing key questions of clergy morale (though they don’t say much explicitly about questions of stipend and pension). As you can see from the links, I have been raising most of these questions for a very long time! I was delighted when, having campaigned in Archbishops’ Council and then through a Private Members Motion in Synod, this was followed up with a fantastic team and we managed to reverse the 40% cut in clergy pension and 10% decline in stipend last year. I still do not understand why no-one in the House of Bishops spoke up about this.
What is interesting in the report is the range of other issues that is missing, which I have noted previously in my own assessment of why vocations to ordained ministry are not recovering, and why clergy are resigning as much as retiring early.
The first is loss of confidence in episcopal leadership; perhaps that was too ‘political’ for STP to include.
The second is the immense damage done by the endless conflict over sexuality, and now issues around ethnicity and ‘race’. STP are avoiding that, because on both those issues, they themselves are a house divided.
Thirdly, the certainty of declining numbers of clergy (and in many, but not all, areas of the Church, consequent continuing decline in the attendance numbers) means that the now top-heavy numbers of bishops, archdeacons, dioceses, and diocesan staff are really unsustainable. I cannot see any signs yet of even the beginnings of a realistic discussion about this.
Finally, the question of finance and parish organisation. STP have campaigned vigorously on particular examples like the merger of parishes in the Kerrier Deanery in Truro Diocese. As I have noted previously, their argument is primarily that, if only the Church Commissioners would release more money into parishes, then these problems would be solved, and we could have a ‘priest in every parish.’ I am afraid that this is entirely delusional, for the demographic reasons above. And there is a real danger that they are operating with a strange (and historical unAnglican) kind of clericalism.
The report warns that the Church of England’s claim to provide “a Christian presence in every community” will have “no meaning” if it cannot attract and retain more priests, who are currently “drowning under burdens of administration”.
The idea that a ‘Christian presence’ is only effected by having clergy there betrays the C of E’s own belief in the ‘priesthood of all believers’ which is actually headlined in the ordination liturgy.
For practical reasons of demographics, the C of E is going to have to completely reimagine what pastoral ministry looks like, not least in rural areas, and I am not sure that, for all the good and right things that they say, STP have actually grasped that yet. (In my 2016 assessment, I even laid out the differential impact this is going to have in different dioceses.) If dioceses and the national church do not do that proactively (and it should have been done ten years ago) then we are going to be always playing catch up in a way that will harm ministry and demoralise clergy further.
But there are also profoundly spiritual reasons why we need a serious rethink. Stuart Browning, vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, expressed it like this on Facebook a year ago:
I’m not being melodramatic when I say that, personally, I think probably one of the Church of England’s greatest spiritual dangers is its wealth from historic assets (as with many Western mainline denominations). None of the most rapidly growing denominations in the UK have any meaningful historic assets, they rely on discipleship, missional vision and the generosity of their congregations—even in very deprived areas.
I’m not denying that faithful and faith-filled churches are greatly blessed by central grants or local assets & buildings, and use them wisely for the Kingdom. But something has gone toxic in the CofE’s bigger picture relationship with money and if left unchecked it leads to the death of dependency on God, faith, prayer, the need to convert and disciple people, and the accountability to normal congregation members who give to sustain the mission of the church.
Or, as Carl Hughes said in introducing the finance debate in Synod last year, this is primarily a spiritual issue and not a financial one.
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