The parish church has been a foundational part of cultural life in England for hundreds of years. England’s 12,500 parish churches are ‘treasure houses’ of national history, containing the memories of our ancestors as well as the rich architectural and musical heritage of Anglicanism. Parishes also bring together local communities, providing charitable services – including food banks, childcare and counselling – worth billions of pounds per year.
Yet parish churches across the country are now in crisis. Crumbling buildings, declining attendance, and sharp reductions in clergy all pose a considerable threat to their survival. In the past 50 years, over 2,000 churches have been made redundant, with some 300 of these closing between 2016 and 2021 alone. Congregations have been shrinking in size since the 1960s, but fell by a further 19 per cent following the pandemic. Meanwhile, the number of stipendiary clergy in the Church of England has almost halved since 1959, leaving many churches without a priest dedicated to the parish.
Though this decline can to some extent be attributed to lower levels of religiosity and community attachment in today’s Britain, this report argues that management decisions made by the Church of England itself have also played a major role. These include moves to cut funding to local churches and ministers – in some cases merging up to 23 parishes into one ‘mega-parish’ served by a single team of clergy – and instead directing resources towards central bureaucracy: on average, the Church now employs one administrator for every three and a half priests. Hundreds of millions of pounds have also been funnelled into ‘strategic development funding’, intended to experiment with radical new ways of attracting people to the Church. These have mixed results and, according to some critics, often represent a departure from Anglican traditions and belief.
Restoring the Value of Parishes diagnoses what has gone wrong with the Church of England in recent years, and makes the case for returning to what works: supporting local clergy to continue serving their communities via parish churches. This will require Church management to restore its confidence in the parish as an institution that is uniquely placed to provide a refuge from the challenges of modernity. At a time when the public sector is diminished and invisible in many communities, the parish can be an ideal starting point for the renewal of civic life. If the Church wants to be more ‘relevant’, the author argues, it should stop trying to reinvent itself and instead embrace its unique position as a source of tradition, sanctity, and community solidarity in an uncertain world.
