This paper looks out to an horizon of 2027.

It has been prepared by the Hon. Secretary in consultation with the officer group.

Currently the work of the Charity is funded as follows:

1. Giving from supporters

1.1 Parish donations

1.2 Deanery donations

1.2.1 periodic, e.g. through levy on parochial subscriptions

1.2.2 special, e.g. through fund-raising event or deanery service

1.3 Individual donations

1.3.1 regular or occasional personal gifts

1.3.2 legacies

1.4 Grants from other charities

1.5 Corporate donations

2. Investment income

2.1 Any dividend/interest payments that are not accumulated/compounded

2.2 Draw-down from capital resources

 

What will be the trend over the next 20 years? This will depend in no small part upon the health and wealth of the Church of England and that of society in general.

Consider three possible scenarios for the CofE:

(a) and (c) are relatively straightforward as far as the Charity is concerned.

In (a) parish giving shoots up, clergy are well supported locally and have little need for the charity.

In (c) the church lives off its capital and so does the charity. A decrease in clergy leads to reduction in applications for assistance, whilst the retired receive only ‘token’ payments in times of need.

(b) is the most likely outcome and the most problematical for the Charity. What would come along with ‘adaptation’? Here are some thoughts:-

i) The Tiller Report re-visited! - minster churches, payrolled personnel focus on leadership/administration/management/enablement of volunteer groups and teams.

There would be an increase in:

semi-self-supporting ministries ("house for duty")

self-supporting ministries

Reader and other Lay Ministries, ppossibly re-vamped as permanent Diaconate

All the above tending to be ‘portfolio’ ministries, meshed with other voluntary, paid or partly-paid activities/employments

ii) Vertical equity-sharing in Parsonage Houses  (Church Commissioners/Diocese/Incumbent)

iii) Contributory pension (in part or whole) - with benefits geared to self-selected level of contributions

iv) Unbundling: C of E moves from being a national franchise (with strict rules governing the behaviour of franchise holders) towards becoming a commissioning agency (allocating funds - often in partnership with others - to support a much wider range of activities, where the aim is specific but delivery mechanisms are flexible). The life of the Church becomes much less centred on buildings, parochial administration and ecclesiastical institutions.

Who will be the ‘clergy’ amongst these disaggregated expressions of Church life?

The incumbent’s functions will be shared with a whole body of people (the only person on the payroll might be an administrator serving a group of well trained and resourced volunteers who are the pastoral/sacramental enablers within a team, group, or parish cluster covering a wide area.

Tomorrow’s clergy will be much more ‘embedded’ within the communities that they serve. Compared with 40 years ago there is already much less sense of an elitist cadre who have publicly renounced the privileged salaries that formerly attached themselves to anyone possessed of a university degree. The ‘worthiness’ of the clergy to benefit from a fund for the relief of poverty is likely to face growing challenge from a rising generation that has never known the benefit of long-term employment and assured pensions.

In such a climate it would seem prudent to plan for a possible tailing off of annual payments made by parishes. To some extent we have already responded to this challenge through our creation of an expectancy of support in response to the inauguration of a new ministry. Here we took a leaf out of the Children’s Society book and modelled our thinking on their successful take-over of the Christingle concept. Now we need to think beyond this link and look for other tie-ins. Perhaps we could do more to encourage corporate giving and/or major sponsorship?

I identify three principal ‘risks’:-

(a) Schism - say, over issues related to human sexuality;

(b) Unity - say, with Methodists;

(c) Creation of a permanent diaconate and/or other new ‘offices’ within the Church.

 

Looking at each of these in turn…

(a) The Charity pre-dates the present Diocese of Chelmsford and is not a diocesan instrument or organ. But would parishes and individuals continue to support a Charity that dealt even-handedly with both parties to any schism? This is uncharted water and we can have little confidence in any assumptions we might make.

(b) No problem - the Methodist Church has benevolent equivalents already at work amongst clergy and local preachers. An amalgamation of resources would be feasible.

(c) Regardless of whether a permanent diaconate is formally introduced, we will need to define much more clearly the scope and intent of our grants. The test will be ‘cy-près’ - where might we find things being done by ‘non-clergy’ that were done only by ‘clergy’ during the twentieth century? The tipping point will be whenever the Church Commissioners come to grasp this nettle and seek legal powers to use their endowment to remunerate those not in holy orders.

Investments

In the closing decades of the 19th century the charity’s investments were held in irredeemable and long term preference and debenture stocks (mainly in railway companies!) These provided an assured income flow of around 3% per annum whilst capital values were preserved through a time of low inflation. In 1914 the valuation was around £15,500 (£1m or so in today’s value). By the end of the War in 1918 its value in today’s terms had been halved to around £500,000.

The charity continued to follow a fairly unadventurous investment path (this was a time when no one got fired for investing in Consols!) and clearly relied heavily upon regular donations from generous individuals in order to maintain a cash stream from which grants could be paid. In recent years the investment world has become much more sophisticated. The product range is greatly enhanced through derivatives and other innovative investment vehicles.

Clergy cost of living

The government publishes two principal measures of domestic price movements, the Retail Price Index (RPI) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The RPI basket includes a number of items chosen to represent owner-occupier housing costs, including mortgage interest payments and depreciation costs, which are not currently applicable to working clergy and which do not figure in the CPI.

The launch of a government website that enables calculation of a personal inflation rate opens the possibility of reaching some ballpark estimates about how our various categories of beneficiary have fared in recent years. Projecting forward is, however, another matter. Equally we cannot predict the performance of our stocks and shares.

We need to ask ourselves two main questions:

(1) How much value do we wish to see retained within our investments, having due regard to CPI? Anything less than 100% carried forward means we are living off the past; more than 100% means we are providing for the future. (A related question is whether we measure year on year or over a rolling three, five or ten year period)

(2) What cash flow (over and above the income that comes in through giving to the charity) do we need to service our grants throughout the year, having due regard to CPI? And do we have a single target, or a band - narrow/broad, year-on-year/rolling - in which event are we content to have ‘lean’ years that scrape the bottom of the band and ‘fat’ years where we reach the top?

These two targets could be identified and agreed with our fund manager. He/she is free to achieve the result in whatever way they determine, subject to our ethical constraints and any other over-riding policy issues. Cash flow may be generated by dividends, interest, or liquidation of assets. Capital growth may come through higher market valuations and/or accumulation of dividends and compounding of interest.

One final question: looking at (1) and (2) above, which has precedence in the event of the two figures combining to produce an undeliverable request?

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