Show me the money

A simmering argument over how to spend the C of E's £11bn endowment bursts into flame, while an unexpected truce breaks out on sexuality

Hello! I’ve just got back from covering the Church of England’s General Synod meeting in York. Gay blessings were not on the agenda this time, so instead the members got stuck into a really significant argument about money instead. Should the 42 dioceses, almost all of which are heading towards going bust, get a bigger slice of the national church’s fast-growing endowment with no strings attached? Should the church’s historic wealth be spent on new types of evangelism and church plants, or instead invested to support traditional parish ministry?

There was one small debate attached to the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) project, and to everyone’s surprise the liberal and conservative factions joined hands in an ultra-rare show of unanimity to pass a reform. Does this portend well for the resumption of major PLF hostilities later this year?

And vicars’ pensions are getting a big boost, so why are so many of them still so unhappy about their retirement prospects?

Then there’s my latest podcast (Can Christians work in the arms industry, and should we be wary of taking at-home DNA tests?), before we end with a list of church news stories from around the internet (including this week a psychedelic church, a seminary lecturer in a yeti costume, mass baptisms in Bournemouth, and King Charles wearing a feathered necklace).

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Show me the money

The Church of England’s parliament, the General Synod, met at York University over the weekend and it was a fairly quiet session. Arguments about sexuality which have dominated and divided the synod in recent years were almost entirely absent (but not entirely, scroll down for more on that). And the stuff which filled the space on the agenda was largely uncontentious.

And so, in many ways, the most interesting part of the first few days of debate was a series of discussions about how the church spends its money. This is a conversation which has been underway across the whole church for some time now (see previous newsletters for more).

A very brief refresher on how money works in the C of E. It has a big in-perpetuity endowment fund which is held centrally and invested. And invested very well, because it’s now grown to over £11bn. The return from investing that is skimmed off each year and distributed back to the church through many different streams.

To simplify a complicated story, about ten years ago the way part of this money was given to the dioceses was changed. Before it went to the dioceses in automatic block grants via a complicated formula. Then it was changed - some would go in grants based on how poor a diocese’s patch was (some of the dioceses covering wealthier areas basically got nothing), and the rest was bunged into a big fund. Dioceses wanting any of this had to make formal bids to the national church, and they could only spend it on new initiatives focused on church renewal and growth (meaning, you can’t use any of this cash to pay for boring old parish priests doing standard parish ministry).

First called Strategic Development Funding, it’s now run by the Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board and known across the church as SMMIB money. The good news is that the money doled out from the Church Commissioners (the independent charity which manages the endowment) is going up, a lot. In 2017 when the current settlement was first established, they gave to the church £790m over three years. The current plans for 2026-28 are to spend £1.6bn, basically double (SMMIB is only a portion of that sum, the rest pays for some older pensions, bishops and cathedrals, props up diocesan finances and does lots of other little things).

This is mostly due to the spectacular market-beating success the Commissioners have had at investing their fund. But it’s not just that. It’s also because the settlement has come under increasing strain. Spearheaded by the pressure group Save The Parish (STP) who oppose new-fangled ministry, more and more people across the church are questioning the way this money is doled out. More and more people, including some bishops, are demanding more (or maybe all) of the Commissioners’ money is given to the dioceses or parishes directly to prop up traditional ministry, without any hoops to jump through or bidding process.

What is clear from how the hierarchy unveiled its latest spending plans is that this campaign is working. Or, at the very least, they are sensitive to the pressure being placed upon them. When Alan Smith, the head of the Commissioners, presented the £1.6bn proposals for 2026-28, he clearly had STP and aligned bishops in mind.

He was subtly trying to defang the critics’ approach by repeatedly emphasising how the Commissioners were going all out. Nothing was being held back, they were stretching their fund to the limit to generate as much cash for the church to spend as possible, he told synod. There were slickly produced slides showing in clear visual terms how enormous the increase in distributions had been. There was clearly a comms strategy behind it all, working way harder than they ever bothered to before, to try and reassure the recalcitrants that the endowment was not being hoarded by the centre.

The context here is that while it’s undeniably good news that the endowment fund is growing so spectacularly, it’s also quite awkward. Because just as the Commissioners are toasting their enormous success, almost all of the dioceses are rushing towards bankruptcy. Last year it was anticipated that 35 of the 42 will be running a deficit, to a total tune of £62m. This has more than doubled in just two years. A combination of long-term decline finally catching up with the church, plus the sudden shock of covid, and then endless increases required for things like safeguarding have plunged diocesan finances into the red.

So, many diocesan treasurers and bishops look with greedy eyes at the £11bn the central church is sitting on and think they could really do with a bit more of that to try and keep the show on the road down here. But, of course, it’s not £11bn in cash sitting in a bank account waiting to be spent. As Smith emphasised at synod:

“As an in-perpetuity fund, our money has to last until the day before Jesus returns.”

Some people have asked why can’t the endowment stop growing. Because it is growing - it’s not the case that the Commissioners ruthlessly give away every penny they earn on their investments year after year. When I first started covering church affairs in 2013 the fund was £6bn; today it’s reached £11bn. But Smith had an answer: the church’s internal economy keeps on growing year after year, and demands for the endowment flood in. And so the Commissioners have to keep on growing the endowment to keep pace with both economy-wide inflation, and the even greater rate of inflation inside the church.

Ten years ago there was no such thing as a national redress scheme to compensate victims of abuse. Today, the Commissioners have had to put aside £150m to pay for it. Vicars’ pay and pensions are also increasing (more on that later). Day to day safeguarding is expanding every year also - a decade ago there was a single part-time safeguarding adviser. Today, the national team alone is more than 50 people. Effectively Smith was saying that to maintain funding for the church into the future you need to grow the endowment as the church’s costs grow.

But for all the work on shaping the message, many in the synod were still not happy. Later, the Bishop of Hereford Richard Jackson moved a quite radical motion. It called for a redistribution of funds back from the Commissioners to the dioceses, to the tune of £2.6bn (the supposed amount lost cumulatively since the dioceses took on some pensions liabilities in 1997).

His speech was quite dark. The financial black holes yawning inside most diocesan accounts were an “existential threat to the Church of England”, Jackson warned. Some parishes in his diocese were advertising their vacant vicar jobs for a fourth time without a single applicant. Numbers entering ordination training were collapsing. Huge effort has been made to increase giving by congregations, but any progress on this is more than wiped out by decline in attendance numbers. Every year his diocese loses 3-5% of its total congregants by death alone.

Something must be done to stave this off. And Jackson’s answer is: give us more of that £11bn the Commissioners are sitting on. He conceded that his original motion (envisaging the reversal of the 1997 settlement) was “unrealistic”, but luckily another bishop had come up with a better idea. Jackson’s motion could be amended by the Bishop of Bath & Wells Michael Beasley, who proposed that 1% of the endowment be given automatically to the dioceses to pay for vicars every year.

This is not about who controls the endowment, Jackson said. Everyone accepts the money should be held centrally by the Commissioners. But it was about “who knows best how to get maximum value” from the endowment. Was it the national church’s experts in London, or the local ministers in each diocese? He shared a story of how even to get a relatively small SMMIB grant of £450,000 for the Diocese of Hereford had required 500 hours of work from his staff. Is this worth it?

And then the synod got into the debate. Some spoke in favour of the two bishops, warning that without more cash reaching ordinary rural parish ministry it would die out very quickly. Without maintaining the parish network, went the argument, there would be no foundation to plonk all the whizzy church plants and fresh expressions on top of. Don’t put all the church’s eggs in the SMMIB basket, one archdeacon warned.

STP’s leading light, the London priest Marcus Walker, said synod was really “shadow-boxing” around the real question: how do we best bring people back to God? Was it through new initiatives or the same old traditional parish ministry the church has offered for millennia? A “phalanx” of Church Commissioners and members of the Archbishops’ Council (the C of E’s executive body which oversees SMMIB) had risen to claim that the power to revitalise the church had to rest in their hands, he said. But those who knew best were those on the ground - why not trust them and let the money flow down?

Others, including the frontrunner to become Archbishop of Canterbury Guli Francis-Dehqani (currently the Bishop of Chelmsford) said parish morale was at rockbottom as clergy were spread thinner and thinner over amalgamated parishes grouped together in ever larger benefices. Only this kind of permanent injection of endowment funds would stop the burnout and decline.

It was utterly refreshing to see the synod get into the guts of a very real divide. For once we weren’t circling around each other via endless proxy debates, but getting at some very fundamental questions. Should the church be run more as a single national unit, or more devolved into 42 regional blocs? How can we best spend our historic assets for present-day mission, while leaving some aside for the future? Is decline inevitable, or can it be forestalled or even prevented? What actually makes churches grow? There are no easy answers to any of these, but if the C of E is going to survive the 21st century it will have to grasp the nettle and work this all out.

What also became clear as I watched on was how carefully the hierarchy were trying to manage the debate. There are, after all, billions of pounds on the line here, and so it became apparent that there was a concerted effort to carefully steer synod towards less radical avenues. Chiefly, one proposed by the Bishop of Sheffield Pete Wilcox, who had brought another amendment to the original Jackson motion.

The Wilcox amendment would take out the whole Jackson one and replace it with some nice wordage about clergy welfare and better stakeholder engagement, blah blah blah. And at the end, the crux of it was a call for a debate at some point in the next few years so that synod could take a view on how funding can be disbursed, but based on “robust financial modelling to avoid unintended consequences”.

And the phrase “unintended consequences” was in some ways the buzzword of the pushback against the Jackson/Beasley revolt. Speaker after speaker (many of them from the Archbishops’ Council) rose to their feet to warn that the synod really, really, really shouldn’t dramatically unpick the church’s funding settlements for fear of triggering “unintended consequences”. It was a carefully-crafted and complicated package deal - you can’t just rewrite it on the fly. Now this is on one level true, but also underlines another one of those national/local divides. As noted by the Church Times journalist Madeleine Davies (who is the leading voice probing into church spending): If the funding settlement has already been agreed and cannot be changed, why is it even being brought to the synod for them to vote on it?

Anyway, Smith, the head of the Commissioners, was first up to deliver a friendly yet chilling warning to synod that passing the Beasley amendment would be disastrous. Putting aside the 1% a year (about £110m at current rates) forever would mean ring-fencing £3.5bn of the total fund. This would mean that all other discretionary spending the Commissioners currently make would have to go. Once you’d done this 1% payment to dioceses to pay their vicars, and covered some historic liabilities such as older pensions and the costs of bishops and cathedrals, there would basically be nothing left. That meant no money for clergy retirement housing. Nothing to help dioceses get their finances in order. Nothing to spend on lay ministry. All those other pet projects, from getting the C of E to net zero or rooting our racial injustice - they’d all have to go.

And he wasn’t done. To make sure the 1% was there every year, the Commissioners would have to move assets into lower-yield but less risky investment categories, meaning lower returns. And lower returns meant less money for all other areas of church spending.

After Smith had poured cold water on the 1% idea, Wilcox was up next. Nobody denied there was an crisis in church finances, he said. But this was not the way to do it, before going on to repeat much of Smith’s warnings. And even if you did shower dioceses with extra cash for parochial clergy, where are those clergy to spend it on? Every diocese right now could not hire enough vicars to fill their current posts, let alone opening more jobs. The risk was this money would be moved from the Commissioners’ central pot to diocesan stipend funds (which by law cannot be spent on anything but vicars) and then pile up there unspent.

Wilcox went further. The Beasley amendment was such a bad idea that the Commissioners would have no choice but to lobby parliament itself to veto the law. Acts of synod don’t come into effect until they have been passed by parliament. Ordinarily they are nodded through, but this time the Commissioners might decide it would be so bad for their fund they could ask MPs to throw it out.

Instead, Wilcox concluded, vote for my amendment. He freely admitted it kicked the issue of funding into the long grass (or as he phrased it, the “closely mown short grass”), but that would buy time for the C of E to knock heads together and find a better way forward, together.

In what might be a sign of some manoeuvring by the hierarchy, the chair of the debate decided (as is her right) to take the Wilcox amendment before the Beasley one. This meant that Wilcox’s ‘calm down and debate this later’ amendment was voted on first. If it passed (spoiler alert, it did) then Beasley’s more radical ‘put 1% of the endowment every year straight into diocesan stipend funds’ amendment would not even get debated at all.

After what some observers suggested might have been a series of prepared speeches by Church Commissioners and Archbishops’ Council members, the synod was duly spooked enough to pass Wilcox’s amendment and kick the funding issue into the long short grass. But the numbers were quite close.

Among the bishops Wilcox won by 22 votes to nine. So about a third of the bishops were at least interested in the more radical ideas coming from Jackson and Beasley. In the clergy it was even tighter: Wilcox prevailed by 89-75, and among the laity it was closer again, with Wilcox winning 87-83.

There is a substantial chunk of the church (if the synod is at all representative, maybe amounting to 30-40%) who are ready to tear up the current funding settlement. A faction which includes many bishops and plenty of clergy. A faction which wants to wrest control away from the national hierarchy and devolve power and money back to those at the grassroots.

It felt, in some ways, like this debate was downstream from some other cultural shifts happening in the church. Ten years ago, when the SMMIB system was first set up, there was significantly more trust and deference across the C of E to the experts and hierarchy at the centre. The reforms which created SMMIB passed, as far as I recall, with quite limited opposition. Now, thousands of ordinary clergy and congregants (and even some bishops) no longer trust the national church. They no longer think they automatically have their best interests at heart.

They’ve lost so much trust, in fact, that they are happy to throw down the gauntlet on the floor of the synod and battle it out, over the vociferous objections and expert analysis from the church’s leading mandarins and accountants. It’s hard to believe we would be having this in-depth argument about money,if we hadn’t first seen confidence in the national church drain away over other issues (primarily, I’d argue, an inability to stop decline and the sexuality saga).

This is a debate which has not been settled. Indeed, the pro-SMMIB side of it disputes even the contours as I’ve sketched them out here. Plenty of speakers in the synod refuted the idea this is about national vs local. SMMIB is not top-down imposition from the centre, it’s partnership. After all, it is the dioceses themselves who come up with the ideas of what to spend money on, before then going to SMMIB and discussing whether their project will be funded.

At times, it even got a bit heated as this was hashed out on the floor of synod. One prominent lay member of the Archbishops’ Council angrily insisted SMMIB existed solely to help grow parish ministry and support the traditional “cure of souls” which the C of E has always set as its mission. I’m elected by you, the synod, she declared - I’m not some “unaccountable faceless bureaucrat”. And it stung to hear two bishops who had not even bothered to come and speak to us “trash” our work in front of the watching world, she concluded.

The Bishop of Blackburn Philip North echoed much of this. Famous for his advocacy on behalf of traditional parish ministry, North said he had in fact changed his mind. After seeing the massive uptick in money being given by the Commissioners to the church this time round, including ever-larger sums to his diocese for its poorest parishes, he could not support his brother bishops Jackson and Beasley. No-strings funding, going back to the bad old days of distributing endowment cash by crude formula, was a recipe for “torpor” and waste in the diocese. What he wanted, as a diocesan bishop, was cash for poor parishes which could never pay their own way, plus access to grants for experimentation on a level they couldn’t afford locally. It wasn’t SMMIB versus the parish; in Blackburn diocese SMMIB was literally rebuilding the parish. “You can’t spend your way out of a missional crisis, you can only grow your way out,” he concluded.

This argument eventually won the day. There were a few other attempts to revolt: one synod member tried to amend a separate motion on spending to peel off a smaller sum of money and hand it over no-strings-attached to the dioceses to spend on parish ministry. Once again the response from the hierarchy: “Beware of unintended consequences”.

It was more comfortably defeated, but the fact it was even up for debate is telling. A few years ago an amendment like that would have got barely a handful of the usual malcontents going for it, and no-one else. Today, up to a third of the House of Bishops is tempted to go down this road.

There’s the backlash of the parish against the supremacy of the church plant. But there’s also another backlash. The era of synod meekly voting through whatever spending plans the hierarchy brings them are gone. The deference to experts is gone. Even as the Commissioners and Archbishops’ Council pivot to trying to give synod more of what it wants, many members are unsatisfied. Every proposal, every plan that comes down from Church House will now have to be properly argued for and fought for to get through the synod.

Perhaps this is a good thing, a sign of the grassroots of the church waking up from their slumber. Maybe it’s healthier for the experts at the centre not to always get their own way, to have to really make the case for why their plans are the best thing for the C of E. It’s certainly positive that we are now getting to grips with the big issues which will determine if the church withers away or bursts back into life.

Towards the end of the synod there was a very upbeat session led by the national church growth team which told a story of progress, maybe even revival. Members were shown a flashy and highly produced video celebrating the church coming back to life. Bible sales are up (something on this coming up in a future newsletter, by the way), the Quiet Revival, four years of attendance growth, smashing success in youth social media evangelism. There was a six-person panel of folk from across the C of E telling stories of conversions, plus an event marking the tenth anniversary of the church’s annual prayer evangelism campaign Thy Kingdom Come.

All of this, the message came loud and clear, is at least in part because the C of E dug out its chequebook (/dipped into its endowment fund) and spent its money. That money is working, the church is turning the corner, good things are happening.

I’ve been frank in previous newsletters that my own view leans closer towards Philip North and Pete Wilcox than Michael Beasley or Richard Jackson. I think it’s better for the national church to have some degree of control on how its central funds are spent locally, to restrain the dioceses from frittering the church’s endowment away on unsustainable ministry and to promote innovation.

But the uncomfortable truth for those on my side of the debate is that it’s far from clear if SMMIB-style projects are the future of the church. There are some successes to cheer, but what does not get hailed on the podium are those SMMIB projects which have gone nowhere. Or even made things worse. The record is decidedly patchy. For every thriving HTB city centre resource church plant which has taken over a moribund parish and brought new life, there will be somewhere else a sputtering-along project which is resolutely not sparking any growth.

There of course won’t be a single silver bullet, a formula we can just roll out across the C of E and know it will lead to revival. But if the pro-SMMIB wing want to hold the line against the growing strength of Save The Parish, they will need to keep on gathering these stories of success. And beyond that, figure out quickly how to direct their millions towards the initiatives which work and not the ones which don’t.

SMMIB may have won this first battle at synod, but the war isn’t over yet.

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A Christmas truce

I mentioned that same-sex strife mostly did not rear its head during this synod. But there was one item which did address the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) saga. A private member’s motion was debated as almost the last item on the agenda which called for the end of Issues in Human Sexuality.

Issues, as it is universally known across the church, is a 1991 teaching document from the House of Bishops of the C of E. You can read it here, if you have a spare hour or two. It was, until the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) project began in 2017, the most recent comprehensive take on sexual ethics the church had offered.

It’s a complicated document, but at root it adopts a largely conservative position. It expresses sympathy for gay Christians and walks through the various arguments about whether or not they should be sexually active. But it lands on the conclusion that gay clergy, whatever their conscience may tell them, are not permitted to be in same-sex relationships. It also, crucially, adds that ordination candidates must also abide by these same standards (although it cautions against intrusive questioning on this issue and recommends the church trusts people to do the right thing by themselves unless given reason to doubt this).

Although it was never explicitly intended to play this role, at some point (no-one can actually explain how or when) after 1991 Issues was inserted into the discernment process. So when somebody was exploring a possible call to become a vicar, after a while they would be required to read Issues and then promise to live within its teaching should they get ordained.

How this happened varied from diocese to diocese. In more liberal places the future vicar would be vaguely pointed towards Issues online and told ‘I have to show you this’, and never would it be spoken of again. Clearly, there are hundreds and hundreds of serving clergy today in the church who have no intention of living within the sexual ethic outlined in Issues, so it did not act as a robust filter for those who disliked its teaching.

In more conservative dioceses candidates would be required to sign a document agreeing to live within the confines of Issues. This, understandably, caused some disquiet and hurt for gay liberal would-be vicars who had previously assumed the church welcomed them only to discover they had to, in fact, promise to be celibate or abandon their vocation.

In addition to laying out the church’s current teaching, Issues is also just very 1991. For its time it was probably fairly progressive in its approach and tries to adopt a measured tone. But the world has moved on significantly, and the bishops are clumsy (and at times, just factually wrong) as they painstakingly work through the issues. Throughout they use the term “homophile” instead of “homosexual” for some reason, which is just cringe. They get quite close to writing that bisexuals cannot but be unfaithful to their partners.

And so for many years, progressives have longed to get rid of it from the discernment process. Throughout the PLF process, replacing Issues with new pastoral guidance was a secondary part of the project. But not just modernising the language or tweaking it here and there - the liberal wing of the church hoped to rewrite some of its teaching entirely. The dream, as yet unrealised but still in the works, was to change the rules so that gay clergy could officially be in sexually active relationships and even enter civil same-sex marriages without censure. All this, despite everyone acknowledging the formal doctrine of the church (marriage is for one man and one woman, and all sex outside it is wrong) remaining unchanged.

The bishops at the very start promised that Issues would go and some elements of the new pastoral guidance have been rolled out, relating to how the PLF can be used in services. There have been several motions passed by synod in previous meetings agreeing that Issues would go. But the really controversial part of the replacement guidance - do gay clergy have to formally promise to be celibate - is as yet unpublished. And so Issues remains, even though even the conservatives agree it is outdated and should be replaced. Gay couples have been able to receive a formal bishop-approved blessing in church since Christmas 2023, and yet an ordinand beginning discernment this month would still be required to assent to Issues.

But no longer. Because in a genuinely surprising turn of events, the liberals and conservatives got together and hashed out a deal. The private member’s motion calling for the end of Issues was amended to say that Issues would be replaced in the interim by the Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of the Clergy (GPCC), until the new guidance was finally ready.

And then, as if by magic, consensus broke out across the synod. Liberals stood to applaud the end of the hated Issues. Conservatives stood to say… well, yeah, we agree, goodbye and good riddance to Issues. There were warm words exchanged, heartfelt thanks for a good solution found. For the first time since the PLF saga began more than two and a half years ago, we saw the two factions come together for a common cause. It was like the Christmas truce in December 1914 all over again. They put down their guns and walked out into No Man’s Land, practically hand in hand.

The key thing to understand here is that from the beginning few if any conservatives ever wanted to go in to bat for Issues. It is objectively outdated, crass and - at times - bizarre. It expresses ideas even hardline conservatives would shrink from today. But they could never previously get on board with binning it because the replacement guidance was not ready.

The conservatives were not about to let there be a vacuum for six, nine or 12 months, when future vicars could get through the discernment process without having to formally agree to order their personal lives around the church’s teaching. They did not want to give even a temporary hint that somehow the sexual ethic of the C of E had changed.

And so Issues lingered on as a kind of zombie document, unwanted by all but unable to be put out of its misery until the bishops figured out what on earth they were going to do about the ban on gay vicars getting married. Until somebody had the bright idea of using the GPCC an interim replacement. These are guidelines written much more recently (and regularly updated) which lay out expectations for the clergy. And crucially they include a section on sexual ethics:

‘The clergy should set an example of integrity in relationships, and faithfulness in marriage. Marital infidelity is regarded as “unbecoming or inappropriate conduct” for the purposes of the Clergy Discipline Measure. The House of Bishops’ Marriage: A Teaching Document (1999) clearly affirms, “Sexual intercourse, as an expression of faithful intimacy, properly belongs within marriage exclusively.”’

So no lowering of the standard would happen by replacing Issues with the GPCC - all candidates for ordination would still have to commit to the church’s doctrine on marriage and sex. This unblocked the conservatives’ opposition, and Issues came tumbling down after a relatively short debate in which almost everyone agreed with each other.

The motion was moved by Paul Waddell, a progressive synod member, who was quite candid from the podium that he would love for the C of E to embrace same-sex marriage wholeheartedly. But that was not on the table, and so why not shelve all the other agonies of the PLF debate and make a targeted surgical removal of Issues here and now? He spoke directly to conservatives, promising the bar would not be lowered because the GPCC would come in to replace Issues.

A critical moment came early on when Vaughan Roberts, a high-profile conservative evangelical vicar, spoke in favour of the motion as amended. “I don’t like Issues,” he said, as a “same-sex attracted” man. His identity and choices (he is committed to singleness and celibacy) were not recognised by Issues. He couldn’t have voted to ditch it without something to replace it, but the GPCC would do very well for now.

This basically sealed the deal, as the sight of deeply conservative Roberts warmly agreeing with the very liberal Waddell meant both sides could get on board. The rest of the debate was mostly filled with people relitigating all the reasons Issues was bad, and also expressing incredulity and pleasure at how nice it was to all agree for once.

One maverick conservative bravely bucked the cozy consensus to warn against the motion, arguing that the deal had always been for the guidance, gay blessings and provision for conservatives to be a three-part package deal. Making a change on one part of this three-legged stool when the other two were not yet ready, was more of a “sticking plaster” than the lauded “surgical removal”. But she basically spoke only for herself, and when the vote came Issues was consigned to history by an almost unanimous synod.

What had happened is that over the synod weekend, small numbers of leaders from both camps had got together over a pint in the bars of the University of York and thrashed out a deal. The progressives listened carefully to the conservatives’ objections and realised they’d never get rid of Issues if there wasn’t a replacement holding the same basic doctrinal standard on sex and marriage.

And when they offered out the GPCC as a replacement, the conservatives realised here was a win-win. They could lose the outdated Issues and gain kudos on all sides for not being stuck-in-the-mud reactionaries, while actually making no concessions at all on the doctrinal substance. And so they chinked glasses, shook hands, cooked up the amendment, checked the text was acceptable to both sides, and got it done a few days later on the floor of synod.

Although not quite everyone got the memo, as leading progressive priest and activist Charlie Baczyk-Bell merrily told the Reuters news agency that getting rid of Issues actually was about de facto liberalisation of the church’s teaching. Whoops.

The lingering question is does any of this matter? Of course it’s nice that nobody has to sign up to an at best outdated and at worst offensive document if they want to start the discernment process. But will this bonhomie and comradeship survive beyond this one side issue? Are we going to see this new spirit of co-operation and compromise extended to the more visceral, contested issues still up for grabs?

There remains much left to be negotiated. What will the guidance be on how standalone services of blessings can happen? Will the bishops attempt to stop liberal churches putting these on as de facto gay weddings? What kind of offer will be made to conservatives itching to break with their bishops and leave the church? Will delegated episcopal ministry be enough, or can it be toughened up to meet the demands of the conservative hardliners? And will gay clergy be given permission to bend the rules of the church and enter sexually active same-sex marriages, despite official doctrine pointing in the other direction?

Are we likely to see this same convivial approach on any of these? We don’t yet know, but my hunch is probably not. The doctrinal and theological gulf between the two sides remains as vast as ever. It does feel like the temporary truce over Issues was a welcome but fleeting example of smart politics on both sides. On the core principles, they are as divided as they were before. And so I firmly expect February’s synod meeting, when we are supposedly going to be finally making a final decision on all the remaining elements of the PLF package, to be as bitterly contested and winner-takes-all as ever.

After all, there was a Christmas truce in December 1914. It was heartwarming and magical. And then in the New Year both sides went back to their trenches and spent four more years machine-gunning each other to death.

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A magic money tree?

Woven throughout the money conversation at synod was the question of pensions. Money spent not on ministry, but on the ministers expected to deliver much of it. And here, the message once again to angry clergy demanding more from the national church was “We hear you”. Because pensions, as mentioned in previous Critical Friends, are going up, and going up a lot. Carl Hughes, who chairs the C of E’s finance committee and helped draw up the new funding plans, made a big push on what a difference pensions would make.

Splashed onto the big screens were indicative examples of what this meant in practice. For a newly ordained curate just starting their ministry, their expected pension would previously have been £14,000 a year and a £43,000 lump sum (if they do the full 40 years service). Under the new pension those figures jump up by 63%: £23,000 a year and a £70,000 lump sum.

And this is retrospective to 2011 (when the pension target was reduced from two-thirds of the stipend to a half. So even someone in the middle of their ministry who was ordained in 2010 will see a 60% boost to their pension. And all of this is achieved without having to demand any more money from the dioceses to contribute towards the church’s pension scheme.

As with the whole budget from the Church Commissioners, this was all presented as jolly good news and undeniable proof that the hierarchy can be trusted to have the local church’s best interests at heart. We’re not hoarding money at the centre, we’re freely dishing it out left, right and centre. But lurking behind the spin is a question: was the C of E actually going to go anything on pensions and pay without the pressure they’ve been under from the synod and other campaigns in the media?

As it happens, the demands for pension restoration arrived at a time when the Pensions Board had improved its situation. The target pension was cut and diocesan contributions hiked up years ago because the scheme was in trouble. Now, the scheme is in surplus and so it was relatively straightforward to bump up the pension without having to call on either the dioceses to chip in or the Church Commissioners (the Pensions Board is run independently). This is being presented as the national church doing the right thing by its priests, but was there a plan to restore the pension prior to the campaigns of the last 18 months?

Indeed, just last year when the issue of pension restoration first came up at synod, the national church was pretty dismissive in batting away the idea or suggesting it was unaffordable and unnecessary. I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility that without the campaign, even as the scheme came into the black, the hierarchy may have just quietly banked the cash rather than giving it back to the clergy.

That said, the vociferous campaigning of vicars over pensions may have gone a little too far at times. Frankly ridiculous numbers of clergy signed up to a pensions Facebook group earlier this year (something like one in ten of all priests in the C of E had joined within a few days). The instigating post for that group was a vicar who posted a photo showing that his mother (a clergy widow) was getting more each year in her widow’s pension than he, a serving priest, was due to get when he retired.

And no doubt there are plenty of vicars who are really struggling in retirement. Simply peruse this website for endless stories of financial woe and crisis, people left with almost nothing to live on once their housing costs are covered (as many vicars retire without a home of their own). And yet. Sometimes the pensions conversation in the church feels oddly disconnected from reality.

I do wonder if the mostly 50-something vicars arguing about this at synod have much idea what pensions look like outside the church. In 2023, the average pensioner had an income in the region of just £14,000 a year. That obviously includes the state pension of about £12,000. Even before the 60% boost just announced, a vicar with a full church pension would be getting £26,000 when you include the state pension, and on top of that a chunky lump sum of £40,000. Under the new pension, that will rise to £35,000 and a lump sum of £70k.

So it is a little bemusing to hear clergy speak of their poor benighted position. And remember that the church’s pension scheme is a defined benefit one. You can accrue that £35k/year without chipping in a single penny of your own money, just by serving the maximum 40-odd years. How many defined benefit schemes are there open to ordinary people today? Very, very few.

That’s before we get to some of the wilder suggestions from some vicars at synod. One person complained that their years of service in an entirely different denomination was not being counted towards their C of E pension. Well - yes. Of course it isn’t. Does any institution anywhere pay pensions for years worked at other jobs?!

The reality is, pensions are fairly tightly connected to the financial health of the scheme. They don’t fall down out of thin air, they have to be affordable from the Pensions Board’s assets. The pension is not now becoming more generous because the hierarchy have had a change of heart and want to be nice to vicars. It’s because the Pensions Board has closed a hole in its scheme from the past and got back into the black.

But there is, of course, a limit. Clive Mather, the board’s chair, painstakingly tried to explain this to the vicars on synod: we can do this now because dioceses kept up their contributions, our investment returns improved, and we cut our central costs. There isn’t an unlimited pot of money, and as much as we might all like to give vicars the world’s greatest pension, calling for unaffordable settlements is simply a bit childish if you have no way to pay for it.

No, said one priest who proposed a motion to go further and pay back already retired clergy any money they have lost from the cuts made in the past to the pension. You might say there isn’t an unlimited pot of money, but I say that “money follows vision”. If we get the vision right for clergy’s dignity in retirement, then the “money will follow”. It’s a lovely idea, but I just don’t think it’s true. Money isn’t magic.

In the end, a sweeping motion from this priest calling for even more uplift of the pension (and Commissioners-funded compensation for retired clergy deemed to be out of pocket) was replaced via an amendment with a more restrained call for a independent review of pensions. That’s due back at synod within 12 months.

Part of me wonders if this is a generational thing. Are baby boomer priests approaching retirement looking at their peers in secular employment and their generous pensions with envious eyes? Perhaps compared to the some of the gold-plated pensions you could get in the 1960s and 70s the church one does feel inadequate. But for millennials like me, who have known from the first day we entered the workplace that our pensions would be threadbare (if they even existed at all), it does feel a lot like special pleading. We’d all love a brilliant pension, but down here in the world as it actually exists the one the church offers is actually kind of fine, and way better than what I or most of my generation will have to rely on.

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Can Christians work in the arms industry?

In this Q&A episode we begin with a query from a listener who is agonising over whether to apply for work at a defence research institution. Can believers, even those who hold to just war theory, spend their careers helping create better ways for soldiers to kill? How can we know what God’s will for our lives are in general?
Then we move to a second question about a concerning story: a family using at-home DNA tests accidentally discovered their late father was not biologically related to them, and instead had been swapped for another family’s baby when a newborn in an NHS maternity ward 80 years ago. Should we be wary of taking these kind of DNA tests, afraid of what unintended consequences may flow? How should Christians approach our society’s increasingly DNA-obsessed thinking about family and kinship?

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Quickfire

• In a blow to anyone hoping he might swiftly usher in big reforms, Pope Leo has reaffirmed that priests have to be celibate, but urged bishops to take firm action against abusers in the Catholic Church.

• In Colorado, a man has started a ‘church’ in his basement which combines worship with psychedelics. Apparently it’s a genuine endeavour and not a thinly-veiled attempt to get round laws which regulate the use of such drugs in the state.

• Lambeth Palace has finished a huge £40m renovation, which included installing 160 double-glazed windows, 30 miles of cables, a mile of heating pipes and three giant air source heat pumps. The first major refurbishment since the Second World War, it has reduced the medieval palace’s emissions by 71% as well as protecting it from a disastrous fire by replacing decrepit wiring and heating systems. Oddly, the builders found half a human leg bone while digging under the kitchen - no-one knows where it came from but they think it predates the palace entirely.

• American’s taxman, the Internal Revenue Service, has conceded that churches and other religious charities can actually endorse political candidates in a court filing, giving up on enforcing a longstanding rule that previously prevented them on pain of losing their tax exemptions. The IRS is being sued by two evangelical churches and now with Donald Trump in the White House seems to have given up defending the rule. In fact, only one church in 70 years has ever actually lost its exemption over it, suggesting it existed more in theory than in practice.

• Churches from the last fully Christian Palestinian town have released a joint statement lamenting continuing attacks from extremist Israeli settlers. The leaders from Taybeh in the West Bank have accused settlers of deliberately starting a fire close to their 5th century church, as well as other regular incidents of harassment and provocation. Four C of E bishops have written an open letter demanding the government ramp up sanctions against such settlers and insist Israel reins them in.

• The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into an Anglican church in York, after concerns were raised over its financial management and the conduct of its trustees (which in a parish church are the members of its Parochial Church Council, elected annually by the congregation). The church’s website describes it as a “living, inclusive church in the central Anglican tradition”.

• A bonkers story from Denver, where a Catholic seminary has got caught in controversy after a bizarre blood oath prank leaked out. Students were on a trip when they were woken late at night by the college’ vice-rector. Videos have shown the students being taken out one by one to swear a pretend “blood oath” next to another man dressed as a yeti, and fake slashing their hand over a document. The local diocese said the event was a “part of a deeply imprudent and inappropriate prank” and the man responsible has since been “removed from his seminary leadership role and has recommitted to his ongoing personal and spiritual formation”.

• The Dean of Blackburn Cathedral has been suspended after a complaint was made against him under the C of E’s disciplinary procedures. He steps aside in the wake of a critical safeguarding audit, which rated the cathedral as “inadequate” and criticised the decision-making, governance and accountability there. The Dean was the designated safeguarding lead, which the audit said was “neither appropriate nor sustainable”. Blackburn Cathedral was the site of a major safeguarding scandal last year after it emerged one of its priests who the diocese was convinced was a safeguarding risk was paid off to retire in 2021 (read the messy details in this newsletter from the time).

• A Catholic mass has been held inside Canterbury Cathedral, complete with a papal blessing, to honour the relics of Thomas Becket. Becket was the 12th century archbishop who was murdered on the (supposedly misinterpreted) orders of the king, and who was later turned into a saint and martyr. His bones and shrine were destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries in the English Reformation, but for decades in a gesture of ecumenical goodwill the local Catholic parish church have been let back into the cathedral they used to run pre-Henry VIII for a mass. This has apparently upset some more evangelical Anglicans.

• A fascinating BBC News report from the King’s “harmony” summit, in which indigenous tribal leaders from across the world led fire ceremonies and blessed Mother Earth as they celebrated harmonious coexistence with nature. The C of E’s environment bishop Graham Usher was also there, who insisted that the sovereign retained his deep Christian faith (he is the head of the church after all) but was interested in building bridges with other religious traditions.

• Ninety-two people have been baptised in the sea off Bournemouth beach as part of a huge cross-city event led by five churches. The minister at the independent evangelical church which spearheaded the mass baptism said they’d seen the “quiet revival” underway and wanted to show Bournemouth its churches were “alive and kicking”.

• Ground has been broken in a dig at the now infamous mass grave in Tuam, Ireland, where the church and state combined to run a coercive and oppressive mother and baby home. About 800 babies who died while in the Tuam home (one of dozens across Ireland which detained women who fell pregnant out of wedlock) and their bodies are believed to have been dumped in a septic tank.

• Deeply conservative and controversial American evangelical pastor John MacArthur has died aged 86. MacArthur led a highly influential ministry called Grace To You as well as running Californian megachurch Grace Community Church for half a century. He upset some fellow evangelicals through his pungent and intemperate attacks on charismatic Christianity and women preachers, and more recently tried to resist lockdown rules and keep his church open during covid.

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading. If you’re not yet a subscriber, click below to get The Critical Friend sent to your inbox every Friday. And if you are, could you consider upgrading to a paid sub? It only costs £5 a month, and that gets you access to the comment section, the back catalogue of newsletters, and occasional bonus content. And it warms the cockles of my hearts too.