Resourcing Mission Group

Hmmm. CofE'ers might want to give this report the once over. Rightly they start with a recognition that resourcing should follow mission. But this is what everyone seems to say but then make decisions based on financial resources. This is in part because the power to deploy finance actually rests away from those who are charged with national strategic aims and objectives.

For example, the post I was made redundant from in my last diocese: in the end it came down to a recognition that the financial resources being deployed in the diocese might have been better used to support university and college chaplaincy [especially in view of the need to take mission among young people seriously]. It even makes sense, on paper at least, to enable a full-time ministry to potentially 30,000 or more people than one which works out at servicing a handful of thousands up in the Dales. However, the way that things are arranged it is hard to shift the reources because so many of them are tied up in things that cannot easily be changed relatively quickly.

Although I suspect that if it hadn't been made a matter of principle, in this case, bridge funding might have been available through various means ... but that's a different story.

It is doubly annoying in view of this personal and diocesan history to read the positively quoted sentence from 'Towards the Conversion of England'; "‘We are convinced that England will never be converted until the laity use the opportunities for evangelism daily afforded by their various occupations, crafts and professions’." -A workplace-based ministry is in part about helping to do that, so again a major example of not trying hard enough to put money where mouth is. In fact the main report goes on to say, "We have been struck in our work by the fact that around half the parishes in the Church of England have virtually no engagement with young people week by week. Worse still, many of us accept that position with relative indifference.", please excuse me a moment while I go off to chew some carpet.... Yes they seem to be identifying all the right issues! And I cheer, but growl at the ways that it is resisted.

I actually thought that is was worth reflecting on further in the light of my own experience of being in an axed frontier mission position which suffered from being perceived as a kind of traditional ministry. "one of the diocesan submissions said, we should take care not to think that the God whom we serve is ‘mainly interested in new things’ but rather is ‘the God who makes all things new’.". The paradox being that university/college chaplaincy -at least in a modern secular university- is both a traditional ministry but also of necessity engaged in just the areas that the church is now saying it wants to attend to. The irony in the Bradford diocese was that there was some money available but they wanted to earmark it for new stuff, while losing some vital 'old stuff' [full-time chaplaincy] and holding on to some not very vital or effective old stuff. The priority which many recognised should have been to enable the chaplaincy style work to be renewed not shifted down several gears.

Moving on a bit, I was pleased to see that there are proposals for transparency of accounting so that local churches are able to see the value of what they are receiving from the national church in terms of their own share; that way many of them can begin to realise more easily that they are in fact being subsidised. This should help people make connections between their own church and decisions that have to be made about allocation of resources -especially people- on a wider scale.

I was also very taken by this proposal which I think is right; "We propose, therefore, that there should be discussion within the Church of the option of moving – over the longer-term – to there being one stream of national funding channelled to dioceses (distributed on the basis of need and opportunity) for them to use flexibly as a resource for the funding of bishops’, cathedrals’ and parish and other ministries in line with local priorities. "
There is a hint in what follows it that perhaps the money's expended on Bishops and cathedrals should be reviewed in the longer term, and I suspect that this is right too; the figures seem disproportionate and if dioceses have to pay for their bishops it may force rethinks about the viability of dioceses in terms of size and resource sharing, ditto if cathedrals are in the frame.

It's probably not going to be rivetting reading for most of Nouslife's readers, but for those wanting to see how the CofE is trying to square it's financial circles it is a good exercise.

Thinking Anglicans: Resourcing Mission Group