Can we afford bishop's any longer?

I think I insulted one of our  bishop's recently.

I'd never met him before so I asked him who he was.

I was genuinely surprised when he told me that he was the new suffragen bishop. Oh, I replied I'd heard that the last one wasn't being replaced because we couldn't afford it. In fact I had heard that someone who had been a bishop elsewhere had recently been made a vicar in the diocese and was to act as an assistant bishop as well.

There was a fair amount of harrumphing at my apparent discourtesy, which I found somewhat amusing, and which gave me a good reason for pointing out that parishes now need to produce £65K if they want a vicar, there are I believe almost as many if not more house for duty appointments as full stipendiary appointments in the diocese and numbers are not just declining, they are collapsing.

So, in the light of this it seems reasonable to ask, can we afford bishops any longer? And yes it is a rhetorical question and yes the answer is no.

Googling the costs of bishops tends to result in out of date figures so things don't always look as bad as they really are, but with 113 bishops paid in 2011, between £30k and £40k with additional expenses for travel, housing, chauffeurs and staff the costs amount to something in excess of £22M four years ago, good job inflation is low.

Some years ago a minister with a non episcopal church went out to the Indian sub-continent, he was successful and well liked and the ecumenical church body for whom he worked chose him to become a bishop. On his return to the UK his own denomination offered a post as a minister, the Church of England however upped the ante and offered him an assistant bishopric which he accepted, I guess in the end you get used to being called my Lord?

Having defended the rural churches against Giles Fraser's attack in my last blog I am not aiming to defend bishops in this one.

The hierarchical nature of the Church of England, which has patronage running through its spine like a stick of seaside rock, really does need to ask itself some existential questions in the light of the crisis that it is facing. Given the costs incurred by Bishops attending the House of Lords recently quoted as £27k per annum per bishop, and the need to review that legislative body, it may be that Parliament will intervene in order to force the church to review its attachment to prelatical overlordship by bishops who it seems according to a report by the Church Commissioners in 2012:

'......have more flexibility to determine the most appropriate level of staffing and other expenditure and set their own budgets'.

So what should happen?

Well certainly a bonfire of the vanities, the vain, pompous and prelatical should be removed, any who find the loss of status unacceptable should leave too, we need to rethink episcope, and rethink it radically.

To exercise Episcope, is to offer oversight, by some definitions bishops are centres of unity, certainly the Church Commissioners report quoted earlier sets out a series of functions, most of which rely on the authority and social position enjoyed by bishops (as reflected by their housing) but thee functions are merely an aspect of the oversight offered and the unity that bishops represent in the communities where they work.

The existential crisis facing the church is reflected in a number of ways, senior members of the hierarchy taking on functions that at  one time were exercised by local clergy, but as the number of clergy reduces and as the number of churches that they must service increases, so the clergy simply become plate spinners, rushing from one challenge to the next challenging project and occasionally pausing to conduct worship in one or other local church in their charge, which of course the bishop at their installation claimed as both his or hers and theirs.

So  my radical solution is not for less bishops but more.

But the price for the those appointed and the parishes they serve is that they become themselves parish priests first exercising their 'episcope' in a smaller geographical area and without any enhancement, the stipend for every priest should be the same, difference no longer has any place in the 21st Century church, as Pope Francis is urging his own communion.

Some years ago I was invited to offer some thoughts on the future of ministry in the area where I now live in retirement.

One member of the clergy was invited to offer a realistic view I was asked to take a radical line.

The realistic view was that by reducing the number of clergy to thirteen by losing the supernumerary, which was me, then the future could be looked at through a positive lens, interesting that when you google episcope one definition is given as 'an optical projector which gives images of opaque objects!'

Today the number of full time clergy has fallen from thirteen to eight.

My radical proposal was that there should be a full-time rural dean with a secretary, three clergy with geographical focus and three clergy with sector focus, health, education, youth, community involvement etc as deemed appropriate.

I was shouted down and one clergyman trembling with anger told me that I was unfit to be a priest and he would never accept my thinking as belonging to the same church he was part of.

I remain unapologetic because I believe that my radical view offered the church a way of planning strategically for a future which was heading towards us as rapidly and unremittingly as storms approach from the west.

All that I would change if asked to repeat the paper today for the beleaguered clergy who gathered for chapter last week is that the full time rural dean would him or herself have a parish base and s/he would be known as 'Bishop'.