money money money money....

Whilst researching for another post, I came across a comment here saying
"Given all the money that the Church of England controls, they could save children in poverty just as easily" -James Cambridge

This seems to imply that the church is either wasting money on bureaucracy, bishop lining their pockets with it, or basically some form of shady dealings.

Well I don't work in the CofE finance offices, but I can give a fairly comprehensive account on what money they do have based on the fact that all of the financial records are publicly available.

Firstly I think we need to consider a key question
1-how much should clergy,bishops etc get paid?

1-well, I think the fairest system, is to use the one the world adopts of 'what is an equivalent job in another organisation and how much do they get paid?'
Also looking at qualifications, and all of the clergy have degrees, many have phds or higher.
At the top, Rowan is a Chairman of a company- equivalent
so £100k?
Bishops are a cross between regional managers, and directors
so? 80k?
A Parish Priest? erm.. well lets assume the church is around 50people.
Perhaps one could liken it to a manager of a shop that has 50 workers, or maybe a school teacher who has a class to deal with.
But clearly it is more than a school teacher as you have a larger 'class' and you need to teach them to teach others.
40k?
[For reference a starting teacher is on about 20k, this then goes up to circa 35-40k and a head master is anything from 50k upwards (of course private schools pay more, etc etc)]
Well as it happens the stipend (take home) is around 20k.
the get rent free housing on top as well as pension so most people say it averages to 35k for a vicar - maybe 40k, and then bishops go up.. slightly.
Rowan gets 45k for his stipend, given he lives in lambeth palace though we can consider this to be closer to 80-100k so maybe they are payed ok?

But how many clergy need to be payed?
This is harder to find than I expected
Eventually I found this.
The important figures are:
number of Bishops - 103 (including archbishops of york, not Canterbury)
number of Archdeacons - 114
number of Cathedral Deans - 41
number of 'other dignitaries (basically cathedral canons, clergy selectors etc) -99
number of priests (vicars, asst vicars, chaplains etc) -8066
(I got that as being total parochial clergy + total non parochial clergy i.e. chaplains.)

I have arranged those number in descending order of 'seniority'.
Given the bill is around £449 million every year, this means each priest/bishop costs the church on average £53k per year.
(this takes housing, training, council tax, etc into account).


So how much money does 'the church' have?
Well the problem is, the CofE is not a single entity, it parishes have seperate bank accounts to the dioceses which are seperate from the national church etc.
However to help, the church commissioners produced a report summarising finances assuming the church was one big entity (for the period 2000-2006).

Roughly the church has £1 billion to play with, and it is spent:
39.2% salaries, pensions etc
27.3% Costs of services, education (church schools support), community support, outreach etc
1.6% central admin
9.3% cost of generating funds (i.e. setting up costs for a fundraiser such as hall hire for a quiz night, advertising etc)
17.4% - building repair and upgrades etc
5.2% - grants to third parties (i.e. helping save the children etc)


Now James claimed the church could end child poverty-
lets say that all services are cancelled.
all clergy work for nothing.
admin, fund generation and building work would have to continue
thats 28.3%.
So with all this belt tightening (that is frankly not going to happen) you get £820.97 million based on 2006
Well based on this - thats actually just a drop in the ocean.
Selling all assets still wouldn't help.

Now if anyone thinks they can find the Billions needed to help child poverty in this country alone by tightening the church belt, be my guest.
However realistically I think the church is already doing quite a lot with all those clergy 'on the ground'.