Allison Pearson
The Church of England has abandoned its mission in the UK.
While a new report paints a bleak picture for Britain’s vicars, the Church’s remote, arrogant hierarchy is focusing on slavery reparations
Published 06 September 2026 9:01am BST
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Beneath our satire of vicars, such as Rowan Atkinson’s in Four Weddings and a Funeral, lies affection and a feeling of reassurance Credit: Atlas Photography
Here’s a Sunday brainteaser for you – how many fictional vicars can you think of? Top of many people’s list: the obsequious, simpering Mr Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (immortalised by the brilliant actor David Bamber in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation). I am just about old enough to remember Derek Nimmo who made his name playing the sweetly hapless Rev Mervyn Noote in the 1960s BBC sitcom All Gas and Gaiters (Noote was the bumbling chaplain to the worldly Bishop Cleaver at St Ogg’s Cathedral). There was also Dick Emery’s buck-toothed vicar, who first appeared in The Dick Emery Show in 1963.
The 1982 BBC adaptation of Trollope’s first two Barchester novels featured two top vicars – Donald Pleasence as the sainted Septimus Harding and Alan Rickman, deliciously odious as the Rev Obadiah Slope (he gave Mr Collins stiff competition in the divine unctuousness stakes). The contrast between low clerical calculation and high-church morality has long been a rich seam of British satire. David Bamber as Mr Collins in the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice Credit: BBC
Everyone remembers Rowan Atkinson’s nervous “Holy Goat… er, Ghost!” chaplain in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but it’s hard to beat his sketch for Not the Nine O’Clock News. Atkinson’s bitterly resentful vicar boils over in the pulpit, rebuking his congregation for their poor attendance. “The week before, Harvest Sunday, there were three of us. Myself, the organist, Mr Posner, and a tin of spaghetti. Where were you b------s then?”
Despite declining church numbers, clergymen (and women) continue to loom large on our screens. The cosy, chocolate-loving Geraldine Granger regularly outwitted her parish council in The Vicar of Dibley, which painted a charming portrait of a potty yet devoted community.
Geraldine Granger (Dawn French), better known as the Vicar of Dibley from 1994 to 2007 Credit: BBC
In Rev, Adam Smallbone (Tom Hollander) was a vicar struggling with the stresses of inner-city ministry. The tormented yet compassionate Sidney Chambers (wonderful James Norton) gave a spiritual heart to the village in ITV’s Grantchester. And Daisy May Cooper’s comic rural mockumentary This Country, starring Daisy May and her brother, Charlie, as bored, neglected young people Kerry and Kurtan, revolved around their unlikely friendship with the kind-hearted local vicar the Rev Francis Seaton.
The work of our greatest comic novelist, PG Wodehouse, is chock full of clergy. This is from his short story The Great Sermon Handicap: “Well, you know how many parsons there are round about here. There are about a dozen hamlets within a radius of six miles, and each hamlet has a church and each church has a parson and each parson preaches a sermon every Sunday. Tomorrow week – Sunday the 23rd – we’re running the Great Sermon Handicap… Each parson is to be clocked by a reliable steward of the course, and the one that preaches the longest sermon wins.”
All of the above, and I’m sure you can think of scores more examples, dear reader, have a lot of fun at vicars’ expense, although the mockery is nearly always affectionate. That’s because Church of England preachers are such a staple of our national life, part of Britain’s bedrock; we can mock away because, at some level, we believe they are indestructible. Vicars will always be there. Beneath the satire, there is affection and a deeply consoling sense of familiarity. Who doesn’t feel reassured to see someone in a dog collar? In an increasingly atomised society, bossed about by AI robots and shaken by horrendous crimes (this week it was a baby girl stabbed 15 times – what the hell?) we are glad, I think, that there are people who are still in the business of goodness.
As a teenager, I was a nervous Sunday-school teacher (you should have met my agnostic pupils!). Although my faith has faltered over the years and I dislike the fashionable Leftist nostrums that too often have replaced the eternal verities of the Bible (I don’t go to Holy Communion to get a lecture on climate change), I would never call myself an atheist.
There are still a surprising number who feel as I do. In 2021, the most recent official census data, 46.2 per cent of the UK population described themselves as Christian. Down from 71.7 per cent in 2001, admittedly, but still a pretty significant 27.5 million people in England and Wales. We may not be in regular communication with God, if we even knew what that meant, but we are grateful that there are vicars who do know and who are keeping the line open should we feel the need to be in touch with Him.
Immense burden
But they aren’t, I’m sorry to say. Wodehouse’s blessed portrait of a cheery parson in a church in every hamlet has too often been replaced by one depressed, overstretched vicar driving between multiple churches in a doomed attempt to provide spiritual support for several communities. Men of the cloth are in threadbare tatters. The Windsor Report, “Addressing the crisis in stipendiary clergy numbers in the Church of England”, launched in the House of Lords on Thursday, paints a bleak picture. In 1960, the Church had 14,603 stipendiary (paid) clergy. Today, the number has collapsed to 6,295 – a historic low – with nearly half of vicars aged over 55 and struggling to meet the needs of parishioners. As the report notes, retired clergy (aged 70-plus) now “strongly outnumber stipendiary clergy”.
The burden on those who remain is immense. Their lives are made impossible by a hostile church hierarchy which has implied that the parish priest and the parish church – theologically trained ministry rooted in place – are not assets to the institution but expensive obstacles to growth.
Meanwhile, clergy are “drowning under burdens of administration”, according to the Windsor Report, eroding their capacity to do the job, which is supposed to be the cure of souls, not getting up to speed with the latest lanyard-class lingo.
St Paul’s Cathedral has signed a four-year deal with the London nightclub Fabric to stage music events inside the building. Diocesan bureaucrats seem to set more store by anti-racism courses and safeguarding training (even for kind ladies doing the altar flowers or chaps who volunteer to strim the graveyard) than by the urgent need for social care which vicars are uniquely well-placed to meet. The 2021 National Churches Trust survey, The House of Good, concluded that the UK’s parish churches provide services with a total social and economic value of £55bn per year, at no cost to the taxpayer.
Another report, the Living Ministry study in 2025, found that 29 per cent of active clergy “show signs of depression” and 40 per cent “feel isolated”. The very people who are supposed to tend to the poor and needy feel neglected by an institution which has left the paths of righteousness to veer off on some deluded tangent.
Economising on priests is ‘madness’
Ordination is supposed to be for life, yet 379 clergy resigned last year, many more than the 278 who retired. Much of this rush for the exit is driven by “strategic” restructuring that cuts stipendiary posts and spreads priests so thinly that they struggle to fulfil their vows. As one senior cleric put it to me: “It’s madness. Trying to reform the Church by economising on priests is like reforming the NHS by cutting doctors.”
The redoubtable Save the Parish campaign, boldly led by priest Marcus Walker and the journalist Emma Thompson, has been saying all this stuff for five years. It has been snubbed by Church leaders, caricatured as “rascally voices”, its members dismissed as quaint nostalgists clinging to the idea that parish ministry matters and that the local parish priest remains the Church’s most persuasive witness to Christian life.
Those still in the pews are baffled. They agree with Save the Parish and have lost patience with a remote, arrogant hierarchy. Lay people – faithful, generous, run ragged – are expected to take services and provide pastoral care for nothing while their clergy are turned into area managers, drowning in spreadsheets. Dioceses and bishops play ecclesiastical Jenga: merging parishes, inventing “ministry models” that push the boundaries of canon law, rearranging structures while front-line ministry withers. The consolidated 2024 accounts show that there is now one bureaucrat to every 3.5 stipendiary (paid) priests in the Church.
As her vicars vote with their feet, where, you may well ask, is the new Archbishop of Canterbury? Dame Sarah Mullally was last seen staring moodily out to sea on a visit to Cape Coast Castle, a site of slavery in Ghana. At the end of her 10-day tour of Africa, the Archbishop renewed her commitment to the Church’s controversial £100m reparation fund. Dame Sarah Mullally, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has recently returned from a 10-day tour of Africa Credit: Toby Melville/Reuters
All I can say is, £100m would buy you an awful lot of vicars who could do good here in beleaguered communities such as Middlesbrough. The Church is yet another British institution which favours “protected characteristics” while putting the white working classes at the back of the queue. Recently, it even turned its nose up at young men enthusiastically professing Christian beliefs because their politics were uncongenial. Funny, I don’t remember the part where Christ said: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened – unless you’re deemed ‘far-Right’.”
The Church benefits enormously from a fund founded by Queen Anne in 1704 to help poor people in parishes. In 1948, that large legacy was merged into the Church Commissioners. In 2024, according to Save the Parish, only £85m (13 per cent) of the annual £653m income from the historic endowments of the Church went to parishes. How can that be justified? Rural churches limp along, desperately trying to raise funds for their own repairs; inner-city youth clubs close for lack of funds during an adolescent mental-health crisis; there is an epidemic of loneliness among the elderly who, this winter, will be too scared to turn the heating on. And their Church, the church of these islands, the church of our nation, like Charles Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, chooses to neglect the filth and squalor in its own home while devoting itself to a philanthropic project in “Borriboola-Gha on the left bank of the Niger”. What about some “reparatory justice” for struggling Britons, Archbishop?
And yet, amid the crisis, something that feels a lot like hope is stirring. Young adults appear to be hungry for meaning. According to a recent report by the Theos think tank (which Church bureaucrats were keen to downplay), young people want to come off their wretched screens and seek relationships lived out in communities “with priests who know their people and call them by name”. For their sake – and for the sake of Britain’s vicars – it is time to reject managerial experiments masquerading as missions.
Look at the case of Kerrier Deanery in Truro, Cornwall. Six benefices, 22 churches, six vicars, proposed to be swept into one mega‑benefice with two priests, one of whom would not take Sunday services. Local people objected, parish church councils objected. The plan sounded inhuman. Last month, the scheme was approved anyway. It’s a parable of what has gone wrong, not just with the Church, I think, but British life in general. No, the lanyard class – with its contempt for the traditional, the tried and tested, the personal and the local – does not know best.
Truro in Cornwall is set to become one ‘mega‑benefice’ under recently approved plans to reorganise Kerrier Deanery Credit: Ian Woolcock
Meanwhile, instead of investing in the humble parish, the Church has poured money into something called “new worshipping communities” which are not bringing in the projected numbers of “disciples” or becoming sustainable. Many are closing.
The Church’s own growth studies show that cutting stipendiary clergy creates a “doom loop”, accelerating decline in attendance and donations. Yet clergy posts continue to be cut. The Church seems to have lost confidence in its own sacramental priesthood. The Windsor Report is clear: the crisis is not only numerical but theological. The Church must reassert a coherent vision of priesthood – rooted in tradition, oriented to mission, confident in its calling. That means more, not less, theological training; valuing residential colleges where ordinands learn Scripture, liturgy, history and Anglican formation in community; removing financial and age barriers; establishing a national Anglican basics course to ground prospective ordinands before selection.
I hope Archbishop Mullally takes the time to read the Windsor Report. It proposes a “covenant of care” for clergy, recognising that a joyful, supported priest is the Church’s best vocations officer. It urges dioceses to halt clergy cuts, rebuild trust, and rediscover “deep Anglicanism”. It is, in its way, a call to repentance. Good. Let’s have an admission that the Church has been failing its priests and parishioners.
All is not lost. Following a consultation with a broad group of church leaders, held by Save The Parish at St George’s House in Windsor in March, there has been, if not quite a Damascene conversion, then a promising shift in attitude. At last, the Church is acknowledging that England faces a full‑blown crisis of priesthood. Without a rise in ordinations, the number of stipendiary clergy will collapse to 5,400 by 2033, nowhere near enough to meet the target set under the Renewal and Reform programme.
Vicars will not always be there to be mocked and cherished. They are far more than a sitcom punchline. Part of the bedrock of our society, like so much else of value, they could easily disappear. Vicars need to believe that the Church has faith in them. Fancy that.
You know, one line in particular in the Windsor Report jumped out at me: “So many of the answers to problems of attracting and retaining clergy come down to a loss of a sense of the importance of having time to love one another.”
It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Time to love one another. It sounds a lot like Christianity – you never know, it could catch on.
DT
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