How the Money is Spent

Clergy, including our curates, are paid a stipend. This includes costs like national insurance and pension contributions.

It is the largest cost in our annual budget

Ensuring our clergy and lay ministers are equipped to minister to their parish congregations is vital and the diocesan staff team offer a wide range of courses and resources for those in lay and ordained roles.

Some of this money is also spent on our Vocations team who work with people to discern what God is calling them to. We also use this money to support pre-ordination selection and then ordination training at a theological college. 

Post ordination, we also provide specialist training and support to our curates in the three years of their initial ministry development.

The Diocese has approximately 160 vicarages and parsonages and the property team oversee the repair and maintenance of each one. Where there is no vicarage, we will rent properties to house clergy and curates.

Housing costs include scheduled and unscheduled repairs and maintenance, council tax, water rates and building insurance.

Our staff team manage around 30 moves each year, including preparing vicarages for the next incumbent.

Any rental income from vicarages that are let is used to offset repairs and maintenance costs and parish share.

While the Church Commissioners pay for our diocesan bishops, the cost of our two archdeaconries and their offices are met by the diocese.

Alongside the Bishops, the two Archdeacons provide spiritual leadership, pastoral care and practical advice for our parishes and clergy as well as missional oversight.

Costs include salaries for staff, expenses of office and other fees and grants including financial support for Area Deans, grants for retired clergy and resettlement grants associated with clergy moves.

The Mission & Discipleship team is the largest team in the Diocesan offices and they provide support for a wide range of activities. These include discerning vocations, pre-ordination selection and training, post ordination specialist training and support, continuing ministerial development and lay ministry training. The team also offer a range of grants to clergy, for example retreat days

The team also offers support to parishes in vacancy, including managing the visioning and selection processes for the next incumbent.

A number of roles in this team also support our missional strategy, including healthy churches, growing faith, evangelism, inter-cultural mission and new worshipping communities.

Safeguarding is an integral of our church communities and we must ensure that children, young people and vulnerable adults are able to worship safely in our churches.

Our staff team are supported in their work by 160 parish safeguarding officers and an independently chaired scrutiny panel.

Each year the team offers daily advice to parishes, runs training events for 100’s of people and manage a caseload of new and ongoing referrals, some of which require further investigation and case work.

Our HR team is crucial in ensuring the wellbeing of the Diocesan staff team. Their work ranges from recruitment and induction processes, to advising line managers on employee issues to administering HR policies.

In early 2024, the team launched a Parish HR Service to support our parishes in all employment matters. This includes advice and a range of resources, templates and toolkits.

Our Finance team are responsible for paying grants, clergy and curate stipends and pensions, managing our investments, and producing budgets, reports and accounts.

Alongside the Deanery Treasurers, they calculate the deanery share allocations and administer parish share payments and receipts.

Our Church Buildings team is available to advise and support parishes considering repairs and new works to our churches. This includes support in raising monies through grants and fundraising to assist with costs.

Churches are exempt from some parts of the Planning Act, which means that while listed building consent or conservation area consent is not needed, a church faculty is. Our Diocesan Advisory Committee team is also available to support parishes through this process.

This support and advice enable the mission and outreach of our churches while protecting the historic significance of these sacred places, many of which are listed buildings.

The Diocesan Registry provides legal advice to the Bishop, Archdeacons and the Board of Finance on matters in connection with ecclesiastical or synodical work. The Registrar also provides advice to churchwardens and PCCs on legal matters arising from their duties or official business, and preparing notices, licences etc in connection with ordination, commission for institution/collation. This work is covered by an annual fee which is set each year by the General Synod.

There is also a Diocesan Chancellor – a senior barrister who works closely with the Diocesan Registrar, DAC and Archdeacons. As the independent judge of the Consistory Court, the Chancellor oversees legal issues across the diocese, especially those in relation to the use of and alteration of church buildings and land.

The Diocese is led by the Bishop of Coventry and synodically governed through the Diocesan Synod. The Secretariat handles the administrative affairs of the Coventry Diocesan Board of Finance, ensuring good governance across the Bishop’s Council and its various committees, including for example the Diocesan Finance Group and the Glebe Committee.

The Secretariat is also responsible for most of the parish grants and for the funds awarded through the Grants Committee. 

There is currently one full-time Adviser and a part-time Officer who also administers grant applications.

The Coventry Board of Finance provides expenses of office for a number of roles which offer advisory support to clergy and lay ministers across the diocese. These include the Dean of Women’s Ministry, the Dean of Self-Supporting Ministry, the Rural Affairs Adviser, Diocesan Spirituality Officer and the Disability Adviser. These roles are held by stipendiary clergy who perform their diocesan-wide roles in addition to their parochial responsibilities.

Additionally, the Board provides funding for various other activities, including the Diocesan Environment Group, retired ministry work, and funding towards the work of Readers.

In fulfilling our mission purpose we partner with:

The DBF provide £150k each year to enable the Cathedral to open its doors to visitors without charge and to continue to deliver the charism of reconciliation across the Diocese.

The Diocesan Board of Education works in partnership with schools, churches and communities to promote a distinctively Christian education. They offer advice, resource and support to over 76 church schools in the diocese. In 2024, we provided £169k.

Our partner charity, Together for Change, supports our churches in the lowest income communities. They provide advice, offer small grants, and run projects and initiatives which are designed to help churches support their communities. In 2025 approximately £218k was provided in cash and kind to support their work.

Our Communications team supports all that we do and say.

Their work ranges from handling media & press enquiries to producing our various e-news, like the fortnightly Bulletin or the weekly update to Clergy and publishing news stories and updating the website.

The team also provides advice to parishes and schools, and supports the Bishop of Coventry on episcopal communications. 

Each year, the Diocese is responsible for making a contribution to national church costs, much like the diocesan parish share.

This contributes to the workings and ministry of the national church. The figure we give is based on the size of the diocese and the amount we need to contribute to the operational budget, mission agency pensions and grants that are made by the national church.

Vote 1 is also included in this allocation, commonly known as the ordinands’ pooling costs – each year we contribute an amount to the central funding for training, from which we receive a set amount back for the training of our candidates.

The Church of England are the established Church in the UK, so many people think that the government pays for our church buildings. But it does not. We get no direct funding from the government. The responsibility for funding parish ministry and caring for buildings rests with us. We must support existing ministry and also invest for the future.

The Church Commissioners do pay for the ministry of the archbishops, bishops and a proportion of cathedrals ministry. Parishes do benefit from grants made to dioceses, such as through the Diocesan Investment Programme, but the income of the Commissioners cannot cover parish costs. The cost of our archdeaconries and the diocesan office teams must be made by the diocese family.

The Diocesan Office is responsible for supporting parishes with their mission and ministry across a diverse range of areas which includes statutory responsibilities. These are managed by the Diocesan staff team, which number has remained consistent since 2019, even with the increasing costs of statutory and safeguarding responsibilities, is a testament to the quality of the people employed. A number of roles operating from the diocesan office are funded by the national church institutions in support of key national initiatives such as digital giving or churchyard biodiversity projects.