Statistics for Finance
2014 Data Collection
We have not issued the forms to treasures yet, our aim is to do this in February 2014. You can however now start to use the online system to look at previous data and reports. The website is here http://parishreturns.churchofengland.org/ If you do not have a username or password, you can request one from Fraser by email fraser@southwell.anglican.org
You can download the paper version of the form here
Notes to help complete the form can be downloaded from here
We hope that the data you gather on your Finance Return is useful to you in measuring how your church is changing. For those using the Church of England’s Online Parish Return System http://parishreturns.churchofengland.org/ please do use the reporting tools included in the system to explore how your attendance and income/expenditure have shifted over the last few years. To help you to use this data in context the Research and Statistics team in the Archbishops’ Council have also recently produced Parish Spotlights. These bring together figures from your church with information from the government Census to explore your church in relation to your local community. They cover areas such as Christian affiliation, population age and ethnicity profiles, household structures, deprivation, employment, schools and qualifications, alongside church statistics such as attendance and giving. Research and Statistics hope you have found these tools useful and welcome feedback on how we can help you further in using your local statistics.
The data you provide are used in many ways in both your diocese and nationally. Nationally, over the last year the National Church Institutions have been using the data as part of a large scale research project exploring some of the factors that might explain church growth in the Church of England. Visit the website here for more information http://www.churchgrowthresearch.org.uk/
Each year your statistics are analysed and published in the annual Statistics for Mission and Finance Statistics publications, the latest of which for last year’s data can be found here: http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics/parish-attendance-affiliation.aspx
and http://www.churchofengland.org/about-us/facts-stats/research-statistics/parish-finances.aspx
Your statistics also form an essential foundation to discussions within synod about the future of our church.
This year Research and Statistics have made a few changes to the form in response to feedback:
- The major change is to move to CHURCH based collection rather than PARISH based. In the majority of cases this will not make any difference, however if your parish has multiple churches we hope a single return for each church will improve the data quality and better enable the data to be used, particularly in areas of change with pastoral reorganisations.
- The Return of Parish Finance has two changes: the first is in response to feedback adding a new box to collect “Other outgoing resources” as some parishes had expenditure that they could not fit into the existing codes. The second is a one off question to measure the number of lay employees that are paid the living wage in response to the General Synod motion passed in November 2012 to “strongly encourage all Church of England institutions to pay at least the Living Wage” in order to ensure, as far as possible, that all employees have enough to achieve a decent standard of living for them and their families.
The Spending Plans Task Group has been having a series of discussions with diocesan leadership teams about resourcing issues. These have revealed a widespread desire for a quicker process of data collection and dissemination within the Church. Therefore the Group have requested that the deadline for submitting the 2013 Statistics for Mission forms should be 31 January 2014. The Annual Finance Return must wait for the Annual Parish Council Meetings, so the return date for these will be 31 May 2013.
The deadline for this submission is 28th May 2014