The Church of England has today published its latest information about parish income and expenditure and trends in ministry numbers in Church Statistics 2009/10. The attendance statistics included were published in February 2011.
This year’s financial statistics show that the 2008 credit crunch began to affect church income in 2009, though not in terms of parish giving nor as hard as many charities.
In 2010, 56 candidates from England and Wales began training for the RC priesthood. This excludes those joining religious orders (Jesuits, Benedictines, etc) but that would not affect the total dramatically. The Church of England manages ten times that number, 515 according to this report. Now some of those would be for self-supporting ministry, and I do not think those training courses are anyway near as demanding as a seminary training. But even allowing for this, the success of the Church of England in keeping a steady stream of vocations is striking. In some ways the C of E and the RC are inverse images: Catholics, lots of people in the pews and not enough priests; Anglicans, lots of priests but not enough people in the pews, by far.