RECENT editions have been looking at parochial church council expenditure. First, a pie chart illustrated the various items, leaving out Parish Share, on which a PCC regularly spent its money with a seventh of this being given to charity. We then looked more closely at this, this time including Parish Share. A bar chart showed that the average for charitable giving of 6.4 per cent was not typical of most PCCs. There was no obvious proportion around which parishes clustered; indeed more gave at the lowest rate of under one percent than at any other rate, and as this rate increased the number of parishes involved became fewer and fewer. This month we return to PCC expenditure, leaving out Parish Share, and take account of the church membership of each parish. It was in March 2009 that this idea was first mooted using data for 2007. We found that two thirds of parishes had spending in the range £2.75 to
£6.75 per member per week. The median amount was £4.10 and we concluded that, in addition to Parish Share, it cost around £5 per member per week to heat, light and insure our buildings, give to charity, and fund all our other activities.This bar chart explores the situation in 2009 for a total of 400 parishes for which we have both financial and attendance data. Here the parishes clearly cluster around the most common expenditure range of £3 - £3.99 per member per week.
However, a significant minority of parishes have expenditure of £10 or more. Many of these, but by no means all, are large parishes or team ministries where the scale of activity requires the use of lay workers, administrative assistants and so on. Thus average expenditure is skewed away from the most common range and approaches £6 per member per week. Here median expenditure at £4.39 per member per week is the more helpful benchmark. (To obtain the median value we arrange all 400 parishes in rank order from lowest expenditure to highest expenditure and note the expenditure of the middle parish, i.e. number 200). Two-thirds of parishes have expenditure between £3 and £7 per member per week and this seems to have little to do with the size of membership or socio economic conditions. Much more it seems to relate to activity levels or the availability of funds.