This page provides a detailed explanation of the calculations and data underpinning the amount parishes are asked to contribute to fund Parish Support Costs.
How attendance data is used in the parish share calculation
Part of the contribution each parish is asked to make, funds parish support costs. Parish support costs make up 11.7% of the Diocesan Budget and funds . To determine how much each parish is asked to pay, attendance and other data is used.
Each year in January churches are asked to complete the Statistics for Mission return for the attendance and other metrics in the preceding year, this is used as source data for the calculation. Where parishes do not make a submission, an assumption based on previous years is used for the year and put into the 3 year average formula explained in the example below.
Taking a single Parish Church as an example:
The Adult Sunday attendance and the Adult Week day attendance for the Month of October are processed by removing the highest week figure and averaging the remaining (unless the comments suggest that there were more than one abnormal attendance service in October, say a Baptism. In this scenario the abnormal figures are removed for the average, or where this leaves only 1 service to average, the Usual Sunday Attendance is used) This compensates for Harvest Festivals, which invariably take place in October.
Along side this, the Electoral Roll (ER) figure is used, with a compensation offset that reduces the weight of the ER for each year after the ER renewal (which is a 6 year rule set out in the Church representation rules) to compensates for new people being added each revision year, but generally people are not taken off until renewal. It is recognised that a parish's electoral roll does not represent the usual attendance on a Sunday or the number of people who are likely to contribute financially to the life of the church.
For example, a Parish has an Electoral roll of 145 with an average Sunday attendance of 92 and an average weekday attendance of 0 (remember this is a count of additional people attending weekday services who were not counted on the Sunday so may not actually mean zero people attended midweek)
The formula takes a third of each with the processing and weighting elements and gives a Monthly Members (MM) figure of 128 for that year.
This figure is then averaged with the two preceding year figures to give the 3 year Avg MM figure of 129 in this example:
2017 MM: 130
2018 MM: 129 3 year Avg 2019: 129
2019 MM: 128
This is designed to flatten out peaks and troughs in the data which will always occur and also to slow the rate of increase or decline for parish share, where it is used in the Services to Parishes and Other Expenditure calculations as a ratio:
Parish MM X Budget figure (Services to Parishes or Other Expenditure)
Diocesan MM
