TEN years ago, the Church Times surveyed dioceses to assess how long it took to fill vacancies in different parts of the country (News, 7 February 2014). In London, it took, on average, 4.6 months, with an average shortlist of three. In York, the average was a year, while in Wakefield, we were told, “shortlists are very rare.”

This disparity was, of course, not a new discovery. “In the far North you live day and night worrying about filling vacancies in parishes,” Archbishop Michael Ramsey told the Church Assembly in 1964. “In the South I have found life totally different, and not a single benefice in my gift lapses. In fact I have a long list of clergymen asking if they can live and work in East Kent.”

The Archbishop’s comments were made in response to the report The Deployment and Payment of the Clergy by Dr Leslie Paul. Prefaced by an extended analysis of the “statistics of decline” (in 1958, 41.7 per cent of clergy were ministering to just 11.2 per cent of the population), it called for the creation of new regional staffing boards with the power of “compulsory direction” of clergy for the first five years after ordination. Predictably, the recommendation was resisted. Clergy could not be “herded into the church as a shepherd’s collie manoeuvres sheep into a fold by its prancing or barking”, one correspondent warned.

Sixty years later, some of the 62 recommended actions in the Paul report have come to pass. But the question of deployment remains. As our report this week shows, some dioceses report vacancy rates of 20 per cent and above. Beyond the Church, the migration to the south observed by Ramsey has only accelerated in the intervening years. And it would be a brave bishop who echoed his calls (noting the ties of family) for “a larger body of young clergy who are called of God for a time to minister as celibates with the dedication of discipline and sacrifice that goes with it”.

The solutions being explored by dioceses today include building up a pipeline of “home-grown” clergy. But here, too, a challenge remains: numbers of ordinands are falling. The Paul report’s forecast of about 19,000 clergy in the 1970s was almost double what materialised. Some projections suggest that the Church may have just 5400 stipendiary priests by 2033.

Analysis of the reasons for the fall remains shaky. But studies identifying mental-health issues and financial anxiety among the clergy may be relevant. As with the deployment challenge, the language of obedience and sacrifice requires careful deliberation. What do we ask of those who respond to a call to ministry, and of those who move across the country, often leaving behind friends and family? The clergy are not troops to be moved around the map with a plotting rod, but, if the Church is to rely on calling rather than compulsory direction, its resources of pastoral care and concern must be deployed at full strength.