Ruth Gledhill of the Times Online on the clergy allocation and funding issue in the COE:

Last week I went to a special parochial church council meeting in Littlebourne, Kent, in the diocese of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The benefice of four churches, one with just ten worshippers, somehow manages to raise £80,000-plus each year of which they give more than £50,000 to the diocese as combined quota payments. It costs the diocese about £40,000 to maintain the Rector, the Rev John Allan. When he retires, this hard-working, successful benefice, albeit with congregations of mostly elderly or retired people, will instead be given a part-time, unpaid ‘house-for-duty’ priest. Apparently, they have been told, they will not be given their own priest ever again, ‘even if you raise £1 million.’