The FD Interview: Ian Theodoreson, Church of England

Dr Rowan Williams and Lady Gaga find themselves sat next to one another at a dinner party. What common ground can they possibly have to talk about? The answer is that they are both figureheads of markets perceived to be in terminal decline, but are actually growing in revenue terms. While less people are buying gig tickets these days, each person is paying several times what they were a few years ago for that ticket – well over inflation. Likewise, the Archbishop’s flock is diminishing, but each member is putting more coins on the collection plate each Sunday.

Which takes some pressure off the Church of England’s chief finance officer, Ian Theodoreson, who joined in 2008 to run its three largest operating strains: the Archbishops’ Council, the Church Commissioners for England, and the Church of England Pensions Board, each with their own CEO. This was after 13 years in finance at children’s charity Barnardo’s and seven with Save The Children.

“Had Barnardo’s seen the increased level of giving per member that the Church experienced in the last 20 years, it would be one of the richest organisations in the country,” Theodoreson tells Financial Director.

The Church was in crisis at the end of the 1980s, he says, when the Commissioners paid about 60 percent of the Church’s total costs. “At the end of that decade, the message came up that going to church wasn’t a free ride anymore; it would no longer be a couple of pennies on the plate and no one really worrying about it,” he says. “Suddenly it was a case of, ‘well guys, we’re either paying for this as a congregation or the whole thing goes down’.” Today the Commissioners pay around 17 percent of the Church’s costs – most of it is picked up by the collection plate, and the same goes for its pension liabilities.

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Like Gaga’s fans, the Church of England’s congregation could be headed towards becoming a select club of the few who can afford the growing cost of membership. Unless it can attract the next generation. Theodoreson thinks that to do that, the organisation must provide more, better and more frequent information to the outside world than it currently does. It has been criticised in recent times for a lack of both.

“There’s a generation coming through who are consumers of charity and they choose where they put their resources, much like buying a washing machine. It’s a concern for me that the average person probably thinks the money they gave last Sunday is being invested by the Church Commissioner, when it actually invests in historic assets,” he says. “But when something is seen to go wrong, the confidence of the person in the pew is knocked. A lot of the stuff we need to do to address that perception is to project excellence, to be seen to be good stewards, to be seen to be responsible, successful investors, to be seen to be people you can trust. It means we have to keep our communication levels right.”

Theodoreson has been working on selling greater accountability and reporting to the Commissioner and through the dioceses, he says – telling the populace how its money is spent, who uses it, the outcome and the societal benefit, as well as questioning itself about whether the money could be better used in other ways. He wrote a whitepaper on improving accountability for consideration by the Commissioner and the Archbishops’ Council, which has a convection current from the Charity Commission (the Church is a registered charity), as it requires its members to provide a lot more narrative to their statutory accounts.

“The Charity Commission is very big on wanting trustees to explain what they are trying to achieve, what their plans are for the next year and the benchmarks to measure success, what their plans for last year were and if they delivered on them,” he says. “When I got here I really felt that neither the Archbishop’s Council, the Church Commissioners or the Pensions Board had risen to that challenge. So my arrival was a good opportunity to say ‘can we look at the structure of these accounts again?’”