Parish Resources, a website managed by the National Church of England, to support PCCs with the everyday governance and administration of their local church has had a major redesign.
The new look website is designed to make it easier for PCC members to find helpful information and download useful documents, such as those needed for revising your electoral roll. New documents are clearly labelled and pages detail when they have last been updated and are due for review, to ensure that you have the correct information. While not all documents have yet been updated (they have several hundred to go through), they intend to do this gradually, prioritising those that will be most helpful for parishes.
Chris Boden, Parish Resources Officer for our Diocese said:
“The new look website is very helpful and I recommend it to parishes regularly. It is a great place to find information on how to run the legal, financial and administrative aspects of your parish, and the new design makes it much easier to use and check when things were last updated. The pages advising on how to register with the Charity Commission (as more PCCs are needing to do) have been particularly helpful and give responses that you can copy and paste into the form.”
Parish Resources covers a range of topics that the PCC may find helpful, such as how to run an APCM, managing life events and registering with the Charity Commission. The website is planning to add a range of short videos to help explain matters that are easier to demonstrate rather than just read. For example, there is a wonderful animation explaining the different ways you can promote giving to your church through the Internet.
The website also has a spotlight section, looking at topics that are currently relevant in the church’s annual cycle, with the current focus being on preparing your PCC annual accounts.
The Parish Resources team for the Church of England, said:
“We are working to make Parish Resources a helpful and easy-to-use website for our churches that will help PCCs with many of the more technical aspects of running a parish. We're currently working on a few things for 2025 including updated GDPR and HR resources as well as a collaboration with The Church Organiser to add a governance module which will provide task management for things such as the annual meetings, PCC meetings, annual maintenance checks and reporting tasks.”
You can visit Parish Resources, and sign up to their newsletter at: https://parishresources.org.uk/
