The Financing of Ministerial Stipends in the Established Church of Scotland: the Rural Parish

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses the remuneration arrangements of Church of Scotland ministers serving rural parishes between 1815 and 1974. It constructs and deploys a new longitudinal and cross-sectional dataset, materially more extensive in range and scope than those previously developed, calibrating the absolute and relative level of stipend throughout the period. It offers a preliminary analysis of the economic consequences for ministers and the established Church of the process of fixing, or standardising, stipends in money terms from 1925 onwards, highlighting how this undermined the financial foundations of the Church's principal means of stipendiary funding.