A low mist was clinging to the beet fields around Newton Flotman in Norfolk when the Rev Sally Gaze ushered two dozen small children into her 14th-century church for a nativity play rehearsal a few days before Christmas.

As the gloom and chill deepened outside St Mary’s mullioned windows, Gaze attempted to bring order to her unruly company of actors. “Who would like to be a wise man? We can have more than three,” she called out. “Now, do you fancy being camels, because we’ve got some great camel costumes. Any more angels?”

The rehearsal was part of Gaze’s preparations for the busiest time of year for most vicars, with carols, Christingle services, children’s crib services, midnight masses and Christmas family eucharists following in quick succession.



Gaze’s work is complicated by the fact that she is the priest in charge of six parishes in rural Norfolk, plus a group that meets for worship in people’s houses and in cafes. Her responsibilities also cover seven Grade I- or Grade II*-listed medieval church buildings plus three ruins.



She is not unusual. Some vicars have as many as 10 or 11 parishes under their auspices, dealing with scattered communities, money-draining listed buildings and arcane church bureaucracy.



Declining numbers of clergy mean they are spread more thinly, particularly in the countryside, where the church is often the last remaining focal point in a village after the loss of the pub, post office or general store. In some places, the weekly congregation in a rural church might be as small as five, but it still needs ministering.



Christmas is especially challenging. Gaze, who – unusually – has another vicar and a curate to help across her parishes, will conduct four services between 4pm on Christmas Eve and noon on Christmas Day. “I really enjoy Christmas, but I can’t be at midnight mass in more than one place,” she said.



St Mary’s in Newton Flotman is the subject of an ambitious £200,000 refurbishment plan, including a vending machine selling food staples Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

In many areas, lay members of the congregation and retired clergy are roped in to help. “Every church rightly wants a service. But vicars with multiple churches have to plan well, so they don’t fall over, and enable the ministry of others,” said Jill Hopkinson, the Church of England’s national rural officer.



More than 2 million people are expected to attend a church service this Christmas, a big increase on a typical Sunday attendance of about 760,000, which is less than 1.5% of the population. But there are fewer clergy to go round the 16,000 Anglican churches in England – most of them in rural areas – as the number of new ordinands fails to keep pace with retiring priests. In 2015, there were 7,661 paid clergy; one in four was over the age of 60.



According to a C of E report, Released for Mission: Growing the Rural Church, written by Hopkinson last year, rural vicars frequently have between three and nine churches in their care, but as many as 11 is becoming more common.

“The distance and travel time between different communities and churches can be long and time consuming. Many multi-church groupings can cover hundreds of square miles, with tens of miles between each church. Even where churches are closer together, a round trip of 20 miles would not be uncommon between services in different churches,” it said.



On the basis of dozens of interviews, the report says clergy feel under pressure to conduct as many Sunday services as possible. Three or four services are “quite normal”, and “in extremis, five or six services may be taken by one priest on a single Sunday, particularly if a baptism was a separate service or there was a special event taking place”. Clergy said they found it difficult to get to know congregations when there was no time to talk after the service.



Church buildings also absorb precious time and resources. C of E parishes collectively spend about £160m a year on maintaining their buildings, some of which are in use for only an hour or two a week. Church buildings are seen as part of the country’s national heritage, but are the responsibility of local parishes.



At St Mary’s, Gaze has ambitious plans for a £200,000 restoration and improvement programme. The plans include underfloor heating, repairs to drains and windows, better lighting and a new meeting area in which a refrigerated vending machine will allow villagers to buy milk, eggs, bread and other staples. The village shop closed five years ago.



She is applying for grants to help pay for the work, but much of it will need to be raised from parishioners’ donations. The size of the fundraising task grew last month when thieves stole part of the church’s lead roof, adding another £10,000 to St Mary’s repair and restoration bill.



In response to the growing clergy workload, the C of E is considering ways to ease requirements under church law. Next year the church’s ruling body, the General Synod, will vote on whether to drop a legal stipulation to hold morning and evening prayer services every Sunday.



Gaze says the whole church now ministers in rural villages, not just one vicar. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Each parish is also required to be administered by a parochial church council (PCC). In some small rural areas, it is increasingly challenging to find people to fill time-consuming PCC posts such as treasurer as the 12% decline in the numbers of people attending church in the past decade shows no sign of abating.



According to Tim Thornton, the bishop of Truro, the church must become more nimble and flexible, rather than burdened with arcane laws more appropriate to the 19th century than the 21st.

Truro has appointed a handful of clergy to “oversight ministries”, an innovation that may be adopted by other dioceses, said Thornton. “We don’t expect that person to be present in every single community, but we expect that person to enable [the church’s] presence by empowering the right individuals.

“The traditional model, of a vicar ‘running a parish’, has not been relevant for some time. The reality is that in many of our local communities, we need to resource and support and sustain lay people, because those are the people through whom the church is going to grow. Oversight ministry is about allowing other people to flourish and blossom.

“We’ve gone beyond the point of trying to carry on a model that isn’t working. We need a new model that allows that flourishing, rather than retreating all the time in the countryside and therefore almost inevitably finding ourselves in more decline.”



Breaks with tradition include wider community use of church buildings. More than 100 rural churches now incorporate post office facilities after village closures; at least one houses a pub; others host after-school clubs, lunchtime curry clubs for homeworkers, art exhibitions and amateur dramatics productions or local concerts.



“Within living memory – maybe 50 years ago – there was one vicar for each church in this patch,” said Gaze. “Now there’s a lot of ministry that I’m not personally doing. But the whole church is ministering in these villages, not just the vicar. One of the great advantages of rural churches is creating a sense of family. Everyone is involved.”

