Commissioner's Churches

A Commissioners' church, also known as a Waterloo church and Million Act church, is an Anglican church in the United Kingdom built with money voted by Parliament as a result of the Church Building Acts of 1818 and 1824. The 1818 Act supplied a grant of money and established the Church Building Commission to direct its use, and in 1824 made a further grant of money. In addition to paying for the building of churches, the Commission had powers to divide and subdivide parishes, and to provide endowments. The Commission continued to function as a separate body until the end of 1856, when it was absorbed into the Ecclesiastical Commission. In some cases the Commissioners provided the full cost of the new church; in other cases they provided a grant and the balance was raised locally.

The First Parliamentary Grant for churches amounted to £1 million (equivalent to £65,850,000 in 2015). The Second Parliamentary Grant of 1824 amounted to an additional £500,000 (£39,680,000 in 2015), so the term "million" cannot apply to all the churches aided by the Commission. The Commission was founded on a wave of national triumph following the defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815; hence the suggestion of the word "Waterloo" in the title. But even if this were a factor in founding the Commission, again it could only apply to the earlier phases of building. The term "Commissioners' church" covers the whole of the work of the Church Building Commission and it is the term normally used by architectural historians, including M. H. Port in 600 New Churches, and the authors of the Pevsner Architectural Guides.

Towards the end of the 18th century the Church of England was facing a number of problems and challenges. Due to factors including the Industrial Revolution, the population of Britain had grown, and it had redistributed, tending to concentrate in urban centres, some older and expanded, others newly created. Meanwhile, the organisation of the Church of England had not been modified to reflect this change, leading to a mismatch between the population and the pastoral services provided by the church. For example, with a population of nearly 34,000 had church seating for only 2,500, Sheffield had 6,280 seats for 55,000 people, Manchester had 11,000 for nearly 80,000, and the St Marylebone district of London had only 8,700 places for 76,624 inhabitants. In addition, there was a concern in society that, following the French Revolution of 1789–99, there might be a similar uprising in Britain. It was considered that "the influence of the Church and its religious and moral teaching was a bulwark against revolution". Some argued that a major function of the church was to complement the work of the state; that "the church's main function was social control". On top of this, the Church of England had its own internal problems, some of them even amounting to abuses, such as pluralism (vicars owning more than one benefice), absenteeism (vicars employing curates to run their parishes) and non-residence. There was a great disparity between the incomes of the parochial clergy. The educational level of the clergy and their training was often inadequate. Challenges to the church came from main two sources, dissent and secularism. Dissenters were those Christians who did not ascribe to the practices of the established church (the Church of England), and they included the older independent churches such as the Quakers, Baptists and Congregationalists, and the newer movement of Methodism. The rise of these movements was blamed partly on the lack of accommodation in the churches provided by the state church.

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