STORY 23

My story begins when I went to work for a parish in the Church of England which required some of its staff to raise all the funds for their own salary.

My fundraising task was harder because I worked for a smaller part of the church which had separate accounts and different accounting staff.

The accounts were very badly managed, so I was often given wrong information about my financial position.

The mistakes led the church to think I was falling very short of my fundraising targets. On one occasion I was told my deficit was so large that I might need to be dismissed the following week. 

Thankfully after a very stressful week it was discovered that my deficit had only been 355 pounds. So I wasn’t summarily dismissed. 

When my contract was up for renewal, I had to go through a painful process of showing that my work could still contribute to the parish’s strategic direction. As part of that long process, I had a meeting where one senior church leader spoke to me in quite a harsh and mocking manner. Afterwards I received a text message from the person who had organised the meeting, apologising that it had been ‘a bit intense’. But I think that significantly understated how harshly the other person had spoken to me.

After the meeting I decided to submit a formal grievance about all of the above problems, and some others that I haven’t mentioned here. About a month later I was offered about a third of my annual salary on condition that I resign from the church and sign a very strict non-disclosure agreement.

Before deciding on the settlement, I asked if the church could apologise for at least some of what had happened, and also answer some specific questions that were troubling me.

However the church replied with an apology which seemed carefully drafted to minimise any liability if I refused the settlement and later decided to bring a legal action. So the apology was quite general, and I found it hard to know how much of my grievance the church actually thought was justified.

Without a proper apology, I didn’t think I could honestly promise never to speak to anyone ever again about any of the problems. So I decided not to accept the money, but just to resign my employment.

Because so much of my grievance concerned things which had been said to me in emails (or in the text message I mentioned above), I felt I had very strong grounds to claim constructive dismissal in the Employment Tribunal. But I decided against doing that. And so after my final payday I never received any more money from the church.