Falling numbers of stipendiary, salaried, clergy in the Church of England over recent decades have made it increasingly common for a single vicar to hold responsibility for several parishes at once, grouped into a benefice or a team ministry, rather than the traditional pattern of one vicar serving one parish that the historic vicar and rector distinction originally assumed; a vicar today may conduct services on a rotating schedule across three, four or more village churches in a single benefice, a working pattern that has become the practical norm in much of rural England even though it sits at some distance from the popular image of the resident village vicar.
The shortage has prompted the Church of England to lean more heavily on non-stipendiary and self-supporting ministers, ordained clergy who hold another job and serve without a full parish salary, and on licensed lay ministers who can lead many services without being ordained at all, spreading pastoral and liturgical responsibility across a wider mix of paid and unpaid roles than the single-vicar, single-parish model the title vicar still tends to evoke.
The same word names an entirely separate office in Catholic canon law: a vicar general is a priest, usually a monsignor or bishop, appointed by a diocesan bishop as his chief administrative deputy with ordinary executive power throughout the diocese, a senior canonical post with no connection to the Anglican parish vicar beyond the shared root sense of one who acts in another's place, and the two uses of the same title, a beneficed English parish priest and a diocesan chief of staff, are easily and often confused by readers encountering the word outside its specific ecclesial context.