We have a serious crisis in the episcopal leadership of the Church of England. It has more than one dimension to it, and, as with any crisis, it has been a long time coming. If your ceiling caves in because a water leak has weakened the structures, you can be sure that the water has been leaking for some while (as we found out in our kitchen a couple of years ago!). The dimensions of this crisis include questions of role, training and education, and selection and appointment—but also more fundamentally of theological vision.
These questions have been brought into sharp focus by the news, leaked to the BBC, that Paula Vennells, chief executive of the Post Office during the Horizon scandal when 700 postmasters were wrongly convicted of fraud, was shortlisted for the role of Bishop of London, historically the third most senior post after the two archbishops. I will return to Vennells and her significance at the end of this piece.
Four years ago, I wrote a piece ‘In defence of bishops‘ as a response to comments by Matthew Parris and Sarah Coakley on the inadequacy of the current bench. (Bishops appear to be a relatively safe target for criticism in the media). I noted that part of the problem is that we have reached a point where, as far as I can see, the role of bishop in a diocese is just not doable:
The one thing I would agree on with Coakley (and possibly Parris) is the desire for bishops who model good preaching and teaching. The problem here is putting that alongside all the other demands that we make of them. They need to be good administrators (who wouldn’t want a quick reply to a request?); financial managers (how else will the diocese balance its budgets?); competent strategic thinkers (else who will lead us into growth?); concerned pastors (who else is looking out for the clergy?); effective in discipline (someone has got to keep everyone in line, even if that contradicts the previous concern); they must offer an effective voice in national debates (to raise the quality, as Parris argues)…and so on. As a recruitment consultant once commented to me, it is the multi-coloured unicorn brief!
I am very impressed when I hear from some of my episcopal friends that they are continuing to study, to read the scriptures extensively, and to engage with theological reading. But I am also aware that many of them feel overwhelmed by the bureaucracy, particularly the bureaucracy of our safeguarding culture. In that regard, they are suffering from the same as clergy in parishes; a recent survey found that clergy spend more time on routine administration than they spend on preparing sermons. And the safeguarding bureaucracy at a local level has got completely out of hand—and to no good effect as far as I can see. We have more safeguarding files in our church than we have members of the electoral roll; someone cannot help with serving coffee, supervised by another, without undergoing safeguarding training; and my wife, a GP with extensive safeguarding training and experience, is told that none of that counts for the church, and she must do additional courses. If that is what it is like at the local level, I cannot imagine what it is like in a diocese.
But part of the crisis of leadership relates to the role of the diocese. A few years ago, our previous diocesan secretary opened a meeting of our deanery by claiming ‘The diocese is the basic unit of the church.’ The clergy in the meeting gasped audibly; one walked out. Where has this idea come from? Is this really an Anglican understanding of ‘the church’? I cannot even think of a theological rationale for ‘the diocese’ or any trace of such an idea in the New Testament. The fact that many of our dioceses closely match our counties—which are convenient, regional, administration and bureaucratic units—seems to me to give the game away.
I noted, at our last diocesan synod meeting, that in our diocese we have 113 stipendiary clergy posts. However, eight of those are funded on a time-limited basis, and of the other posts, 20 are currently vacant. That means that we have only 85 filled, non-time-limited, stipendiary clergy posts. At the same time we have a total of 50 FTE central staff posts—and I don’t think we are untypical. Of course, it is important to note that neither the number 85 nor even the 113 represent all the stipendiary ministry in the parishes; many churches have paid administrative support, and stipendiary lay ministry include student workers, children’s and families workers, and other specialist posts, including those funded from national central funds (in our church we have a Spanish-speaking pastor funded through SDF). For the sake of clarity, the diocese maintains that they have closer to 41 in genuinely central staff posts (which includes 5 working in the Board of Education supporting their 75 church schools and 5.5 in safeguarding), with the 9.5 other posts in front-line ministry—including chaplains in the two universities, part-time school chaplains in the seven Church of England secondary schools, and staff working ‘on the ground’ with children and youth in parishes across the diocese.
I am sure my diocese is not exceptional—in fact, we are probably better off than many. Paul Williams has courageously committed not to cut stipendiary parish posts, in contrast to our neighbours in Sheffield and Leicester, as well as Chelmsford, Liverpool, and numerous other dioceses. And we have been more proactive than most in applying for national funding. But this still raises the question: can that really be the right kind of proportion? There are statutory responsibilities that must be fulfilled (for example, in relation to education and church schools) but it feels to me that we are seriously out of balance. It would be very interesting to compare the proportions across all dioceses—but I don’t think there is anywhere these are collated.
This raises a wider questions about the culture of the Church—what we think is important, and what needs to be addressed. I was very struck by a Twitter thread by Gerry Lynch, from Salisbury diocese, in which he put his finger on the philosophical and theological issues which have been shaping church leadership for a generation or more, prompted by a screenshot of the programme for bishops’ training.
‘The C of E has been strangely convinced since ~1990 that its crisis was caused by poor management. But what it actually has is a narrative crisis, which it shares with Christianity throughout the West for reasons that have little to do with it specifically. Asking an organisational psychologist to offer suggestions as to how to fix the C of E’s crisis is like asking a plumber to tell you how to fix your crashed hard drive. These people have no particular insight as to what besets the C of E and Western Christianity generally.
Christendom & the modernist paradigm which replaced it struggled for a century before the latter triumphed in most of the West ~1963. The Church not only capitulated to but attempted to assimilate modernism. Doing so usually made the Faith untransmissible across generations. High modernism was marked by strong confidence in scientific, technological, and moral progress; deference to expertise and technique or the verisimilitude of them; faith that humanity could master nature (including human nature) & a disregard for the historical and local. What jumps out from the topics and teachers in the C of E’s pre-bishop training course is a High Modernist faith in technique, expertise, and quantitative measures—or at least in people who can bullshit effectively about them.
But we don’t live in 1963 anymore. People all over the West have been gradually losing faith in the modernist narrative pretty much since it started; at first it was slow and barely visible, but I think now we all appreciate there is a crisis of faith of Westerners in their leaders, institutions & ideologies. But nothing has come to replace modernism; both modernism’s own contradictions & post-modernism corroded it but PoMo could build nothing in its place. So we have the modern political faultline of “populists” versus “progressives” and technocrats. The progressives and technocrats still believe in the old faith of High Modernism; the populists opportunistically penetrate its crumbling walls, like migrating peoples into the late Roman Empire, without themselves being able to create a new organising principle for society.
Which is where we jump back to the course. This reads like something that would have been exciting at a theological college in the 70s, with people desperate to make the Church ‘useful’ and “outward-looking” in an age of “modern liberal democracy”. The idea that liberal democracy is looking insecure even in its heartlands, or that runaway progress might end up killing an awful lot of people doesn’t get a look in here – although its shot through the popular discourse of the 2020s.
The C of E, while sometimes opposed to the progressives, has also lined up squarely and almost universally behind the technocrats in opposition to the populists. But the populists aren’t destroying technocracy, merely opportunistically taking advantage of its slow implosion. Surely the question all Christians in the West should be asking is how Faith can carry us through us through a time of political and cultural crisis and possible collapse? Truly looking outward means turning our back on the failing systems and ideas of modernity.
It has been fashionable for 2 generations to sneer at the idea of Church as lifeboat, but in times when the floodwaters are actually and not just metaphorically, rising, is it bad to look inwards and backwards at the Church’s spiritual & cultural resources for crisis eras? That’s the sort of leadership I want from our bishops; not attempting to do what the Diocesan Secretary is already there & better trained for, but proclaiming Christ’s Good News in a time full of bad news in a way that makes me want to follow, and bring my people with me.’
Gerry has expanded these thoughts into an article for The Critic, The Failure of Anglican Managerialism, and he ends it with this plea:
The sad thing is that the bishops of the Church of England are, in the main, talented, thoughtful, and caring men and women. They are called to shepherd an institution whose cultural and spiritual resources are keyed specifically to times of crisis—and indeed a culminating crisis when all human attempts to build heaven on Earth will end in disaster. If they speak, gently, liberally, sophisticatedly, about that grand narrative, they may find that people are more interested in these than in the latest theories of experts whom they increasingly mistrust.
In making this comment, he is echoing two other important commentators, one from outside and one inside the Church. The voice from outside (still, just) is that of Tom Holland, when asked by Glen Scrivener what he would like to hear Christians preach:
I see no point in bishops or preachers or Christian evangelists just recycling the kind of stuff that you can get from any type of soft left-liberal because everyone is giving that. If I want that I know I can get it from a Liberal Democrat councillor! If you’re a Christian, you think that the heart of the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured by this strange singularity where someone who is a God and a man sets everything on its head.
To say it’s ‘supernatural’ is to downplay it! I mean this is this is a massive singularity at the very heart of things and if you don’t believe that it seems to me you’re not really a confessional Christian. And if you believe that, it should be possible to dwell on all the other weird stuff that traditionally comes as part of the Christian package. It seems to me—largely from a cursory look at Thought for the Day—that there is a deep anxiety about this—almost a sense of embarrassment—’oh, Jesus was just a nice guy.’
But it is all a lot weirder than that, with the supernatural panoply of angels and so on…ultimately, if this is to be preached as something true, the strangest of it has to be fundamental to it. I don’t want to hear what bishops think about Brexit; I know what they think about Brexit, and it is not particularly interesting.
The voice from inside the Church is that of David Goodhew, in his analysis of the decline of attendance in the Church of England—and why at times the Diocese of London has been an exception to that:
Why has London been different? First, London prioritized congregational growth over decades. That might sound obvious. But you’d be surprised how easy it is to evade the obvious. Large sections of the C of E see the growth and multiplication of congregations as unnecessary or impossible. In the last decade there has been more rhetoric about growing churches, but all too often it is accompanied by minimal action, or ineffectual action. Prioritizing growth means serious focus on sharing faith and multiplying congregations—and a willingness to use hard metrics to face up to what is happening…
The Diocese of London is not the only sign of growth in British Christianity. There are some good things happening elsewhere in the C of E. But most of the other signs of growth are to be found outside of Anglicanism. Many churches in Britain are growing, But most of the growing churches are not Anglican. Immigration is a significant driver of growth, but not for every growing church. Alongside this, historic denominations such as Methodism and Presbyterianism are collapsing.
The primary common denominator is theology. Those trimming faith to fit in with culture have tended to shrink, and those offering a “full-fat” faith, vividly supernatural, have tended to grow. This is as true of the ultra-liturgical Orthodox as it is of the ultra-informal Pentecostals.
Giles Fraser has also criticised the managerialism he sees in the Church of England. But he confesses that, at one time, he agreed with this agenda: ‘In 2015, without recognising the irony, I wrote for the Guardian: “We must do to the churches what Beeching did to the railways.” And I think he still makes a major mistake in his approach to this now and what he sees as the alternative.
I was a fool to think that the local parish church could be replaced by vicars in regional hubs, fired with start-up entrepreneurial energy but hiding behind their laptops. I wanted some quick fix to the church’s slow decline, but I helped to make it worse. Clergy were described as “limiting factors”, church buildings as expensive millstones. Out with the old in with the new. Move fast and break things, was the spirit of the age.
But the (now notorious) phrase ‘limiting factors’ was not uttered by someone committed to managerialism—rather, precisely the opposite. It was said by John McGinley, someone who is passionate about the need for spiritual renewal as key to church growth. The observation that clergy are ‘limiting factors’ relates to the way that clergy can often be committed to traditionalism, and obstacles to the church planting and evangelism that we need to see. Similarly, the use of the Strategic Development Fund, despite some setbacks, has not been about implementing managerialism, but specifically about seeing people come to faith and grow in their discipleship. This can be seen in the fruit of new church plants, which have a youthful energy, an enthusiasm, and a commitment to invitation that most Anglican churches lack. The success of the church planting initiatives that have grown out of HTB (Holy Trinity Brompton) have not been a result of managerialism, but a confidence in the gospel and the power of God to change lives. The Alpha course epitomises this sense of a commitment to invitation, and an expectation that people will have a genuine encounter with the presence of the living God.
This brings us back to Paula Vennells and the question of selection and training of bishops. Giles Fraser notes:
Despite the fact that Vennells had almost zero parish experience, never having been a vicar for instance, her candidacy for the post of Bishop of London—the third-most senior clerical job in the country—was supported by Welby.
She trained part-time on what was then the Oxford and St Albans course, and appears to have undertaken no further theological study. The idea that someone with so little theological understanding, and absolutely zero experience in stipendiary ministry, could be considered as a candidate for the third most senior position in the Church, is quite astonishing. It indicates a complete loss of faith in the importance of either ministerial experience or theological depth on the part of someone. And it does seem clear that she was put on the short list by Justin Welby; as Fraser again notes:
I imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury now rather regrets the foreword to his book Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope in which he credits Vennells with having “shaped my thinking over the years”. But this wasn’t just a rhetorical tribute: Vennells’s thinking has left its mark on more than one national institution. Across her careers, she has championed and centralised precisely the kind of centralising managerialism that leaves the little people forgotten. It is exactly this approach that Welby has galvanised as a battering ram against the local parish church throughout his tenure at Canterbury.
The book in question was so poor that I could not bring myself to write a proper review. In surveying the recent history of economic change in Britain, it completely ignored the most significant change of all—the impact of Thatcherism. Welby appeared to be completely blind to the monetarist reductionism and the concentration of elite power that this has brought. And it has in turn led to a series of Commissioners, at least one of which (on the family) represents a complete loss of confidence in a Christian theological outlook and its value for society.
Vennells’ consideration for London highlights the major problems with the appointments process, not least its secrecy and the consequent misuse of power of those involved. It has also been leaked that there were in fact four people shortlisted, the other two being Chris Cocksworth, then bishop of Coventry, and Graham Tomlin, then bishop of Kensington. It is extraordinary to think how different things might have been—and how different the post-LLF process might have been—had either of them been appointed. As it is, the Church has lost both of them from episcopal leadership.
Read it all in Psephizo
