This week the number of confirmed members of the Canterbury Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) rose from 3 to 14 with only 3 names left to be determined and announced (those from Canterbury diocese). A helpful website provides details of each of the people and the 3 non-voting members. What can we learn about the process so far and what still lies ahead?
I set out the basic process back in late February when the only known confirmed names were the independent lay Chair appointed by the Prime Minister (Lord Jonathan Evans), the Archbishop of York, and (to many people’s surprise given he was often listed as a leading candidate for the post himself) Graham Usher, the Bishop of Norwich who was elected by the House of Bishops as a representative of the episcopate from within Canterbury Province.
The eleven new names come from two groupings: the 6 central members drawn from General Synod; and 5 representatives of the wider Anglican Communion.
New Church of England names
The 6 central members are, with one exception, well-known as they have been elected by the General Synod and worked with one another (and the Archbishop of York) on multiple CNC nominations since 2022. Synod originally elected 6 “pairs”, 3 clergy and 3 lay, with 4 being broadly conservative (Anglo-Catholic or evangelical) and 2 broadly liberal or progressive. Since 2022, three of the pairs have been reduced to a single member through one of the pair leaving General Synod so those names, though unconfirmed, have been fairly clear for some time:
Ms Christina Baron, a retired academic based in Bath and Wells diocese (and former mayor of Wells) who has been involved in appointing bishops since 2017.
The Revd Lis Goddard, a London-based parish priest first elected to Synod in a by-election in 2020.
Mr Clive Scowen, a retired lawyer and licensed lay minister in a London parish who has been on General Synod since 2005.
One of the clergy pairs (Andrew Cornes and Paul Benfield) has neither member serving and so, under Standing Order 137(3B), they have nominated another member of the House of Clergy who has been agreed by the Prolocutor for York Province (Kate Wharton):
The Revd Canon Paul Cartwright is vicar of a parish under the Bishop of Beverly (so an Anglo-Catholic opposed to women priests and bishops) based in Wakefield in the Diocese of Leeds. His selection ensures one of the 6 central members is from the northern province. He is Vice-Chair of General Synod’s Business Committee (on which Clive Scowen also serves).
From the other two pairs, the members are
Ms Debbie Buggs, a London-based accountant in the charity sector who was elected to Synod in 2015.
The Revd Canon Claire Lording, vicar of a parish in Worcester diocese elected to Synod in 2021.
The six central members therefore comprise two women clergy and one priest opposed to the ordination of women alongside two lay women and one lay man. Five are from Canterbury province and only one from York.
New Communion names
In a major development, introduced by Justin Welby, the Communion’s representation has increased from 1 voting member to 5 voting members. In addition, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, Anthony Poggo, a bishop from South Sudan who was appointed in 2022 having been Archbishop Justin’s Adviser on Anglican Communion Affairs at Lambeth Palace, will serve as a non-voting member as in previous Canterbury CNCs. His name has, however, been mentioned in some circles as a possible candidate given his experience of both the Anglican Communion and the Church of England in which case he would presumably withdraw and be replaced by someone else, perhaps Bishop Jo Bailey Wells as the Deputy Secretary General.
As I noted in my earlier article, there was at the time little clarity and many unanswered questions as to the process for the selection of these 5 people but that is now much clearer. The General Synod, on introducing this new representation in July 2022 (debates reported here and here), laid down clear criteria that would have to be met which are found in the Standing Orders (SO 139 (2A)). These required that the 5 must be:
- one person from each of the five regions of the Anglican Communion;
- at least one primate, at least one priest or deacon and at least one actual communicant lay person;
- at least two men and at least two women;
- three or more GMH persons.
In November 2023 the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion addressed the task ahead:
The Standing Committee discussed how they would choose the panel of five and agreed that current and immediately past members of the Anglican Consultative Council should be the “pool” from which the five were selected and agreed that there should be a youth representative and an indigenous person. The Standing Committee agreed to request the primates from each region to nominate a slate of people. A group from the Standing Committee would then apply the criteria to select the five representatives.
Following this, in February 2024 all the Primates were invited by the Anglican Communion Office to compile a list of individuals who met the required criteria from the Standing Orders. This process left it up to each Primate how those names were to be chosen in their province, respecting the autonomous nature of each province. A regional discussion then took place among those Primates present (quite a number were absent) at the Primates’ meeting in Rome in April 2024. This resulted in a shortlist of 3 names from each region, so 15 names in total. These names were then considered by the Standing Committee in May 2024 who selected 5 people meeting the four criteria listed above. These names were kept confidential until last week.
The Revd Canon Isaac Tui Te Kanapu Broudigan Beach is a Māori priest from the province of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia (in the Oceania and East Asia region) who describes himself as a “governance leader, and social entrepreneur who has devoted his life to indigenous Anglican expression, climate resilience, and youth leadership”. He graduated from Otago University with a Master of Business Administration degree in 2015 and served on the ACC as a Youth Representative at ACC-17 in 2019 and at ACC-18 in 2023 where he performed an impromptu haka in honour of a Māori bishop on the platform. He is co-founder of Kanapu Hempery and Director of Operations at Te Rau College where he teaches Applied Ministry, Environmental Theology, and Social Entrepreneurship. He has spoken of being inspired by another of the 5 representatives (Archbishop Hosam Naoum) and being “passionate about climate change” so will also find much in common with the Bishop of Norwich who also served at ACC-18 and has been the Church of England’s Lead Bishop on the Environment since 2021.
The Most Revd Hosam Naoum, a Palestinian Christian born in Haifa (Israel’s third largest city) in 1974 and growing up in Galilee, is the Primate (since May 2023) of the Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East. This is in the Middle East and South Asia region and includes his own diocese of Jerusalem and the dioceses of Cyprus & The Gulf and Iran (the birthplace of the Bishop of Chelmsford, one of the often cited front-runners for Canterbury whose father was a former bishop of Iran). It previously contained the diocese of Egypt but in 2020 this formed the new province of Alexandria. The province has had women priests since 2011 but does not permit women bishops.
Archbishop Hosam has been the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem (where he was previously Dean of Saint George’s Cathedral) since 2021. This is a diocese with about 7000 Anglicans in 28 parishes spread across Israel, Palestine (including Gaza), Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In Lent 2023, following developments in the Church of England’s LLF process and with strong responses from elsewhere in the Communion, the diocese made clear in a statement that it was not affected by those decisions and that “the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem has neither changed, nor does it contemplate any future change, in its adherence to the Church’s traditional teaching and practice on Christian marriage as being a lifelong union between a man and a woman as detailed in the 1998 Lambeth Conference Resolution I.10”.
The Archbishop trained for ordination in South Africa and also studied in the US at Virginia Theological Seminary earning an M.Div. in 2011, a Doctor of Ministry degree in 2020, and more recently was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2022 alongside Rowan Williams. The province has strong links to The Episcopal Church and the bishop of Southeast Florida was involved in his consecration as bishop.
At ACC-18 in 2023 where he was a representative for the second time he was elected as Vice-Chair of the Communion’s Standing Committee (though it is important to note he was absent when the Standing Committee selected the 5 people to serve). He was part of the Anglican Delegation at COP28 in November 2023 and is reportedly widely respected among the Primates. He worked closely with Archbishop Justin especially in relation to seeking peace in, and raising Christian awareness of, the Middle East where he has also worked with the Bishop of Norwich. His other connections with the Church of England include being an honorary canon of Rochester Cathedral, his involvement in the Coronation where he processed in holding the Bible and presented Archbishop Justin with the oil for anointing (afterwards enjoying fish and chips and prosecco with the Bishop of Norwich).
The Revd Professor Grace Nkansa Asante, born in 1965 in the Ashante Region of Ghana in the Province of West Africa, is Ghana’s first female professor of economics and Vice Dean at KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology with CV). She also serves as a priest at KNUST in the Archbishop Thomas Cranmer Anglican Church after being ordained following what she has described as a strange Samuel-like call through a phone call from someone with the contact name “Jesus Christ” who was silent on the other end of the call. She was interviewed by Times Higher Education in August 2024 about her life and professional work. She has also worked with the African Development Bank and the Kumasi Metropolitan Authority. Unlike the other four people she has not served on the ACC (although the last ACC in 2023 was in Ghana) but appears to have been shortlisted and then chosen as the African representative despite not being in that original “ACC pool” which had been proposed by the Standing Committee but is not a condition for CNC membership required under the General Synod’s Standing Orders.
Mr Joaquín Philpotts is the only lay person among the 5 and comes from Buenos Aires within the Province of South America (formerly known as the Southern Cone). An industrial engineer he and his Primate were the two reps appointed from the province for the ACC in Ghana in 2013 and he will serve for the next two ACC meetings.
The Right Revd Mary Stallard became Bishop of Llandaff in the Province of Wales in 2023 and was one of the first women to be ordained in the province (in 1993 by Rowan Williams) although she was born (1967) and educated in England, studying Theology at Cambridge and training for ordination at The Queen’s Foundation in Birmingham. All her ordained ministry has been in Wales where she has served in all but one of the six dioceses, most recently as Archdeacon (from 2018) and then also Assistant Bishop (from 2022) of Bangor where she served alongside the Primate of Wales who is the diocesan bishop. Having been one of Wales’ representatives at both ACC-17 and ACC-18, her term on ACC will expire after it meets next year for ACC-19. She has been a strong supporter of full inclusion of LGBTQI+ people being part of a BBC Radio Wales discussion on Gender and Identity and last year opening a service in Llandaff Cathedral organised by OneBodyOneFaith, “the UK’s oldest Christian LGBT+ members’ network”.
Summary on Communion members
It is hard to assess exactly what difference the inclusion of these 5 people will make to the process and their integration and relative lack of knowledge about the Church of England could be a challenge for the work of CofE-dominated CNC. What is clear is that having such an impressive and diverse range of cultural perspectives from across the globe and looking in on the CofE will enrich the discernment and make this significantly different from any previous CNC.
There are still some questions and concerns about the process that has led to their selection and particularly the decision to use the 5 regions. This means they are clearly far from fully representative if only because the 3 other rather small UK provinces have a place (once again taken by Wales—its Archbishop was the sole Communion representative at the last Canterbury CNC) and are on an equal footing with, for example, the 14 much larger provinces from Africa with such a high proportion of the Communion’s regularly worshipping Anglicans.
In terms of the provinces represented, none of them are either GAFCON provinces or covenanted members of the GSFA although, in a development few would have predicted, the Americas is being represented by someone, reported to be an evangelical, who is from a conservative province which is part of the GSFA and in the past was much more prominent in both the Global South and GAFCON. Two of the provinces represented have affirmed same-sex blessings but not (yet) same-sex marriage, three are conservative on marriage and sexuality but have not joined those who have declared impaired or broken communion.
It is surprising, given how much emphasis is often given to the fact that the ACC is the only Instrument that involves lay people (and the rules were simply to include at least one Primate, one priest and one layperson), that the 5 comprise a Primate, a bishop, two priests and only member of the laity. This means that the Communion 5 are 2 women clergy (one a bishop), 2 male clergy (one a Primate) and 1 lay man.
Missing Canterbury names
In January the Archbishops’ Appointment Secretary said that “it was expected that the full membership of the Commission will be known by mid-March”. The delay beyond March was in the hope that all names could be announced together but the 3 representatives from Canterbury are still missing due to what, as reported recently in The Times, some people are describing as an “omnishambles”.
In summary, the election of these last members of the CNC is by and from the diocesan Vacancy-in-See Committee (VisC) which is meant to be a standing body in the diocese. It began work in December but was then judged to have been improperly elected and so new elections had to be called in late February at the direction of the Archbishop of York. As I have set out previously there were serious questions about that election result when announced on 18th March. This was due to a mix of, once again, a failure to follow the rules in the diocese but now combined with the changing of the rules mid-process by General Synod. On Wednesday last week (7th May), the diocese finally announced it was going to ask the Archbishop to order the re-running again of the ViSC election. This was despite the recently elected ViSC having by then hurriedly done its work including completing the Statement of Need and electing its 3 representatives (neither of which outcomes were publicly released).
The stated reason for the re-run was a failure to remove from the ballot (as required by what is known as Rule 75) those candidates who were elected unopposed. It would appear that this error was then perhaps compounded by further errors in the count (but the diocese never released the result sheet for the election so this detail remains unclear). This error was therefore obvious even before the result was declared but it sadly took nearly two months after the result was announced for it to be officially recognised by the diocese and the seriousness of it for the integrity of the election to be acknowledged.
The rerun itself could face further problems. Firstly, the timing is such that the voting does not close until 5pm on Friday 23rd May, just before the May Bank Holiday weekend. The diocese has informed voters that it is expected that the result should be announced the following Tuesday, 27th May. After the membership is known, a meeting of the Archbishop’s Council in the diocese needs to appoint a Chair and the members of the ViSC need to meet, agree how to elect 3 members for the CNC, nominate candidates, and vote. This makes for a very tight schedule to have the 3 members in place for the first CNC meeting which it has been said will be in May.
Secondly, in addition to removing from the ballot paper (unlike last time) the candidates judged elected unopposed, in the re-run the diocese has also removed from the ballot paper (unlike last time) three other candidates (the diocese did not re-open nominations as some believe it should have done for a new election). These three have been judged to have a “relevant connection” (ie to be part of the same worshipping community) as ex officio members or, in one case, a lay candidate declared elected unopposed. This application of a new rule passed by General Synod in February (Rule 6A) has removed both nominated ordained women from the ballot, one of them on the paradoxical grounds that someone else from her parish has already been elected “unopposed”. Their removal from the ballot would appear to have no legal basis as the rules for running the election by STV state (para 3(3)) that such decisions should be taken after the votes are cast and before the first count not in such a way as to prevent a candidate standing for election (especially as here it is someone who would be eligible should the candidate they are connected to die or withdraw before the count). The removal of a candidate because of the “relevant connection” rule is particularly problematic in the situation, as in one case here, where it involves depriving the voters of the opportunity to choose which of the two connected nominated candidates up for election they would prefer to represent them on the ViSC.
Thirdly, the lack of any ordained women on the ballot means there are only two ordained women serving on the ViSC, both ex officio. Another new rule (Rule 13(8A)) states that in the election of the CNC members “at least one of the lay persons, and at least one of the clerical persons, elected as members under this paragraph must be female (unless no female person of the relevant description is proposed and seconded for election)”. In the last election of 3 CNC members by the ViSC it was judged that this meant that when only one of the two eligible women clergy was nominated they were declared elected unopposed to the CNC, not placed on the ballot and the number of seats up for elections reduced to 2. This is despite the fact that there is no explicit legal requirement for a clergyperson to be elected to serve on CNC and in theory the voters could choose to select only lay people.
If this scenario happens again after the re-run election then, as before, only two lay people can be elected by the ViSC. In addition, to be elected requires several more votes when there are only 2 seats up for election than if there is an election for 3 seats. This distorts the outcome of the election as (a) voters who would support the woman deemed elected unopposed do not have to use their “single, transferable” vote for her but can vote instead for another candidate of similar views and (b) there is the risk that candidates from minority groupings on the ViSC (in this case evangelical and traditional Catholics) will not be able to get across the higher threshold or quota and so not be represented on the CNC.
A further possible difficulty is that all the dates for the 3 CNC meetings are fixed (the first, as noted, for some time later this month) and every member of the CNC has to be present throughout every meeting given the nature of the process of discernment. This may well severely constrain which members of the ViSC are able to stand simply on account of the need to be available for probably between 6 and 10 days across May, July and September.
Conclusion
The CNC for Canterbury is finally taking shape but the process has been—and remains—far from smooth. Part of the problem is the wider context in the Church of England where, as has been officially acknowledged, there has been a serious erosion of trust and also a deepening of divisions, particularly but not solely in relation to marriage and sexuality and the PLF process.
Such difficult situations can often be held and contained in a community because of long-established and widely accepted processes which are properly followed and continue to be trusted and have everyone’s respect and confidence for determining outcomes. A large part of the difficulties in relation to the CNC is that in relation to first the Communion 5 and then in relation to ViSC rules there have been significant changes introduced in recent years. These were led by Archbishop Justin with the support of most bishops and passed (though not without serious questions being raised, especially in relation to the recent ViSC rule changes) by a majority of General Synod.
The changes have related to:
- the composition of the CNC: increasing from 1 member to 5 members from the Anglican Communion (despite recent proposals, also supported by Archbishop Justin, to reduce the historic role of the Archbishop in the Communion) and reducing the diocesan members from 6 to 3 (making it harder for them to represent the breadth of the diocese, particularly with the further new rules for ViSCs);
- the selection of the Communion members (lacking any clear and accountable electoral process unlike for other CNC members); and
- the rules both for constituting a ViSC and for how the ViSC chooses members for the CNC. Here some of the new rules are strictly unworkable, others seriously undermine the fundamental principles of the STV electoral system by imposing constraints that over-ride the preferences of voters.
In addition to all this, Canterbury diocese has now on two (perhaps even three) occasions failed to follow due process and broken long-established rules as to how to elect a ViSC.
The recent election of Pope Leo shows that a church can, despite various crises and challenges, still be led by the Holy Spirit to reach (remarkably quickly) a consensus as to whom God is calling to lead it into the years ahead. We need to pray that over the coming months as the 17 members of the CNC get to know each other and consider what is needed in the Church of England and wider Anglican Communion they will similarly know the presence and guidance of the Spirit and find that 12 or more of them can agree on who should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.