The Church is What We Do Next 

by Gilo,  co-editor with Janet Fife of the book Letters to a Broken Church, and co-creator of the House of Survivors website. He is also a hymn writer.

I recently saw Conclave at my local cinema. If you haven’t read the Robert Harris novel, and don’t want to be handed the crux of the story – avoid looking up any online reviews. They nearly all give spoilers. So I won’t reveal any here, other than one pivotal moment when a cardinal makes a quietly impassioned call to the other cardinals in the midst of heated debate, “The church is not tradition. The church is not the past. The church is what we do next.”

The church is what we do next. Upon such a fulcrum of gravitas where promise and danger meet in equal portion is where the Church of England now stands. Almost every senior bishop who might be considered for the role of Archbishop of Canterbury is likely to have legacy ghosts trailing in their wake and waiting to haunt them. This is not a political statement, nor particularly an anti-bishop one, but rather a statement of probable fact. If the Church and especially the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) do not exercise rigorous scrutiny in this appointment, you can be sure the media will.

Any senior bishops being considered for the role will need to have searing honesty with regard to their safeguarding history. Have they blanked survivors or denied disclosures? Have they evaded necessary and crucial questions? Have they deployed the standard institutional responses of silencing and blanking? Have they been party to the burial of things which they know should not have been buried? Have they hidden reviews under lock and key? (I know of at least one current diocesan who has done so in recent years.) Have they rested easy in quiet complicity with any bad cultures of Church House or Lambeth Palace when their position of power and privilege offered opportunity to speak up and act? In truth, the standout voice has been that of the Bishop of Newcastle. She alone has spoken fearless truth to frightened power and has from all reports met with a lack of support. Other bishops, especially senior ones, have lacked even basic courage in comparison.

This is the reality the Church finds itself in: the CNC may sleepwalk the Church into fresh crisis simply by assuming that senior bishops are transparent in any assertion that all is well with them and that no skeletons will emerge to plunge the Church deeper into damage. Some of them are possibly too hubristic to care much.  Unaccountable power tends to breed a hubristic attitude. Some perhaps imagine that what has been successfully buried in the past will stay buried. It won’t.

Increasingly my own view is that the next occupant of St Augustine’s Chair might need to be an interim figure. Someone who can hold the Church to its promises and critical decisions throughout this year and during the next few. But not necessarily someone attempting to usher in any ‘Grand Plan’. Lambeth Palace and the Church probably need a rest from any big Welby-esque strategic vision. Maybe five years max in the post. Deep elder wisdom required. Someone who has not necessarily been in much position of power to bury anything. Someone from the edge. Someone with a deep understanding, heart of compassion, and wisdom. Possibly a retiring suffragan. The late great Alan Wilson would have been such a figure. He was unique and I’m not sure we will see his like again. But imagine if he’d been Archbishop leading up to his retirement, with a brief to begin the vital rescue of the Church. With Rosie Harper alongside him as Chaplain and partner in the project of institutional  transformation. He had the chutzpah to speak right over the heads of the agents of resistance and obvious institutional corruption. Crucially, he and Rosie had shared the journey of survivors for a decade or more, and gathered the threads in their groundbreaking To Heal and Not to Hurt. Alan would have stood sentinel to the beginning of root and branch reform and insisted upon a much more honest Church of England built upon the keystones of systemic transparency and truthfulness.

It’s clear that the CofE will undergo considerable and necessary change over the next decade, with hopefully a return to a much more locally focussed Church and away from the two-tiered Church of struggling parish over against the weight of privileged and unaccountable power. The next Archbishop will need a depth of wisdom that almost none of the current senior bishops seem capable of demonstrating, to guide the start of that process. Crucially, they will need to embody a focus of real energy across CofE on setting the safeguarding and response to survivors on to a genuinely healing and restorative path.

When Channel 4’s Cathy Newman summed up the John Smyth scandal as showing that ‘the church had neither process nor kindness’, Justin Welby had no option but to agree. The next Archbishop will need to be someone who can insist upon right process matched with great kindness, and who can publicly and decisively call all structures which govern every aspect of the response to survivors to follow that lead. Transparency is the essential cornerstone of such a move. But transparency is destined to fail when touted publicly by Archbishops whilst figures hidden in the corridors of power work to mitigate against it. For transparency to work, for it to bring any possible redemption of the Church’s reputation, everyone needs to face in the same direction and sing from the same hymn sheet. And the act of kindnessing will need to be apparent throughout.

Realistically, any implementation of structural independence is likely to be complex and require more than a few years to achieve. If this is rushed as a reactive response to the mess the Church is in, will only lead to further meltdown and confusion. So I posit some crucial first steps along the way for a possible interim Archbishop. I imagine an experienced suffragan with the strength of purpose to focus on the following:

1. Call an EGM of Synod
2. Support Tanni Grey-Thompson’s Mandatory Reporting bill currently in passage in the House of Lords, and call for that support across the House of Bishops and Synod.
3. Ensure the Redress Scheme begins this year, is fair and just, and not any kind of rerun of toxic Ecclesiastical Insurance tactics.
4. Sort out the undeniable mess of Archbishops’ Council and its wholly unaccountable Secretariat. Sackings required, even if key personnel demand immorally high severance packages. The Secretary General is unlikely to leave without a wheelbarrow of cash. So be it. But go he must.
5. Call all of Church House and NCI staff publicly to transparency. Ditto to all bishops/dioceses. Transparency must be the watchword of the Church going forward.
6. With this in mind, introduce the Nolan Principles into public life across the Church. Bishops and key staff are public office holders and should be required to commit to principles of accountability and integrity.
7. Work with key parliamentarians to bring the Church quickly under Freedom of Information regulation.

In fact, with grit and determination, I think all of these could be achieved in Year 1. Ceasing to be ‘pope’ of the Anglican Communion will free up time and energy, and allow for focus on recovery of the broken Church. If this 7-point plan was achieved, it would be a job well done, and would pave the way to longer-term repair after the turbulence of the last decade. The Church’s only chance of repair will be the measure to which it commits to the repair of those it has harmed and re-harmed.

If the CNC chooses business as usual and Lambeth Palace ends up with someone who represents the fearful milquetoast culture we’ve seen in the bishops of recent months, then the Church is likely to fold in on itself and travel deeper towards its own shabby diminishing. If, on the other hand, they choose an unexpected and unknown elder of wisdom it may be that the Church will have a much better future after he or she has gone. The reset of the Church of England depends on the initial year or two of the next Archbishop and the vision and determination and public grit they bring to laying the groundwork.

Any of the obvious diocesans – York, London, Oxford and others – will in various ways represent a Church of broken promises, complicity with cruel structures and reliance upon reputation management. If the CNC looks to them, the Church will rue the day. The current grim state of affairs will deepen. Let us hope the CNC (which has awkward ghosts of its own which need to be sorted) will find the boldness to choose with extraordinary care. “The Church is what we do next.”