LONDON (UNITED KINGDOM)
The Times/The Sunday Times [London, England]
December 22, 2024
By Stephen Bleach
Justin Welby and others have left in disgrace and the gaps between factions are widening. Stephen Bleach meets vicars across the country to see if the institution can be saved
The vicar Father Alex Frost surveys a small, shabby block of 1960s flats in Burnley, Lancashire. “Most people here are on drugs,” he says matter-of-factly, then nods to a spot under a concrete walkway. “I found a man living right there. He was sleeping outside, on a mattress, with nothing. Nobody else was helping him, so we did.”
If you want a picture of the Church of England at its best, Frost’s parish is a good bet. St Matthew the Apostle sits in one of the most deprived areas in the country and it intends to do something about it. The church provides free lunches and food vouchers, runs ketamine addiction and mental health support groups and half a dozen other initiatives to help the needy and the vulnerable. Faith here is about action as much as prayer. Frost eventually got the homeless man into temporary housing after buying him a tracksuit to replace his old clothes.
Father Alex Frost tries to help one of the most deprived areas in the country at St Matthew the Apostle in Burnley.
If you want a picture of the CofE at its worst, that’s easier to find: just look at the headlines. In the space of one month, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, was forced to resign over one case of abuse; his predecessor, George Carey, quit the priesthood over another; the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, faced demands to go over the same case. Hundreds more allegations are yet to be resolved.
Given the scale of public fury over abuse and cover-ups, you might expect the church to be solely focused on putting its house in order. Instead, Welby’s resignation was the cue for smouldering internal rows over other issues — gay inclusion, funding priorities, the future of the Anglican Communion — to ignite into bitter, open warfare. Even while it is coming under a barrage of external criticism, the church is busy ripping itself apart.
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Why? A believer myself, I’ve spent weeks talking to my fellow faithful and to clergy at all levels, trying to find the answer. St Paul distilled Christianity down to three things: faith, hope and love. In my many discussions, I found plenty of the first, although little agreement about what it was placed in; not much of the second; and the third, well, it was in short supply.
I came away thinking that, for the CofE, this really might be the end of days. The first horseman of this coming apocalypse is the ugliest: the church’s hideous record of abuse.
Abuse: ‘Neurotics and monsters’
“We need to get to the heart of it,” says Chris Eyden, a retired vicar who is gay and spent 33 years in parish ministry. “Why do QCs beat young boys until they bleed? What is that?”
We’re talking about the case of John Smyth, an evangelical Christian whose sadistic sexual beatings brutalised more than 100 young men over four decades. It was the Makin report into the case that forced Welby to resign when it revealed that he had known Smyth for decades and had failed to report the case to police when he was made aware of allegations in 2013.
The case of John Smyth, an evangelical Christian, forced the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But this was just the latest in hundreds of cases and dozens of reports, all of which have left a fundamental question unanswered: what is it in the church that attracts and enables abusers? And why is it so persistently bad at addressing the issue?
Eyden argues that the CofE’s position on homosexuality is a major part of the problem, suggesting that abusers such as Smyth are often acting on repressed desires. “If the church had an affirmative attitude to the many gay people among its most faithful followers, it would make warped sexual expression much less likely,” he says. “If gay sex is always sinful, the church will continue to produce either neurotics or monsters.”
Abuse cases continue to mount up and evidence to the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse has found that 70 to 80 per cent of victims are male. Cottrell is facing calls to resign over his handling of the case of David Tudor, a priest accused of serial abuse, in his case of girls. This includes the payment of £10,000 to a woman who claims Tudor sexually abused her as a child.
The church has said it will allocate £150 million to a national redress scheme to compensate the abused but Richard Scorer, a lawyer who has represented many victims, is unimpressed. “It’s been mooted for years but still we’ve no start date, no idea what the terms will be, the levels of compensation, how many claimants are eligible, nothing.” For victims who turn to the law, it’s “impossible to say” how much the church might be on the hook for, he says.
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Campaigners for better safeguarding are angry about what they see as stonewalling in response to the allegations. Martin Sewell, an Anglican reader and lay member of the General Synod, speaks of “threats from lawyers to silence people, promises made, insincere apologies, reviews that are not actioned” and “Machiavellian” manoeuvring at the very top of the church.
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All agree that more vigilance is needed but liberals such as Eyden argue that the deeper solution to much of the abuse is more fundamental: support and bless gay relationships. If that happens, however, there may no longer be a CofE, or a wider Anglican Communion, at all.
Disintegration: A schism awaits?
The CofE was founded under Henry VIII in 1534, amid his tumultuous split from Rome, but the average Anglican today, according to Welby, is a woman in her thirties living in Africa. That’s because of the Anglican Communion, the family of churches founded mainly by imperial missionaries in countries from Nigeria and Uganda to Australia and Canada.
Many of these churches are thriving. While weekly worshippers in the CofE have plunged well below one million, the number of Anglicans in Africa is estimated at more than 50 million. But the issue of homosexuality threatens to drive them away.
Justin Welby was at odds with the Global Anglican Future Conference over gay relationships.
That’s seen most clearly in the conservative Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon), which is dominated by African archbishops. Before Welby’s resignation, he refused to condemn gay sex and defended the newly introduced blessing for gay relationships, seen by some as a step towards performing gay marriage. Gafcon responded by accusing him of “promoting the sanctification of sin”.
The Rev James Nash, vicar of the thriving St Andrew’s in Preston, Lancashire, may not use that language but he takes a similarly traditional approach. “Eighty-five per cent of Anglicans around the world still adhere to an orthodox view,” he says. “Marriage, between one man and one woman for life, is the God-ordained place for sexual activity. The African churches were saying, ‘Justin Welby, you’ve reneged on your position and therefore we don’t recognise you any more.’”
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As for the Communion, so for the church at home, where the fault lines between high-church traditionalists, evangelicals and liberals seem to widen by the day: “The only way forward, barring a miracle, is going to be some kind of managed split within the Church of England,” says Nash. “And what that looks like, nobody knows.”
Perhaps predictably, the leadership takes a more optimistic view on church unity. The Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, compares the rows over gay inclusion with the ordination of women priests in the 1990s. “Lots of people disagreed but most found a way to live with it,” he says. “I think we will hold the vast, vast majority of the Church of England together over this. The bonds of affection that tie us are much stronger than the things that try to drive us apart.”
Maybe, although communal affection seems notably lacking in recent missives from the African churches. Finding a unifying new leader will be important. The names being mooted to succeed Welby include bishops Guli Francis-Dehqani, of Chelmsford; Rachel Treweek, of Gloucester; Graham Usher, of Norwich; and Sarah Mullally, of London. The first three signed a letter last year supporting the ordination of clergy in same-sex civil marriages. For many in the Communion, and indeed some here at home, their appointment might be the final straw.
Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London, is being tipped as Welby’s successor.
At least they’ll have time to think about it. The labyrinthine process for appointing the next Archbishop of Canterbury — in which a 20-person commission of lay members and clergy, five from overseas, will invite candidates, who cannot apply, and eventually pass their selection to the King for approval — is expected to drag on for months. Sir Keir Starmer, who appoints the chairman, has picked the safest pair of hands he could find: Jonathan Evans, the former boss of MI5 and the head of the committee on standards in public life.
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Desertion: Talent gap in the clergy
For the English church, the most pressing question may not be “Will it split?” but “Does anyone care?” In 2000 the average weekly attendance at CofE churches was 1,274,000. Last year, it was 693,000.
Part of the reason, says the vicar Fergus Butler-Gallie, is the quality of the clergy. “If you put in people who are, quite frankly, crap, then you are not going to get people coming to church.” The paucity of the talent pool may not help: the number of ordinands for priesthood has fallen from 591 in 2020 to 370 this year. The church’s finance chair, Carl Hughes, cites “mental health issues and financial anxiety” as a factor: vicars are paid about £29,000, with housing provided.
However, for Butler-Gallie, energetic clergy can turn things around. “If you put a good priest in a parish, you will get people to come. Take the parish of St Bartholomew the Great, which the Diocese of London wanted to shut. I went before the current rector was put in: it was 15 old people in this huge medieval church, the archetype of Anglican decline. Now on a Thursday, for evensong, they can get 400 or 500 people.”
Many parishes continue to dwindle, however. As a result, clergy are stretched thinner and thinner: one cleric spoke of having to serve 13 different parishes. And it’s not just the CofE: attendance at Catholic mass shows a similar downward trend.
Some believe it’s simply a losing battle. “Decline is inevitable, I think,” said one former priest. “And it is not entirely the church’s fault. When a whole culture has become secularised and commercialised, an institution like the Church of England, which is based on things that no longer exist, is always going to decline.”
Leadership: A crisis of confidence
For all the infighting, there is at least one thing most clergy and laity agree upon: their leadership is terrible.
Some focus on the quality of the leaders. “There’s a shady cabal in Lambeth Palace of people who appoint people like themselves,” says Butler-Gallie. “You need a wholesale change of the kind of people we’ve got at the top. They view the people of God as purely there to be managed, to be cajoled into doing things. There is this invidious sense that the people running the Church of England actually hate the people who come to church.”
Others stress the byzantine governance structures. “We’ve created 44 fiefdoms, frankly, headed by bishops who are more or less unaccountable and that’s not a great recipe for trying to drive through change,” says Jayne Ozanne, a founding member of the Archbishops’ Council and a former member of the General Synod.
The political manoeuvring, especially around issues of abuse, is “grotesque and horrible”, says Sewell. “It’s corruption. I mean that: high-level corruption.” He is particularly angry about the role of one senior church official who, he claims, is widely known as “Voldemort, he whose name cannot be spoken”.
At the highest level, there is no question about the church’s leadership: the monarch is the supreme governor, and separation — or disestablishment — doesn’t appear to be on the agenda.
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Yet the monarchy isn’t quite as staunch a foundation for the church as it once was: the late Queen Elizabeth was a committed Christian who saw the CofE as the bedrock of national life. The King’s spirituality, however, is more wide-ranging and ecumenical — he once suggested he would like to be defender of faith, rather than the faith — although clearly still heartfelt. William, insiders say, shows little sign of personal devotion but he is observant when form demands and his respect for tradition means he’s unlikely to rock the constitutional boat.
Money: ‘They’re like the mafia’
Money is a subject that comes up surprisingly often in relation to the church. Jesus famously told his disciples it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. If so, the church hierarchy might find their passage difficult: the CofE’s endowment fund is worth £10.4 billion, with the income generated funding spending of £400 million a year.
That aside, much of the CofE’s other income is from parish collection plates and each must pay a “parish share” to the central church. “It’s pretty difficult when you’re working for an institution that’s so incredibly rich,” says Frost. “Our Burnley parish is recognised as one of the most deprived in the country but still we have to pay £38,000. We don’t have that in the bank.”
There’s disquiet too about where the money paid by parishes goes. Some clergy claim that traditional parishes are being starved of cash, while money from a strategic development fund is lavished on planting new “flavour of the month” evangelical churches. Butler-Gallie has accused dioceses of acting “like the mafia, withholding staff or funding from parishes that don’t toe the line”.
Fergus Butler-Gallie has criticised the quality of the clergy in the CofE and the way it behaves over finances
Others criticise vast spending on “political” projects: a quarter of the central church’s expenditure goes to “strategic” spending on targeted programmes, including “racial justice and other social justice and diversity matters”. Last year, the church also set aside £100 million to address the legacy of slavery, with the money going to projects working in black communities in Britain.
But still, a lifeline for the community
While the battles rage all around them, at parish level ordinary clergy and their congregations are quietly getting on with the job: spreading the Word, loving thy neighbour. It’s not easy work. Sitting in his local chippie in Burnley, Frost looks exhausted. “Yeah, I am a bit. I’m working 12-hour days. There’s so much to do.”
Over his sausage, chips and gravy, he reels off a list: as well as services and prayers, there’s the lunch club, breakfasts, choirs, home visits to the sick and disabled, the mental health support group, the ketamine support groups. “It’s a huge crisis in the town,” he says.
An after-school club at Frost’s church, which must pay £38,000 the central church.
This afternoon it’s “fun church”, an after-school service for children, with dinner afterwards. “There’ll be some there out of necessity because it means they [have] a meal,” says Frost.
For many, believers or not, it’s this sort of work that earns the CofE its place at the heart of national life. The church runs or supports 8,000 food banks nationwide. “The British Humanist Association isn’t doing that, I can tell you,” says Butler-Gallie.
Frost and his team of volunteers get stuck in at the service: 29 children run in eagerly, enjoy crafts and games, sing a jolly song about the love of Jesus, then attack their dinner with relish. The mothers — most single, few working — say the service is “a lifeline”.
On the ground in Burnley, the bloodletting of powerful clerics in ornate frocks hardly registers; few in the congregation were aware of the archbishop’s resignation. “My ministry is centred on the beatitudes of Jesus Christ and that means we reach out and serve the poor and fight injustice,” says Frost. “We walk with people in their time of need. That’s what my life is. And it’s a joy. It’s a privilege.” Amen to that.