YORK (UNITED KINGDOM)
Anglican.ink - AnglicanTV Ministries [Webster FL]
January 17, 2025
By Ian Paul
When Justin’s appointment was announced, I might have been surprised had I known as much then as I know now about how appointments processes work, but I was certainly encouraged. A friend published this comment on Facebook, and I think it was representative of how many people felt at the time:
In March 2013, while training for ordination in Nottingham, I went along to a local church, to listen to an invited speaker. This clergyman spoke about his faith in Jesus Christ. I was struck by how he did not gloss over the death of his child, and his own struggles with depression. A few days later, the speaker, Justin Welby, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. I am thankful that his words made space for leaders to speak about mental health challenges…
I remember two events early on in his time in office where I too felt deeply encouraged, and excited for the future of the Church of England. The first was watching his enthronement service on March 21st, 2013, when he struck the door of Canterbury Cathedral, and was greeted first of all by a child.
Child: we greet you in the Name of Christ who are you and why do you request entrance?
Justin: I am Justin, a servant of Jesus Christ, and I come as one seeking the grace of God to travel with you in his service together.
Child: Why have you been sent to us?
Justin: I am sent as Archbishop to serve you to proclaim the love of Christ and with you to worship and love him with heart and soul soul mind and strength.
Child: How do you come among us and with what confidence?
Justin: I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified and in weakness and fear and in much trembling.
Child: Let us then humble ourselves before God and together seek his mercy.
Despite all the pomp of the ceremony (and that dreadful mitre!) it felt like a new and fresh start, and suggested that this might be quite a different way of being archbishop. (I gather that asking questions of the incoming archbishop was a mediaeval tradition, but here it had a very new twist with the questions being asked by a child.)
The second event was being present at the New Wine leaders conference in Harrogate in March 2016 when Justin came to address us. Revisiting it again nearly a decade on makes for fascinating reading. One distinct impression we had was that Justin saw himself as one of us, and saw a key role for New Wine and similar movements in the renewal of the Church of England.
I can’t tell you what a privilege it is to be here. It’s beyond what I can easily express. The New Wine movement has done so much in our lives and in our family’s lives. God has worked through you in so many amazing ways, and so much in the church.
And he was distinctly upbeat about what was happening in the C of E:
I want to say to you today that I believe from the bottom of my heart that the long years of winter in the church, especially in the Church of England, are changing. The ice is thawing, the spring is coming. There is a new spring in the church.
I say to you secondly: embrace the present. With all the pain, the grace, the weakness and “we’re not what we hope to be”. For the Spirit always meets us in the reality of the present, to lead us into God’s future. There is no despair in the church because we serve the God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
But it was also striking that he was already talking in terms of his legacy:
At Canterbury Cathedral there’s a chapel at the west end that is especially complicated for me psychologically. It’s complicated because it has a list of all my predecessors, right back to Augustine. If you want to feel inadequate [laughter] then try looking at a list that begins with Augustine…I wonder what thought you give to your legacy, to what you will leave behind—to how you might be remembered; most of all to how we will all be judged.
That’s the hardest thing for me, in the decisions of daily life, in how I live each day, how I pray, love, argue, decide, discipline. It’s very difficult for me to escape—especially difficult to escape that sense of our legacy, of what it could be and what it shouldn’t be.
The there was great emphasis on humility, on transparency, and on honesty and facing up to difficult truths—deeply ironic given the end of his time in office. But we were full of hope, and we felt that Justin gave us reason to be.
He ended by focussing on Jesus: ‘For he is completely true, completely faithful, completely trustworthy. He simply asks us, his servants, to live in a way that witnesses to him in this world.’ And this commitment to witness was a frequent theme. It was about the time he visited New Wine that he launched Thy Kingdom Come as a prayer initiative running from Ascension to Pentecost each year for people to come to faith. In 2018 it posted a wonderful video in which Justin goes back to the room in which he came to faith himself on October 12th, 1975—it is very moving and worth a watch.
In terms of the institution of the Church, things were also encouraging in the first few years. Despite finding a strong consensus that ‘there was no theological objection to the ordination of women’ as far back as 1976, the ordination of women was only enacted in 1993, and debates about women as bishops (raising quite distinct theological and ecclesiological questions) had reached deadlock. As Andrew Atherstone notes:
Lord Williams’s tenure had ended in tears, literally, when hopes for women bishops crashed in the General Synod. Immediately, Archbishop Welby offered a fresh way forward (the Five Guiding Principles), and legislation was promptly agreed. It seemed almost miraculous, after years of wrangling. Here was Welby the great reconciler in action. The Midas touch had struck again. It will go down as one of his greatest achievements.
Alongside that, he quickly introduced the Renewal and Reform programme, facing the question of decline in attendance head on:
…“the biggest reform of the Church since the mid-19th century”, he said — which set out to address the “existential crisis” of numerical decline, and addressed the Church’s structures and funding flows. “We can’t simply go on as we are, if we are to flourish and grow as the Church of England,” he declared. “Our call is not to manage decline.”
It is striking, looking back, at the combination here of concern for evangelism and mission combined with a bold confidence, almost to the point of hubris, that this would solve our problems. It is again worth remembering how most people responded to this, as noted by Madeleine Davies. John Spence, chair of the Archbishops’ Council Finance Committee, set out the rationale:
His speech setting out a vision to “return this Church to numerical and spiritual growth, and to return Christ to his rightful place — at the centre of this country, its conscience, and its culture” secured rapturous applause in the General Synod in 2014.
I was elected to General Synod in 2015, so all these things were in placed when I joined the chamber. Soon after that, in earlier 2016, I was elected to the Archbishops’ Council (from here, ‘AC’), to my surprise; I had not even thought of standing until a friend strongly urged it. Both within Synod, and in meetings of AC—and in personal conversation—I began to encounter a very different Justin Welby. In theory, we should have got on well, having both been educated at public schools (albeit of very different kinds) and studied at Oxbridge—and shared an interest in rowing. But from the beginning, conversations were awkward.
Synod was already engaging in the Shared Conversations which had been recommended by the 2013 Pilling Report. At considerable expense, and taking a good deal of time and energy, they demonstrated two things: that opinions were deeply divided within the C of E on the question of sexuality and marriage; and there was no obvious way to bridge this divide. Looking back, I find it strange that none of us raised the question of why so many in the church appeared not to accept its doctrine, despite (for clergy) our vows to do so. (The roots of this question go back to the 1991 report Issues in Human Sexuality mainly authored by Richard Harries, then bishop of Oxford.)
The Shared Conversations ended with a report from the House of Bishops Marriage and Same-Sex Relationships After the Shared Conversations (GS 2055) at the end of 2016, brought to Synod in February 2017, effectively recognised this. Central to the paper was paragraph 26 proposing ‘no change to ecclesiastical law or to the Church of England’s existing doctrinal position on marriage and sexual relationships’ but with work being done on better guidelines for clergy than in Issues and guidance on pastoral provision. By a narrow margin, this paper was not ‘taken note of’ in Synod, the opposition being mainly liberals who wanted to see change, plus a small group of conservatives who thought even this work was a step too far.
In response to this, Justin made a call for:
a radical new Christian inclusion, founded in Scripture, in reason, in tradition, in theology, and in the Christian faith as the Church of England has received it. But it must be also based on…the freedom and the equality that comes with the radical, Christ-centered inclusion of the Gospel.
Alongside the first Justin I had encountered, here I found a second Justin—someone who believed he was the expert in reconciliation, who could keep everyone happy, and who (alone?) could provide the solution to what others saw as intractable problems.
The following July, I passed him on a pathway on the York university campus (where July Synod is held), and I commented that I thought this statement was a disaster, since no-one was remembering the caveat ‘founded in Scripture…’ He stopped and turned to me, and defended himself: ‘I had to say something’. My simple reply was ‘No, you didn’t’. The possibility of going away, taking time to reflect, and seeking the counsel of others, did not seem to him to be an option to him. In fact, his inability to listen to advice (despite the claims he made about following advice in his fatal Channel 4 interview) seems to have been a feature of his working relationships.
About that time, I had been praying for Justin, and felt God giving me a verse to share with him from Isaiah 11: ‘The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might…’ He response was immediate: ‘Is that so I can bring in same-sex marriage?’ It was a strangely flippant and surprising comment, and I had no idea how to respond. But with the benefit of hindsight, it now makes sense. From this, and other comments he has made, I feel sure that he changed his mind on same-sex relationships and marriage at least as far back as 2017, and probably much earlier, around the time of his consecration as archbishop. Although he only said so explicitly in his appearance on the podcast The Rest is Politics with Alistair Campbell last November, he actually allowed Campbell to attribute this view to him in his previous discussion in 2017.
About eight years ago, Justin told me with excitement that Richard Hays had informed him (on a trip to the States) that he had changed his view on same-sex marriage—something Hays denied in correspondence, when he also said he would not make any public statement on the matter. It turned out that Justin was right.
I think this means that Justin has been disguising his own views for a very long time. What many have interpreted as statements that sought to balance competing views have actually been Justin seeking to push through change behind the scenes whilst seeking to hide this from those who oppose it, in order to keep then on side until it was too late. A startling example of this occurred in York last July, when Justin made a statement of support for those in the Alliance (who are coordinating those in the Church who continue to uphold the Church’s teaching on marriage) in debate—only then to make a furious personal attack on a leader of the Alliance in the bar that evening, to the shock of those looking on. In stark contrast to the message he gave in 2016 to New Wine leaders, Justin informed me that he was now cutting off relationships with all those who had nurtured his faith in his early years, because of their opposition to his position seeking change in the Church. ‘This indicates the seriousness with which I view this matter.’
It is hard to disconnect his own secretive approach from that of the House of Bishops, who as a body have consistently refused to be open about their own discussions, holding their meetings in camera instead of open to scrutiny, and refusing to publish legal and theological advice whilst claiming that it supports the position of their published statements.
In 2018, he published a book with the ambitious title Reimagining Britain, and out of that set up a series of Archbishops’ Commissions, on race, housing, and the family. In my review of it, I don’t hold back on Justin’s achievements to date:
Justin Welby had already left a significant legacy from the first half of his tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury. The swift resolution to the inherited crisis of finding a workable settlement in relation to women bishops; the instigation of the Renewal and Reform programme; reorienting the Church’s administration and finances towards mission; the re-establishment of evangelism as a priority; the prayer initiative around Thy Kingdom Come; and even the personal success of (just about) ‘putting Wonga out of business’—all these have been significant achievements.
But when it came to the book itself, I was appalled by the weakness of its analysis, the thinness of its critique, and the absence of any real theological thinking. In his survey of British economics, he does not even mention Margaret Thatcher; he offers no assessment of the rise of managerialism in institutions; and he draws on no real Christian or Anglican theological resources. The book included a note of his debt to the thinking and friendship of Paula Vennells, who was head of the Post Office during the Horizon scandal.
When I asked a staff member what he thought was good about the book, he paused, looked up, and replied ‘He wrote it all himself’.
The resistance to theological thinking has left its mark in other ways too. A professor of theology who was invited to the initial preparation for the 2022 Lambeth Conference quickly stepped back: ‘It was clear that Justin had no interest in theology whatsoever.’ And this has also been reflected in his influence in the appointments to the bench of bishops. It was widely rumoured that, in the process of appointing the bishop of London, he used his privilege, as archbishop of adding to the shortlist, to include Paula Vennells, even though her shortcomings at the Post Office were already know—and then to use his influence within the process to prevent either Christopher Cocksworth or Graham Tomlin from being appointed.
As the editorial at Living Church noted:
He sought to form the Church of England’s episcopate after his own image by introducing an invitation-only leadership training program. This meant the bishops shifted as he did — from a cadre dominated by moderate evangelicals with business degrees to the current band increasingly united around identity politics and ready to take the plunge on same-sex marriage. Many gifted clergy and people in the pews were left on the sidelines shaking their heads.
This lack of interest in theology has also extended to a lack of interest in theological education. Some years ago, I set out for him what I believed where the serious issues facing us in theological education; this includes the fact that, with the growth of context-based training, whatever else its merits, it means that clergy are ordained having effectively had almost half their theological learning time cut out. He showed no interest whatsoever, and in the discussions that we have had on AC about theological education, it was clear that Justin knew nothing of the details of how the current system works.
More odd was his lack of interest in the questions of clergy stipends and pensions. When I succeeded in getting unanimous support for a restoration of the clergy pension and stipend levels through Synod (by means of a Private Member’s Motion) he immediately spoke to me on the platform: ‘I have always been concerned about this’. But I knew this wasn’t true, since I had sat through meetings where he had voted through an effective reduction in the stipend which I had opposed. He appeared now to be wanting to take credit for something on which someone else had done the work.
The overall impact in vocations to ordained ministry has been catastrophic. After a significant rise in numbers prior to Covid, there has been a massive drop, and this will have very long-term implications for the Church’s mission and ministry.
This lack of interest in process has been the hallmark of other initiatives. In February 2020, the Synod just before Covid lockdown, in a debate about racism and the Church, Justin unilaterally declared that the Church of England ‘is institutionally racist’. He borrowed this language from the 1999 Macpherson report into the Metropolitan Police, but Justin made the declaration without the same evidence of research. I am sure that he thought that this statement, coming from a white man with a privileged background, would communicate the support needed for those feeling on the margins of the institutional church. But what he failed to realise was the impact on the ground—that he made local clergy and members of congregations immediately feel tarred with the label of ‘racist’ regardless of their own actual attitudes and practice.
This was one of a number of ‘Ratner’ moments for Justin. Every time that he talked about the failure and the shame of the Church, I think he genuinely thought people would see both him and the institution as humble and self-aware. But what many deduced was that this was an institution to avoid—especially if the leader had no confidence in it. The final example was in his Channel 4 interview, where he astonishingly said that he didn’t care about the institution!
Lockdown was in place by the time the report From Lament to Action was published. It was commissioned specifically by the archbishops, thus by-passing the usual process of consultation, and did not even attend to its own terms of reference (something confirmed in later questions to Synod). Rather than gather together previous recommended actions for implementation, it created a kind of shopping list of things wanted by the authors, which Justin appears to have encouraged. These were not based on evidence; many were unrealistic; and the evidence is that many of the actions would actually harm rather than address attitudes to ethnic diversity.
Successive reports from the Archbishops’ Commission on Racial Justice have not been widely read, but have continued to lack proper process in drawing on evidence, have argued that any questioning of their methodology must be racist, and even included racist stereotyping of different theological traditions in the Church.
Another of Justin’s commissions, arising from his book, focussed on the family. But, again, it paid little attention to theology (and in fact omitted a key theological reflection from Elaine Storkey from its published documents), was written by a sociologist, and rather than drawing on Anglican understandings of marriage and family life, said that it affirmed family structures whatever their form, disregarding the evidence of harm done to children in broken and unstable home environments.
This approach to process has also dogged key elements around safeguarding. The report from Alexis Jay was explicitly commissioned to explore the options in relation to independent safeguarding in the Church, both in terms of safeguarding operation and scrutiny of processes. When her report was published, she was at pains to emphasis that this is not what she considered—she only looked at what fully independent operation and scrutiny might look like. The reason for the change was, I think, Justin’s own briefing to her, outside of due process, to move straight to independent operation, since he mistakenly believed that that is what the IICSA report required of us.
Keith Makin took five years to produce his report, when AC has asked for it in nine months. I now think it was a significant failure of ours not to press harder the question as to why the report took so long; I cannot but help feeling that the idea that Justin had no involvement in this delay does not look very plausible. Can you imagine where we would be now if Makin had reported four years ago?
Living Church offered this summary comment on Justin’s attitude to due process:
In the end, [Justin] had little choice — resignation became inevitable. The chorus demanding it was remarkably unified, rising from across the normally fractious Church of England. This wasn’t just because the Smyth case was appalling or because the church needed to prove once and for all that it takes safeguarding seriously. The archbishop simply had no friends left. During a tumultuous 11-year tenure, he had lost his notorious temper too many times, scolding subordinates for failures he overlooked in himself, refusing to let others have their say, ignoring precedent and canons when they got in the way of his agenda.
In a wonderful and moving letter to the Church Times last week, James Dudley-Smith offers a list of qualities we need in the next archbishop. In the middle he includes the perhaps surprising request: ‘Someone who does the hard work of following due process, or changing it by due process.’ The reason for this is that adherence to due process says two things: first, I am not the person with the solutions who can fix things; and, secondly, I value the wisdom and insight of others. It seems that Justin struggled to say either of those.
This is ironic given Justin’s repeated claims that he had little or no power.
The big mistake in this role, which I’d sort of worked out before I came, but it has been amply confirmed, is: don’t waste time looking for levers to pull, because there aren’t any. It’s a process of persuasion, of example, of blessing and withholding blessing for particular things.
Given his clear influence in appointments, his use of Commissions, and other interventions in processes behind the scenes, this sounds distinctly disingenuous. Culturally, the Church of England is deeply deferential, and Justin appeared to be unaware of how hard those both within and outside the Church of England find it to ignore strong suggestions or preferences expressed by an archbishop.
This was especially true at moments when he lost his temper. I was the object of his outbursts on several occasions, both in public meetings and in private—though at other times he could be quite charming. There is no doubt that this was exacerbated by his own struggles with confidence and mental health, and was made worse with the Covid lockdown. But it is very hard to be led as a Church by someone prone to such things, which on more than one occasion reduced women in a meeting to tears. And this was not a surprise. A friend of mine who was an intern when Justin was based in Coventry (2002–2007) asked after a few weeks: ‘Why does Justin hate me?’ ‘Oh don’t worry’, came the reply. ‘He is like that to everyone’.
I have already written here at length, and I have not even considered the disastrous handling of the Covid lockdown, when Justin (I think illegally) issued an order to clergy telling them they could not enter church buildings, and later denied it was expressed as an order, claiming it was merely advice.
Nor have I explored the fate of the Anglican Communion. Justin invested an enormous amount of time in travelling around the Communion, visiting all the provinces in his first year, and making the 2016 Primates Conference the best attended in years. But he failed to follow through on promises of discipline, and in the end at Lambeth 2022 announced unilaterally that there were now two, contradictory, understandings of marriage in the Communion, and that was that.
After a mammoth and costly effort to gather thousands of bishops, he laid on a 12-day leadership conference, largely refusing to let his fellow bishops argue or to make meaningful decisions, at least not about the issues that really trouble our unity.
His decision to squash the Global South Anglicans’ patient and respectful request for a referendum on the Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 1.10 — the only significant Communion-wide doctrinal text to emerge from the Global South — was a travesty. It alienated many leaders who were ready to be his friends, and who may never respond to another Archbishop of Canterbury’s invitation. As one Indigenous bishop said informally during the conference, “It was just like at the boarding schools. They say, ‘Sit down, shut up, and we’ll tell you what to do.’”
There could hardly be a starker contrast with all the things Justin said in his enthronement service and to the New Wine audience.
This article has been a piece in two halves, and the two halves seem to correspond to the paradox of the two Justins we have had as archbishop. On the one hand, there is a sense in which evangelism, mission, and church growth are now officially on the agenda of the Church and embedded in many of the things we do like never before, and that must be credited to one of the Justins.
Yet, on the most challenging issues, particularly around sexuality and race, we are not only more divided, we are deeply embedded in an impossible situation—and this must be credited to the other Justin. His approach of working behind the scenes, not following due process, offering what he thought was needed to both sides, has created deeper division by making everyone think they were going to get what they wanted in a quite unrealistic way. As Andrew Atherstone notes:
In a tragic symmetry, his appointment was welcomed enthusiastically by every part of the Church, and his resignation was energetically demanded by every part of the Church.
Amongst all the comments that have been made in the last couple of months, two, from quite opposing viewpoints, struck me. Conservative evangelical Gerald Bray commented on Facebook:
I think the scandal that finally brought Justin down was just the tip of an iceberg that had been getting closer to the ship for a long time. He strikes me as one of those people who cannot deal with bad news, not just about this, but about most things. Look at the way he has watched the Anglican Communion disintegrate before his eyes, and yet denied it. Look at the way he has presided over a precipitous decline in church attendance in England, but denied that too. He just does not know how else to react. Probably, when he was told about John Smyth’s abuse, he could not face it and tried to sweep it under the carpet as if it had never happened, and for 10 years or so, he got away with it.
And liberal Martyn Percy said in The Times:
I think the one feature needed in the selection process this time will be new: realism. The Church of England does not need another rallying call for revival. The people’s hopes in the pews rest on an authentic and honest candidate who does not deny reality.
My main emotion in reading back over this piece is sadness—sadness for the lost sense of hope and optimism that we had eleven years ago, sadness that so much went unrealised, sadness that we are now in an even more challenging situation, and sadness that Justin’s promising tenure should have ended the way it did.
Where do we go from here? As the person apocryphally replied to someone in London asking for directions: ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’.