By Catherine Pepinster
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury for 12 tumultuous years, came to the role through an unorthodox route — transferring from running a multimillion-pound business to a mid-life vocation to the priesthood in the Church of England.
His Anglican career was meteoric: a parish priest for just little more than a decade, Dean of Liverpool and then Bishop of Durham for just a year before taking on the most senior role in Anglicanism, he found that nothing in his previous career could truly prepare him for the politics and the internal fighting in the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion.
Nor did the turbulence and trauma of his own life: he had weathered the storms of a childhood beset by alcoholic parents, not knowing who his biological father was until later life, and losing one of his own children in a car accident.
Surviving the top job in the Church of England turned out to be nigh impossible, brought down by a scandal over how he dealt with the worst case of child abuse discovered so far in the CofE.
There were high points too: finding a strong moral voice in the House of Lords, particularly on issues such as sending asylum seekers to Rwanda, sharing a strong bond with Pope Francis on the world stage, overseeing the introduction of women bishops in the Church of England and consolidating the Church of England’s establishment credentials with his overseeing of Elizabeth II’s funeral and Charles III’s coronation.
But it was Welby’s lot to lead the Church of England at a time when declining congregations combined with internal rows, especially over same-sex marriage and safeguarding. Sex and money dominated his time in office.
Justin Welby did not have a conventional upbringing shaped by the Church of England. He was born in 1956, the son of Jane Portal, a former secretary to Winston Churchill, and apparently her husband of nine months, Gavin Welby, both of them alcoholics. But when Welby was 60, a paternity test showed that he was the son of Sir Anthony Montague Brown, a former private secretary to Churchill.
It was not until Welby went up from Eton to Cambridge that he became a fully fledged Christian, later recalling that he had an overpowering conversion experience of God. It was the start of a strong connection between Welby and evangelical Christianity that shaped his priesthood and episcopacy.
Yet it was not easy at first for Welby, the mature entrant, to gain ordination. He was at first rejected, being told by John Hughes, then the Bishop of Kensington: “There is no place for you in the Church of England.” But he persisted, supported by Sandy Millar, the founder of the Alpha course for teaching Christianity and vicar of the evangelical hotspot parish of Holy Trinity, Brompton, becoming ordained in 1993. Millar and his successor, Nicky Gumbel, had a profound influence on Welby’s ideas about Christianity and church growth.
His rise was rapid. After just nine years of parish work, he became a canon at Coventry Cathedral, then Dean of Liverpool in 2007, leaving after just four years to become Bishop of Durham — the fourth most senior see in the Church of England — in 2011, and then a year later was appointed to succeed Rowan Williams at Canterbury.
As the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury, he was markedly different from Williams: more plain-speaking, more testy, less otherworldly, less the intellectual and more the pragmatist. His faith may have been different in form from Williams, who came from the more Catholic wing of the Church of England, but it was similarly deep. And like Williams, he was beset by continuing rows over women in the Church, the role of gay people, and a recalcitrant Synod.
There were attempts to play to Welby’s strengths. A fluent French speaker, he enjoyed travel, including across the Anglican Communion. But the rows at home over gay marriage followed him and caused a lasting split in the communion.
Welby delayed the Lambeth Conference that should have taken place in 2018 until he had visited all primates in their own countries, hoping to bring back into the Anglican fold African bishops who had objected to the way that homosexuality and same-sex marriage was being dealt with in some communion countries.
When it was eventually held in 2022, 660 bishops attended, but some Africans still stayed away while LGBTQI+ activists, including 175 bishops, objected to the lack of a full endorsement of same-sex relationships as expressions of love. Not for the first — or last — time, Welby tried a middle course but ended up caught between competing interpretations of Christianity and scripture.
He faced similar rows at home as the Church of England attempted to steer a course on homosexuality. He tried to hold to the tenet of church teaching: that sex outside marriage was wrong, while not accepting that same-sex marriage should be permitted within the church. He did, however, accept that priests could be in celibate same-sex relationships.
Then, in 2023, he became the first Archbishop of Canterbury while in office to accept blessings of thanksgiving for same-sex couples, after the House of Bishops put forward a proposal for them. Once more, he attempted to keep objectors in the Anglican Communion on side when he abstained on a General Synod vote to allow standalone same-sex church blessing ceremonies on a trial basis.
A year later, this October, he revealed in a podcast that his views had evolved to accept that sexual intimacy for both straight and same-sex couples should take place within a committed relationship. He tried to distinguish between his personal opinion and the doctrine of the church, but again, steering this middle course did not convince those opposed to same-sex partnerships — those in the evangelical wing of the church that had nurtured Welby.
Perhaps his most lasting legacy in the Church of England was the entry of women into the episcopacy, which was given final approval by General Synod in 2014, a year after he took over as archbishop. For some, it was anathema, but Welby, who has had several female chaplains, has backed women’s role as prelates.
There were others infuriated by him too. As the established church, the Church of England has 26 bishops who sit in the House of Lords, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Welby made many interventions over the years, including speaking about social injustice, taxation, and welfare benefits.
He was also critical of the former Conservative government’s policy on sending asylum claimants to Rwanda. While his critique was rooted in Christian teaching on human dignity, he was regarded by many on the right as a meddlesome, wet bishop who should stick to spiritual matters.
But when he did support the Conservative government in its total lockdown of the country at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020, which led to the shutting of England’s churches for the first time since the time of King John, he was criticised by many, who felt that he did not understand people’s need for worship in a traditional building.
This perception was also evident in the Save the Parish movement which campaigned on the plight of the churches across the country, as declining congregations struggled to hold their own while faced with huge demands for payments from their dioceses.
Traditional parishes also felt threatened by Welby’s policy of church planting, whereby he encouraged new communities to be created — a way of encouraging people to attend church that was highly influenced by his friends in the evangelical Alpha movement.
His comments that “we have to let Jesus out” of the existing churches sounded critical of those who dedicated their lives to the CofE. But Welby’s intention, if clumsily expressed, was born of a deep desire to spread the Christian mission to a secular nation.
And his efforts were arguably working: figures in recent years showed a small rise in church-going with numbers up by 20,000 in 2022 to 654,000 after a calamitous fall in the Covid lockdown. But they were still way below the pre-Covid 854,000. It did challenge the CofE’s right to be called a national church when so few people attended, leaving it trailing in the wake of the Roman Catholic Church, with its Sunday mass attendance of about a million, while other religions, such as Islam, grew. But Welby, a strong ecumenist and a supporter of interfaith dialogue, was not in that sense a numbers game prelate.
Instead, he formed strong bonds with other religious leaders, particularly Pope Francis, who was elected Pope just a week before Welby’s installation as bishop. They spoke out on issues together and made a significant joint visit to South Sudan in 2023 — the first such overseas trip by a Pope and leader of the Church of England.
On that occasion, Welby was accompanied by his wife, Caroline, whom he married in 1979. The couple had six children, losing their firstborn, Johanna, aged seven months, in a car crash.
Welby spoke of his grief and also opened up about his struggles with depression over the years. An emotional man, he also admitted bursting into tears when he heard of the death of Elizabeth II in September 2022.
Sensing the importance of his role for the nation at that time, he drove through the night to return home from holiday in France immediately. He went on to oversee both the late Queen’s funeral and then the coronation of Charles III in May 2023, helping to form a ceremony that was both deeply traditional, with its usual coronation oaths and crowning of the King, with innovations, including prayers said by Christian leaders of other denominations, and some small involvement by other faiths.
It was the first time in 70 years that an Archbishop of Canterbury had crowned a monarch. None of Welby’s five predecessors had done so. It gave him the opportunity to demonstrate before a global audience the continuing links between Church and State.
Just how much that mattered to people was unclear, as their focus at that time was more on the cost-of-living crisis than on the niceties of the Establishment. Welby tried to ensure the service offered a comprehensible message to people, instigating a theme of service to it. But whether television viewers at home or those streaming it around the world understood that was unclear.
Instead, they saw a sumptuous occasion, with not only the King and Queen dressed in finery but Archbishop Welby in his pomp, dressed in vestments trimmed with gold thread and a cope fixed with a bejewelled clasp. That was just a day in Welby’s time as archbishop, but a historic one.
Meanwhile there were other troubles to deal with. In March this year, independent advisers commissioned by the Church of England reported that it should help create a £1 billion reparations fund to address the legacy of slavery and that the £100 million put aside by the Church Commissioners was not enough. Welby appeared to agree with the advisers’ talk of moral sin, saying that the report “was the beginning of a multi-generational response to the appalling evil of transatlantic chattel enslavement”.
But a more recent moral evil — that of child abuse — overshadowed Welby’s tenure as archbishop. In 2020 the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) had vilified the Church of England for its record on dealing with abuse, saying it failed to protect children and had a culture that enabled abusers to hide.
Then in February a report commissioned by the church from Professor Alexis Jay, the former chairman of the inquiry, said the church’s safeguarding standards fell below the standards expected of secular organisations. It recommended that two new charities should by funded by the church to oversee the protection of children and adults.
Welby said that he welcomed the report’s wisdom. But the church’s safeguarding project was already in disarray, with first one and then a second chair of its independent safeguarding panel resigning. The second, Meg Munn, who quit in July 2023, issued a coruscating statement, saying that a General Synod debate on safeguarding was a debacle, that the Archbishops’ Council was slow to listen and understand, and that Welby had undermined her.
But it was a sexual abuse case closer to home that was fatally damaging to Welby. In October, the Makin Report was published, examining the Church of England’s response to the case of John Smyth, a barrister who had used the cover of boys’ camps and his involvement at Winchester College to access children and beat them savagely. It concluded that there had been a marked failure for decades to deal with Smyth.
Welby, who like Smyth, was immersed in the evangelical wing of the Church of England, was named as someone who had worked in the camps in his early twenties, although he has always maintained that he knew nothing of Smyth’s crimes at that time.
Then, in 2013, soon after his appointment as archbishop, Welby was informed of the Smyth case and told that complaints had been reported to the police. But no formal referral had actually been made. Instead, the Makin Report says, Welby and other senior church figures showed “a distinct lack of curiosity” and “a tendency towards minimisation of the matter”.
As the report points out, if Smyth had been reported to the police at that time — and by then he was in South Africa, where he also abused children — then there could have been a full investigation, uncovering his crimes, and later victims would have been saved. Smyth died in 2018 and was never brought to justice.
Publication of the Makin Report caused huge fury over the church’s failures to protect children. But Welby’s comment that he had considered resigning over it but decided not to do so, only served to whip up anger even further. Thousands signed a petition urging him to quit. Well-known church figures, from media vicars to the Bishop of Newcastle, joined the chorus of damnation. It was an unprecedented fall from grace.
