Comment by Andrew Brown
In 2001 it was still possible for a church report, written by a former foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, to claim: “The Archbishop of Canterbury is generally recognised as one of the most significant Christian leaders in the world.”
But even then the job was recognised as an impossible one. The Hurd report pointed out that the archbishop was doing the jobs of at least six people: he ran the diocese of Canterbury, the Church of England, and tried to hold together the worldwide Anglican Communion. He also had responsibilities for interfaith relations and liaison with other churches.
Today the job has become even less possible. Both church and communion have shrunk, and the problems facing any archbishop have grown far larger. In the past two decades the church has lost about a third of its regular worshippers and receded into the margins of everyday life: about half as many people now are getting married or buried in church as when Hurd wrote.
The Anglican Communion has split in two over homosexuality, and many of the largest African churches no longer recognise the authority of the archbishop. That split has been carried over into this country, where the faction opposing same-sex reforms does not, in practice, recognise the archbishop’s authority either.
One of the leaders of that faction, Dr Ian Paul, was calling for Dr Justin Welby to resign long before the crisis over sex abuse after the archbishop failed to repeat the official doctrine that sex belongs only in lifelong monogamous marriage between a man and a woman.
The most recent move towards a schism was a ceremony earlier this year in a central London church where the conservative evangelicals “commissioned” their own “overseers” — in effect they appointed their own bishops. They already control one theological college and withhold most of their money from central funds. All that holds them inside the Church of England is the buildings and the pension fund.
It is not just the conservatives who are revolting. On the liberal wing, the Rev Robert Thompson had for some time demanded the archbishop resign because he would not support same-sex marriage in church.
Both factions came together to attack Dr Welby over safeguarding, but his successor will have to deal with their irreconcilable differences. To make the job even harder, the fissures over doctrine are not the only divisions that the next archbishop must cope with. Dr Welby had the political talents and the party backing to drive through the kind of organisational changes that evangelicals had pinned their hopes on all century. The results have been few in terms of bums on pews and the effect on clergy morale disastrous.
Attempts to professionalise the management of the church have been hugely unpopular. The third priest who had been calling for Justin Welby’s resignation before the sex abuse scandal broke is the Rev Marcus Walker, chair and co-founder of Save the Parish, a movement demanding that money be spent on the traditional churches, rather than diocesan bureaucracies and evangelical plants, which it is hoped will grow into mini megachurches like Holy Trinity Brompton.
Yet the problems of shrinking congregations and impoverished dioceses that Dr Welby’s reforms were intended to tackle will remain even if they are reversed or backpedalled and they will confront the next archbishop on day one until the end of their term in office.
So will the problem of interfaith relations, which was listed as one of the archbishop’s roles in 2001 but is very much more urgent now at a time of rising intercommunal tensions. To be the Church of an England with a visible Muslim minority is a difficult role and directing that part of policy would be a full-time job in itself.
Meanwhile, secularists are campaigning with increasing vigour against the church’s role in parliament.
All those problems would have confronted the next archbishop even without the crisis that has brought down Dr Welby. But that has added a fresh element to the demoralisation of the clergy and the weakness of its public position..
