The resignation last week of the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has raised far-reaching questions among clergy and observers about the future of the Church of England.
“This is a crisis moment for the church,” says Giles Fraser, an Anglican priest and media theologian. “I think it’s a turning point.”
“There needs to be a complete reset as to how this whole organisation is run at the top,” says Martyn Percy, former dean of Christ Church, University of Oxford. “We need a statutory independent inquiry.”
These reactions follow the publication of the long-delayed Makin review on how the church handled the allegations of sexual abuse by John Smyth, a man who was an early influence on Welby. Makin made clear Welby was one of the people who had displayed a “distinct lack of curiosity” about the “most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church of England”.
The former chair of the Iwerne Trust – a conservative charity that ran evangelical camps where Welby was once a dormitory officer – Smyth is thought to have groomed and savagely beaten as many as 130 boys and young men in three countries across five decades. Eight boys received a total of 14,000 lashes, and two more suffered 8,000 between them.
He started his sado-sexual campaign in the 1970s and by 1982, after one of his victims attempted suicide, the trust and a number of church members were aware of the allegations against him. In a familiar out-of-sight, out-of-mind move, funds were raised to send Smyth to Zimbabwe in 1984, where he would later be charged with the manslaughter of a 16-year-old boy – he was never convicted of the offence, it is thought because of his powerful connections within the Zimbabwean government.
However appalling the Smyth case is, there is a danger whenever assessing the Church of England of crying wolf, simply because it is always in crisis. After all, it has been losing its congregation for decades, is stuck in an existential battle between its liberal and evangelical wings, and struggles to hold together a global communion of 85 million Anglicans.
Defenders of the church, including Welby himself, have pointed out that Smyth was not a clergyman and his vicious assaults on boys from Winchester College, where he took part in the school’s Christian Union, were outside the church’s jurisdiction.
Ian Paul, an associate minister and member of the General Synod who writes an evangelical blog, Psephizo, says there is no comparison with the plight of the Catholic church in Ireland, where religious influence has dramatically waned after a succession of sex and abuse scandals involving priests and nuns.
“This is not about abuse within the Church of England,” he says. “Smyth was not a minister of the Church of England.”
This is true, but he was a lay reader who served at Christ Church Winchester, and an active part of the laity, so any attempt to distance Smyth from the church looks more like an act of self-protection than one of communal moral responsibility. And it’s not a good look for an institution that prides itself on its high ethics and benevolence to say about a monstrous abuser operating in its midst: “Nothing to do with us, guv.”
Nonetheless, Paul does not dismiss the unprecedented significance of Welby’s resignation.
“In 1621,” he says, “the incumbent archbishop of Canterbury actually killed somebody with a bow and arrow on a hunting trip, and even then he didn’t resign.”
So something major is afoot: it’s just that the clergy can’t agree on what it is. For Paul, Welby represented an anything-goes liberalism that stood in contradiction to church doctrine, and was a poor leader. “Justin managed to make enemies of every single group. He made enemies of liberals by talking about evangelism. He made enemies of evangelicals by talking about sexuality. He made enemies of conservatives by talking about new forms of church.”
The kind of change Paul would like to see – a return to established and more conservative doctrine – will be hampered, he says, by the bishops that Welby appointed during his 12-year tenure.
“It’s been widely observed that the bench of bishops we now have is the weakest we’ve ever had in the history of the church,” he says. “Justin himself tried to get Paula Vennells [the disgraced former head of the Post Office] shortlisted for bishop of London. That is absolutely catastrophic.”
Percy, an academic specialising in ecclesiology who has been an outspoken critic of the hierarchy’s failure to listen to survivors of abuse within the church, agrees that the problem lies at the top but sees it as primarily a lack of transparency and accountability, exemplified by the issue of safeguarding.
“It’s another serious rupture in the reservoir of trust. People just look at the church and say or intuit that this is not an institution they can trust – and it’s very hard to get that trust back,” he says.
He describes Lambeth Palace as a self-preserving bureaucracy riven by intrigue, “including secretive organisations”, and intent on obfuscation and damage limitation.
“I don’t think they have any perception that their secrecy and their lack of accountability, their lack of transparency and external scrutiny, is 100% the problem,” he says.
He maintains that Smyth was not an isolated case. In 2016, he says he met a group of survivors in Oxford who told him “utterly harrowing” stories of abuse by figures within the church.
The perpetrators, he says, were made known to the authorities but remained in the church and were subsequently promoted. “They’ve suffered absolutely no penalty whatsoever,” he says.
Yet at the same time, he argues, the safeguarding measures that Welby oversaw are ill-thought-out and arbitrarily enforced, and deter the sort of volunteers on whom the church has traditionally relied for local good works.
Percy’s remedy is for the church to open itself up to independent assessment and break up its top-heavy bureaucracy. One aspect of this reform, he says, would be disestablishment from the British state. Ever since Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy in 1534, the church has been part of the English and, later, British state, with the monarch as the supreme governor and ecclesiastical representation in the House of Lords.
“What they need to do is get themselves back down to ground level and work out what it means to be a national church which is not an established church,” says Percy.
It sounds like the continuation of the Protestant revolution that was never quite completed in the 16th century, when elements of the Catholic system of hierarchy were absorbed into the newly formed church.
On balance, Fraser is against disestablishment, but he agrees that the church should scale back its global operations and focus more on the parish level.
“Why did Welby miss all of this? It wasn’t that he was malevolent but that he was so overstretched. And there’s an ego thing going on here. They prefer to get out of the airport in Kigali with 3,000 people waving flags rather than spending a rainy afternoon in Stockport with survivors shouting at him. Who wouldn’t? But actually that’s what they’ve got to do.”
Fraser would like to see the bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani – the “one outstanding candidate” – appointed archbishop of Canterbury, not least, he says, “because women are going to be more trusted on safeguarding than men”.
While nobody expects that Welby’s resignation will arrest the long-term decline in church attendance, Paul argues that Britain is a less secular nation than is often believed. “There will be more Christians in church on a Sunday morning than people attending football matches at every level from schools up to professional,” he says.
But a diminishing number of them are in Church of England ministries. How much this has to do with a country losing its religion, and how much it is a reflection of the church’s shrinking sociocultural relevance, is open to debate.
What does seem clear, though, is that the church finds it hard to establish a coherent message because so much of its doctrinal teaching is subject to internal and international dispute. Nor is it adept at capitalising on wider social movements, partly for that reason.
One example is the rise in some quarters of what’s called “cultural Christianity”, a sort of secular appreciation of the religion’s active legacy, as well as the rituals and traditions that accompany it.
Some critics suggest it is a movement born of anxiety about the cultural changes wrought by mass immigration, and in particular the rise of Islam. That is a major red flag for a church that promotes inter-faith relations. Yet if it can’t openly connect to a yearning for certain sense of Englishness and Christianity, it might reasonably be asked, what is the Church of England for?
That is a question that the church is going to have to grapple with in the challenging weeks and months ahead.
