Scandals, schism and decay: is the Church of England doomed?
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
Sunday December 22 2024, 12.01am GMT, The Sunday Times
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’”
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.
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.
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.
Church of England weekly attendance
Numbers have bounced back from the pandemic but the long term trend is downwards
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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.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.
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