John Humphrys asks: What should we expect from the new Archbishop of Canterbury and is he accepting a poisoned chalice?
The next Archbishop of Canterbury is to be Justin Welby, the Bishop of Durham. What should we expect from the new head of the Church of England and the leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion? How much does the job matter these days? And is the new archbishop taking on an impossible job?
By all accounts the secretive Crown Nominations Commission, which has had the task of coming up with a successor to Rowan Williams, the current archbishop, has had a difficult time making up its mind and its choice will surprise many. Justin Welby has been a bishop for less than a year. Indeed his career within the church has been much shorter than that of other possible contenders. That’s because he came late to the cloth. In his twenties he was an oil executive, ending up as the treasurer of an oil exploration company in Africa. The death of a young daughter in a car crash is believed to have been a major influence on his decision to leave the world of business to become an Anglican priest.
It’s his business background that may have persuaded the church authorities that he is just the man they need at Canterbury. It is not only that he understands finance. As Bishop of Durham sitting in the House of Lords he was appointed earlier this year to the parliamentary commission on banking standards. It’s also that his time in Africa gave him great experience in conflict resolution.
Cynics will say that’s just as well: if ever there was an institution riven by conflicts that needed resolving, it’s the Church of England and even more the larger Anglican communion of 77 million believers worldwide.
The Church of England has long been divided between various factions, with the often (but not always) liberal, traditionalist Anglo-Catholics (the “smells and bells” group) at one end and the conservative (but not always) evangelicals (closer to Methodists and other non-conformists) at the other. But they have managed to get along reasonably well, despite the notorious in-fighting of church politics. They have taken it in turns to share the big jobs. Rowan Williams was from the liberal, Anglo-Catholic wing; Justin Welby is a conservative evangelical. But in recent years the divisions have become much more acute, notably over the position of women and gays in the church.
It is the primary job of an archbishop of Canterbury to keep the church united but these two issues have strained the capacity of recent incumbents to do so almost to breaking point. The problem has been that in order to provide a focus of unity the archbishop has had to stifle expression of his own, often deeply-held, views in order to keep both sides on board. As a result the archbishop (whoever he happens to be) opens himself to the accusation of failing to lead and, even worse, being unfaithful to his own convictions.
This has certainly been the fate of Rowan Williams who came to the job as a universally respected theologian with the hopes of many that his sheer intellectual capacities would be sufficient to heal the divisions in the church. But it was not to be. Dr Williams found himself having to bite his lip on issues on which, personally, he took a strong, liberal line (such as the legitimacy of appointing chaste gay priests as bishops) simply in order to keep the Anglican show on the road. Many of his fellow liberals felt personally betrayed. Some hope that he will be able to be more outspoken when he returns to Cambridge next year, freed of the responsibilities of Canterbury.
For Justin Welby the more immediately pressing issue will be women bishops. He himself is strongly in favour of appointing women priests to the episcopacy, though is equally keen to find ways for traditionalists who oppose the idea to remain within the church. But the divisive power of the gay issue will not go away.
Within the Church of England there is a broad measure of agreement that the government’s policy of legalising gay marriage (without requiring the Church, or any other, to perform such marriages) should be opposed. But the question of whether gay priests should become bishops will not go away, not least because so many younger Anglican priests are gay and will one day be obvious candidates for promotion. The problem for the new archbishop lies not so much within the Church of England (though it is controversial enough there) but in the wider Anglican Communion, especially in Africa, where cultural hostility to homosexuality buttresses what is taken to be unequivocal Biblical condemnation. Dr Welby will need all his skills in conflict resolution to keep the issue from splitting the Communion wide apart.
Some say that he shouldn’t waste his efforts and that the difference of view between the two sides is so great that the Anglican Communion cannot be kept together and shouldn’t be. The issue itself, they say, is both deeply felt on each side but also peripheral to what Christians should really be concentrating their energies upon. Better to have a clean break and let the two sides get on with their very different sorts of Christianity. No archbishop, however, is going to want to be the one who presides over such a split in the church.
These, though, are matters for those who call themselves Anglicans. What about everyone else? The Church of England, after all, is the established Christian church of this country. It is part of the state, part of the furniture of the nation. Its senior figures sit in the House of Lords and preside over royal events. It is an institution that has a place in the lives even of those who do not share its beliefs.
To many this is an anomalous state of affairs that ought not to be allowed to persist. Only a minority of British people are Christians in any meaningful sense, they argue, and many of these Christians do not even belong to the Church of England. The country is now a mosaic of many different beliefs and none and so it is anachronistic for there to be an established church with the Queen as its governor and its senior figures privileged to be able to legislate within parliament. Disestablishment is long overdue, they argue.
But supporters of a continued established church say that it does not matter that the Church of England can no longer claim to represent the beliefs of a majority in this country. Much of the Church’s activity involves working closely with other Christian churches and indeed other religions to make sure that in an increasingly secular world the voice of religion in general gets a hearing. The established nature of the Church of England assists this cause and those other religions support establishment, they say. Furthermore, the very fact that the Church has been part of the fabric of British life for so long ought to be enough to make people hesitate before putting an end to it.
No doubt the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury will sigh with relief as he leaves Lambeth Palace en route to Magdalene College, Cambridge. What his successor will be feeling as he journeys south from Durham may well be another matter.
What’s your view?
- Do you think the choice of Justin Welby as the next archbishop of Canterbury is a good one?
- Do you think Rowan Williams was a good archbishop or not?
- If you are yourself a member of the Church of England, what do you most hope the new archbishop can achieve?
- What line do you hope he will take on gay marriage, gay bishops and women bishops?
- What do you think ought to be the main focus of his Christian mission at Canterbury?
- Do you think it is the duty or not of an archbishop of Canterbury to keep the church united no matter how fundamental its divisions seem to be?
- Should Dr Welby be prepared to allow the Anglican Communion to split on the gay issue?
- And do you think the Church of England should remain an established church or not?
