BY : Gavin Ashenden Christian Today
Hearing Justin Welby being interviewed by Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News rather took my breath away. It was the closest thing to Gladiator 3 The Interview as one could hope for.
She accused the Archbishop of being involved in a cover-up in order to save the institution of the Church.
Welby appeared to be deeply offended by the suggestion and he overreacted. His roots are of course evangelical, and evangelicals are always suspicious of the institution of the church. They don’t like the idea of the Church as an institution, preferring to see it as collections of believers.
Falling back onto his evangelical instincts, and trying to defend himself from the cover-up, Welby became incandescent and, ‘over-speaking’, spluttered that he had no interest in the Church as an institution.
This turned out to be a mistake.
Newman: “Are you ever torn between doing what’s right and protecting the institution?”
Welby: “Never … I don’t give a hang about the institution. I really, genuinely don’t. If this report was a lethal blow to the institution, so be it. God will raise up another institution.”
Newman: “So your failing is incompetence rather than cover up – your personal failing?”
Welby: “Yes. Incompetence? Yes, all right, I’ll give you that one.”
His mistake, though, lay at several levels.
The first was that despite his passion, it wasn’t necessarily true. The Makin report had taken five years to emerge and even at the end it had to be leaked because of a reluctance by Welby’s office and Church House to put it in the public domain.
It’s not unreasonable to suspect that they knew it was dynamite. It’s entirely possible that Welby mistook his anxiety about defending his own reputation as having nothing to do with guarding the institution. But only too obviously, his reputation and the institution are inextricably entwined.
But worse than that, it is a fact that the Church is an institution whether it likes it or not. It is a fact that it is an institution he is responsible for as (he would see it) the CEO.
It was alarming to hear a person responsible for the whole complex institution of the Church that is designed to house, protect, nurture, sustain and grow the body of Christ talk about being willing to have it destroyed in an instant by a report that just happens to be critical of him.
It was a careless and irresponsible articulation of a pseudo-pietistic, half baked ecclesiology. Setting that to one side for a moment, he was too energised to notice the trap that Cathy Newman had laid for him.
The jaws of the not very complex trap snapped shut on him. If it wasn’t a deliberate cover-up, the failure must have been due to his incompetence. In other words, he wasn’t so much mendacious as just very bad at his job.
This was particularly wounding because he had been given fast track promotion precisely because he had spent his formative years not in the hard, backbreaking, sacrificial ministry of the parish church and its intense demands, but instead as a privileged corporate executive responsible for the accounts of an oil industry.
If he hoped that by admitting he was bad at his job, he could avoid resigning, he was of course mistaken. A sense of mistrust in the whole organisation grew over the days that it took for the whole nation to express its growing discomfort with his failure to oversee justice for Smyth’s victims, while he claimed his colleagues had told him not to resign, and while they remained publicly, and self-interestingly, silent – with the impressive exception of Dr Helen-Ann Hartley the tenaciously feminist Bishop of Newcastle.
It must have become clear after a while that their silence would have the effect of making his irresponsible incompetence contagious, and finally, he resigned, having done incalculable damage to the Church he was supposed to have looked after.
So what happens now?
Inevitably, the victims are reminding the rest of us that the incompetence was not just his. Other senior colleagues had compounded his mistakes. And in a rather unhappy way, lists of people who knew or have been suspected of knowing and kept silence, are growing longer.
In a way that is not unlike the atmosphere surrounding the Grand National or the Derby, the replacement of an Archbishop of Canterbury seems to catch the interest of a large section of the population and most of the media.
Impossible to interest with the question of the existence of God, life after death, judgement, forgiveness, ethics, and heaven and hell, most popular papers raced each other to publish the names, faces and biographies of the most fancied candidates in the archiepiscopal appointment steeplechase.
It used to be a different game in all previous appointments. The Church of England was a hybrid organisation constructed with a political stability in mind. It set out initially to avoid religious civil war and civic turbulence by trying to contain and cram into the state church as wide a spectrum of different Protestant spiritualities, theologies and religious pressure groups as possible.
Over time they coalesced into high church and low church. The convention developed that their representatives would take turn but that’s all changed in the last 10 years or so.
Over the last decade the Church has moved from defining itself historically and theologically to culturally and politically. Justin Welby saw to it that almost all of the people appointed to be bishops shared his own profile; energised and excited about administration, little experience of running a parish, and either woke or very woke.
The choice then will not be between high and low church, but woke and much more woke. High and low church may well have been replaced by man and woman. Determined to introduce women bishops into the Church, it was something of an irony that one of them, refusing to be bullied by Welby backed by the grey suits in Church House, brought him down.
Sympathetic to the zeitgeist as the C of E is, it is virtually a certainty that a faithful feminist will occupy the throne once used to enthrone St Augustine whose mission from Rome began the conversion of this country.
The obvious front contenders are the Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, and the Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani. Without pretending to be able to assess their virtues and flaws, the future may instead be determined by the secular criteria of identity politics. My money is on the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford.
Photo: Lambeth Palace
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