Crisis? What Crisis? Governance of the Church of England
In a little over twelve months, Justin Welby will have retired as Archbishop of Canterbury. In this first essay Martyn Percy looks at the issue of classism and governance in the Church of England that underpin its operations. His The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery, Revolt and the Church of England is published by Hurst Publishing on January 16th.
- A Touch of Class?
The English, and perhaps the Church of England’s bishop-makers, are easy prey to a touch of class. The assumption is, somehow, that entitled episcopal leadership is wired in through the bloodline. Just as hereditary peers governed through their bloodline, so do bishops through their classist ontological pedigree. A posh-sounding middle name helps a lot.
On his paternal side, Justin Portal Welby’s biological father was Sir Anthony Montague Browne. His adoptive father (Gavin) was of German-Jewish heritage, and stood for Parliament as a Conservative MP in 1951 and 1955. On his maternal side, Welby’s mother (Jane Portal) had served as Secretary to Sir Winston Churchill, and was related to Rab Butler (a Conservative politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister, and Foreign Secretary), and also became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (coincidentally, where Welby also studied as an undergraduate).
Other descendants in the Welby pedigree-line include Sir Montagu Butler, Governor of the Central Provinces of British India and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Josepine Butler (social reformer) and Henry Montagu Butler (who had been headmaster of Harrow School, Dean of Gloucester and also served as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge).
John Colenso, the first Bishop of Natal is a more distant relative, as are Charles Portal, 1st Viscount of Hungerford, the brothers, General Sir Charles James Napier and General Sir George Thomas Napier (respectively commanders-in-chief of the British armies in India and in the Cape Colony), Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, Charles Lennox, 1st Duke of Richmond, (one of the many illegitimate sons of) and his mistress Louise de Kérouaille (Duchess of Portsmouth), and of the prominent Whig politician Charles James Fox.
One of the peculiarities of the more entitled English class is a marked reluctance to admit culpability and apologise, and at the same time lionise any achievements or experiences that might occlude any residual faults. Welby’s career in the oil industry is well-known and usually cited as an example of the executive leadership and management he brought into his role as Archbishop. Welby worked in the oil industry for eleven years – for French oil company Elf Aquitaine based in Paris and then the oil exploration group Enterprise Oil plc in London, mainly concerned with West African and North Sea oil projects.
Later, in his ordained ministry, Welby would return to Nigeria as part of his work for Coventry Cathedral, trying to facilitate peace between competing tribal factions in West Africa, most of which were caused by oil-based economic disputes, as well as ethnic and religious division. Welby’s much-vaunted accounts of his harassment – and even regular kidnapping – at the hands of Nigerian military and warlords is boldly illustrated and highly colourful, in much the same way riveting accounts from 19thcentury missionary explorers left English audiences at home rapt with wonder at stories of such heroism and bravery. Indeed, there is more than a hint of Boys’ Own in the retelling of the tales – a kind of valorisation of risk-taking.
Yet despite Welby being a regular commentator and critic on climate change and global warming, he never mentions his career in oil at this point. There is mention of why the blood-soaked Niger delta was riven with war, the pollution, exploitation and ecological decimation caused by the oil firms in his CV.
There is no mention of the novelist and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa (1941-1995), who along with others, was executed by the government for his sustained protests against companies like Shell, Elf and others for their exploitation of the land, and their oppression of the Ogoni people. Saro-Wiwa was working as an award-winning non-violent environmentalist and activist during some of Welby’s time in the oil industry.
Later, Saro-Wiwa’s trial was widely understood to be rigged. He was put to death by the Nigerian government along with other Ogoni – Saro-Wiwa’s own execution requiring five attempts due to the botched equipment. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the executions and passed a resolution by a large majority, as did the European Union, calling the deaths “cruel and callous”. Welby, as a former oil executive, might have been able to use his position as a clergyman and later Archbishop to say something specific about this tragic history. Silence reigns.
With Eton, Cambridge, elitism and class baked-in, it is safe to presume, the monarchical airs that go with such pedigree. This is not a criticism, however – merely an observation that a person born to such power and privilege, class and hegemony, might struggle with modern democratic demands for transparency, accountability and fairness.
We may find it peculiar that two Oxbridge-Etonians (Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Justin Portal Welby) held such positions and power in the 21st century. Yet I am not surprised. By adopting the air of some kind of entrepreneurial Victorian explorer or provincial governor of a crown dependency, both ascended to their positions by diminishing the scale of the tasks nation and church faced, and the risks. They are adventurers and gamblers. You, the reader of these fantastical tales of daring, are meant to be impressed with this go-getting attitude.
For Boris, Brexit was cast an easy win: “Get Brexit Done”. (That’s gone well, hasn’t it?) For Welby, evangelism and church growth, sorting out the Communion on sexuality, and bringing peace and order to global Anglican polity was also cast as relatively straightforward. Get Brexit Done, or Sort the Church, are hubristic claims rooted in rashness, lack of care and a failure to attend to detail. Indeed, the detail will be regarded as a mesh of hazardous obstacles to be cut through, much like carving some path through a thick jungle. Rules, regulations, considerations, consultations and committees are for bureaucrats. They are overruled or some other route is found to bypass complexity.
There is a kind of monarchical class-based insouciance that can still seduce the English in a time of crisis. The ruling class in postwar England has, to a large extent, been a snobbish and regimented coalition. The elite are still drawn from a handful of public schools which have retained an ethos that is trained to suppress emotion and to speak in voices that are riddled with “aloof, condescending superiority”, as the poet Ted Hughes opined. Their supporting courtiers in Lambeth Palace and amongst the new cadre of ‘Special Advisors’ to government ministers are there, intentionally, to get around the Civil Service. Welby also employs ‘Special Advisors’, and General Synod has not even begun to query their accountability. There is none.
There is also an assumption about white male normativity. Welby regularly slips up when talking about gender equality to openly ask about “other minorities”, as though women were a minority. Or, in a difficult conversation about LGBTQ+, expresses his lack of fear at his own ability to facilitate reconciliation, as he has done so with violent Nigerian warlords and terrorists. It makes you wonder why those in committed same-sex relationships find themselves compared to such groups. But Welby is an upper-class, white, entitled male.
His normativity means he just looks down on others. His identity is inherently aloof, and cannot fathom why everyone is not, in fact, looking up to him. Accountability, transparency and scrutiny are not for the likes of him. Such things are for others.
Yet this quasi-regal executive leadership no longer works. The 21st century, like the last half of the 20th century, is decidedly post-colonial. Social deference can no longer be assumed, and few amongst the elite-born class of yesteryear are cut out to face the challenges of contemporary culture and accompanying global crises. Both Welby and Johnson had extremely ‘poor wars’ against Covid-19, with neither making the right calls, and badly misjudging the public mood. Both have found themselves at the helm during a time of ever-deepening distrust in the governance they presided over. Both have been unable to use communicative charm to smooth over growing problems with truth and transparency. Confidence, trust and even belief in the probity and integrity of the institutions under their tenure, has effectively collapsed.
I recall giving a keynote address at Edinburgh Business School almost a decade ago on the subject of secular corporate theories in contemporary church leadership. I read three brief paragraphs from the Green Report to set the debate in context. The room was full of other business and leadership studies academics from the UK and Europe. After the first paragraph, there was some sniggering. After the second, some laughter, and after the third, the room erupted in laughter.
I asked why they were laughing (I wasn’t trying to be funny), and the assembled explained that I must be joking, because nobody had written anything like that for decades, and it was so bad it was comedy I must have written myself. I explained that the Archbishop was deadly serious. The room expressed dumfounded incomprehension at something so daft and out of date presented as cutting-edge.
In any ecclesial leadership, culture-church synergies are unavoidable, and these invariably incorporate class, patrimony, nostalgia, religious fears, hopes and dreams, and socio-political dis-ease. With the Church of England led by an Etonian-Oxbridge educated male, and boasting impeccable pedigree, the monarchical-executive leadership has been fully manifest in management of the church. But how has the synergy of minor monarchical entitlement come to coalesce with executive management to produce this kind of culture within the Church of England’s senior leadership?
All we can note is that the culture of the ground-level Church of England clergy and congregations is caring, compassionate and considered. It is wholly at odds with the disastrous culture of diocesan and national leadership, which is shaped by outdated capitalist and corporate-management rhetoric, along with ill-fitting outmoded organisational theory. It doesn’t work.
The creation of ‘talent pipelines’ in which church leaders can be incubated and delivered has largely produced compliant middle-managers. Welby and his cadre of courtiers (usually given smart executive-type titles) have simply not understood the chasmic difference between leading an organisation and heading up an institution. Thus, vacuous management-speak and bureaucracy – all geared to delivering growth – proliferated under his tenure, with spirituality, pastoral care, ordinary parish ministry and theological education all relegated and marginalised.
The talent pipeline is also easily exploited, There are few checks on claims made in CVs or even Crockfords. For examples, flaunting claims to have an earned doctorate that is in fact honorary would be commonplace. There have been recent cases, and indeed current cases, where the educational and ministry credentials claimed by those elevated to episcopal office are highly inflated, if not in fact untrue. Or, previous moral misconduct that would bar most from being ordained simply being concealed or “overlooked”.
Yet once this is discovered, the CofE hierarchy goes into defensive reputational management. In any other job, the applicant would have been sacked. But this being the CofE, it is all about appearances, so deception is protected.
Equally questionable discernment has also been demonstrated in the lionising of prominent evangelical leaders such as the late John Smyth QC, the Revd. Jonathan Fletcher and the Revd. Mike Pilavachi, all of whom were subsequently discredited following serious investigations of grooming and safeguarding breaches. At the same time, Welby’s defenestration of the late Bishop George Bell (1883-1958) was based on deeply flawed processes and premature judgement, which was subsequently retracted following an independent inquiry led by Lord Alex Carlile.
Welby’s choice of David Porter as Chief of Staff at Lambeth Palace also raised eyebrows, as he had no background in Anglicanism, and his approach to doctrinal and moral division within the Church of England seemed assume that compromise was always necessary, yet without realising that any expediency adopted would be likely to undermine truth and justice.
That said, the attempts made by Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury to address the crises have largely been a mixture of the inept and inappropriate, and yet imposed with some degree of monarchical assertiveness.
With the advent of the post-colonial era, the Church of England has set out to imitate secular organisations and corporations . It has mostly failed to replicate the models of secular organisation and leadership, and ended up with extremely poor reproductions. At the same time, clinging to the privileges and powers of monarchical authority have led to a situation in which there is little public patience left with unaccountable and non-transparent corporate-episcopal leadership. The lack of liability and responsibility in elitist models of control and governance has also rendered the Church of England’s hierarchy morally and reputationally bankrupt.
As scholars of institutions and organisations know, the primary purpose of a system is what it does. One might expect Christian patterns of behaviour from the body of senior leadership within the Church of England. ‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy’ tells us that the purpose of the system is to look and sound good, manage reputational damage, remain independent, and stay in control. The bureaucracy resists external scrutiny, regulation and even English law, precisely because it disrupts the corporate public relations.
The Church of England’s hierarchy therefore evolves into one that mimics democratic accountability, organisational structure, professionalism and basic proficiency in fields such as safeguarding, employment law and governance. In reality, it has no investment in becoming effective in such spheres, as they would soon hold the senior leadership and their cadre of senior bureaucrats accountable to assessment and standards.
The purpose of the system is to remain aloof, as monarchs might, and avoid being subject to external scrutiny. But in a post-colonial era, there is no space or place for the Archbishop of one nation to preside over all other Provinces in other nations, even if only in some symbolic way. The Archbishop of Canterbury could still function as the Head of a National Church, but there is no need whatsoever for any such church to be established. The nation needs a Church that uphold the law of the land, and is therefore subject to it.
The present situation is democratically unconscionable. One where the Church of England exempts itself from all the laws on equality, accountability, data compliance, transparency, sexuality and gender that it doesn’t like. At the same time it receives all the tax breaks of a major charity, to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds each year. Yet the operation is being governed and run as though it were some kind of elite and unaccountable fee-paying private school. This simply cannot continue.