With the process of choosing a new Archbishop of Canterbury now underway, it perhaps won’t come as a surprise that many commentators have already quietly written off the next incumbent, even before those running the process have started sifting through names, let alone choosing one. It is not their fault, mind. However, turning another page makes no real difference to a narrative drama that is essentially bound to rehash and repeat the previous storylines.
The current senior leadership of the Church of England should have realised some while ago that it can be both interesting and irrelevant. But without relevance, and after a while, it becomes difficult even to awaken interest. Speculative strategies and an endless carousel of new initiatives are no substitute for assuaging the immediate, deep-seated fears and longer-term concerns that consume congregations as they struggle to maintain their churches. Current church governance is in denial and wholly broken. Local clergy and congregations deserve better from their senior leadership. It is depressing to watch lions led by donkeys.
As Sir Tony Blair observed in his treatise on leadership, a process is a worthy means to an end but can often become the end. This, says Blair, results in “a continuous loop of deliberation, not decision”. The Church of England is hard-wired to (apparently) purposeful procrastination. It invents a seemingly endless parade of processes for affirming same-sex blessings, reparation and redress schemes for victims of abuse, independent delivery of safeguarding and the like. However, as any process approaches the point of implementation, it reverts to more consultation and further discussion. Defeat is perpetually snatched from the jaws of victory.
As sociologists know, a system’s purpose is what it does. The purpose of this ecclesial system is to maintain indecision. In the case of the Church of England’s hierarchy, consultations, reviews, and occasional inquiries can quickly be commissioned. However, when the moment of decision and actual implementation is required, any actions will be subject to further caution-based deliberative delays.
Pournelle’s Iron Law
The motto for this institutional stasis runs like some episode out of Yes, Minister. “Something must be done. This is something, and nobody can argue with that. So we now don’t need to do anything more than this.” So, actions that could or should be taken are postponed. Future omissions that might later emerge can be covered up with further commissions. There is no end to such processes.
What maintains this stasis in the Church of England is a phenomenon that sociologists know as ‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy’. It is named after an American scientist and philosopher, Jerry Pournelle (1933-2017). Jerry Pournelle theorised that organisations or institutions were comprised of two kinds of staff.
The first are those devoted to the organisation’s goals, purpose, vision and ethos. The second are those dedicated to the organisation itself, who would regard the goals, purpose, vision and ethos as being subordinate to the organisation’s existence. As Pournelle noted, the Iron Law states that the second group gains control of the organisation or institution in every case and ultimately determines who succeeds in power and authority. With all the key roles and tasks eventually secured by this second group, the organisation becomes an ontologised executive. Group Two sets up and runs the process to pick a candidate who believes they best epitomises the principles and values enshrined by Group One.
The unsuspecting nominee has no chance of changing much and certainly nothing about Group Two, who remain in the shadows, self-narrating as “being in support of the new Archbishop”. The fresh-faced nominee will be groomed to think they are the change agent (finally). The nominee hand-picked by Group One from Group Two will even say they are “called” to this work – a vocation, no less. They have no idea that they answer to Group One, who holds all the power and authority and presides over the budget.
Thus, minimalist attitudes to change will reign supreme in a culture where valorised gradualism is part of the ecology of the establishment and its hierarchy. Modest tweaks and reforms are the eternal friends of aloof and unaccountable power, as they merely acquiesce to the micro-modest modifications in the current arrangements. The agenda is to retain the majesty and power of the Steady State and its ruling elite.
The Church of England, as an institution, hasn’t adapted well to the 21st century. It really hasn’t. Its managerialism is frequently experienced as alienating, laughably outdated, morale-sapping, and invariably bungling and bullying. It has also struggled to state, in simple terms, what its core purpose consists of. So, it is seduced into talking about reforms, success, results and growth. These often sound hollow, dated, inauthentic and unconvincing. As one senior retiree recently confided of a branch of the armed services, “I used to be well-led in a first-class institution; I am now inadequately managed in a third-class organisation.”
“Lions led by donkeys” was how ordinary foot soldiers expressed their pain and frustration with their out-of-touch officer elites in the Great War. “Lions led by donkeys” summarises the situation for frontline clergy and chaplains in the Church of England now. Trust and confidence in the hierarchy vanished long ago. Morale has collapsed in congregations too.
Scholars of institutions and organisations know that the primary purpose of a system is what it does. One might expect different patterns of polity from the body of senior leadership within the Church of England. Christian, even? But as with ‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy’, the purpose of the system is to keep going. Structural indecision is the expression of value.
Oversight or Overlook?
Another primary purpose of the current system is to remain beyond any accountability, ostensibly to preserve its mystique. The Church of England hierarchy wants to look and sound good, manage potential reputational risks, remain independent and aloof and stay in control. Thus, the senior ecclesiocrats resist external scrutiny, regulation and law precisely because they are perceived as potential threats.
In the arena of safeguarding, there has never been any real listening or genuine engagement from the senior leadership. Victims who complain repeatedly will be met with silence or shrugged off. When they continue to complain, they will receive threatening lawyers’ letters or even threats of police action for harassment. This will be reported to General Synod as “listening and engagement”. No person on the Archbishops’ Council has yet had the courage or integrity to break ranks and say, “Enough!”.
The recent debacle relating to the Bishop of Liverpool and (yet another) coverup by the Archbishop of York is now an established standard modus operandi by the hierarchy of the Church of England. Conveniently, the NST – bizarrely referred to as “experts” in one CofE statement – were on hand to provide the customary whitewash for inaction.
We need to remind ourselves that the NST staff have no independent external professional regulatory body overseeing their work. So “experts” is a self-aggrandising label coined by the Church of England. The whitewash they duly supplied is only available to the upper echelons of the church. It justifies nothing being done.
Ordinary run-of-the-mill clergy would already be cast out into outer darkness were they facing similar allegations, or just the mere hint of them. Nobody in the Church of England hierarchy has managed to explain why the accused carried on working as normal whilst an alleged victim was effectively sidelined for over 500 days, unable to work.
The justice system in the Church of England provides endless exemptions for the favoured few whilst dishing out neglectful malfeasance for the vast majority of victims and the falsely accused. This is an uncaring and fundamentally dishonest institution. But Group Two rules the roost.
As for interim support for victims, it should be evident by now that the very existence of the abused is what shames the Church of England. So they must be denied and blanked, and then the problem needs to be reduced in scale and silenced. The noisier the abused become, the more they are ignored. But should they opt to be compliant, they will fare no better. The ‘system’ doesn’t want the abuse to be an issue, acknowledged or addressed.
So, any prospect of redress, reparation, justice and truth will always be suppressed. This is a standard dynamic in so-called ‘shame cultures’. It is validated by an unaccountable autocratic Church of England hierarchy that will perpetuate the abuses until such time as it has its hand forced. Here, episcopal oversight shifts into perpetual overlooking. The leadership only sees what it wants to see.
You have to feel for the women complaining in the Liverpool case – they could not know beforehand that the Church of England hierarchy aspires to model a wholly shame-free appearance, so all serious allegations must be deemed to be entirely false until they are known to be irrefutably true. Thus, the women must always be regarded as purveyors of doubtful testimony. (If you remember, it was like this at the first Easter, but I digress).
The lesson we could all learn from this sits uncomfortably before us. If a more junior clergpyperson complains about a more senior clergyperson, the hierarchy closes ranks. The exception to this rule will be if the hierarchy wish to depose the senior clergyperson. Thus, the proposals before General Synod to turn the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) into the Clergy Conduct Measure (CCM) will retain this same bias and power imbalance.
Curates bullied by Incumbents, Canons by Deans, or Sufragans by Diocesans – nothing will change. The church lawyers have again devised a system to protect those who are in positions of greater power and ensure that HR, conflicts of interest policies, data protection and fair access to legal support in employment are kept well away from the Church of England.
To be clear, the problem for the Archbishops’ Council and senior leaders is not the abuse, victims, or abusers. It is that people might know about it, and that causes them reputational harm, damages the leadership’s mystique, and undermines their sense of entitlement to obeisance. A system that ensures might is always right is therefore essential. The rest of the world may well speak of ‘trust and confidence’ being lost in the leadership, but the hierarchy regards such losses as mere collateral damage in preserving their powers and elite-aloof status theatrics.
Victims will not get justice and truth while these power-authority dynamics remain. Ever. Any interim support for victims —unlikely, anyway—will only be begrudging and piecemeal and will only be conceded in order to try and quell any media noise. The leadership will act to preserve itself and believes this to be its highest calling. Here, the conflation of the church, the leader and the identity of God are at their most dangerous.
No one in the leadership of the Church of England currently comprehends these dynamics. Even if there were such self-awareness, there would be no resolve or desire to address the issues. Only a Royal Commission and the urgent intervention by Parliament can cut through this debacle. This cannot come soon enough.
The Revd. Canon Professor Martyn Percy is the author of The Crisis of Global Anglicanism: Empire, Slavery and Revolt in the Church of England (Hurst Books, 2025). He is the Provost-Theologian for the Anglican Province of Hong Kong and teaches at the University of Saint Joseph, Macao. He is a Research Professor at the Institut für Christkatholische Theologie at the University of Bern and also serves as Canon Theologian in the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe.