Archbishop Justin Welby left office on January 6th after a decade of decline and turbulence in the Church of England and wider Anglican Communion. To fathom the future of succession for the global head of the Episcopal Church, a little bit of history might be instructive for the next occupant of Lambeth Palace.
One: Accidents Happen
In 1579 Sir Francis Drake reached San Francisco Bay, California— marking the first-ever Church of England service to be said in America. There is a memorial to that event, a simple Celtic cross, that few would recognize the significance of. The Anglican Communion—Church of England churches outside the British Isles—began by accident with shipwrecked sailors in Bermuda in 1609. Just as with St Paul’s detour to Malta (Acts 28), it was stormy seas and a shipwreck that led to Christianity reaching the island so early. Commercial trade in the Caribbean is how the Anglican Communion started, and what it is now becoming. That is to say, multiple dependencies and independent territories of various sizes, which may or may not relate to one another. Some are aligned to the British crown; others are republics; others still relate to their nearest continent—North or South America. Some churches fall under the US Episcopal Church, others in a regional federation, and others still relate directly to the Church of England. Different currencies, legal systems and cultures are the accepted norm. The Caribbean is a blueprint for what the Anglican Communion is rapidly evolving towards. The emerging Anglican federalism of the future will be looser, yet remain tribally interconnected.
Two: Protestant!
The actual theology of Anglicanism is Reformed and Protestant, not Catholic. It would be odd if that were not so, since this is what Anglicans have consistently claimed since the mid-sixteenth century. Formally, Anglicans believe that there are only two sacraments: baptism and eucharist. Ordination and marriage did not ‘make the cut’, so to speak. Anglicans do not need their marriages to be “annulled” by the church. Within reason, they can divorce and remarry, if they so wish. They do not need to seek the permission of Rome, or even their local bishop. Thus, when conservative Anglicans protest today about same-sex couples marrying as a “change to the doctrine of marriage”, they are reaching for a Roman Catholic doctrine, and not some Protestant view of marriage. Some Anglicans believe in ordination as a sacrament and as a matter of ontological change. However, most Anglicans do not share this view, and regard ordination as something more akin to the public authorisation of ministry. Until very recently, that was the standard Anglican theological understanding of ordained ministry.
Three: Trade Wars
Great Britain (or, rather, England), with its significant military and trading power, carried out unrivalled invasions and colonisation across the globe from the 16th century to the 20th century. Only 22 countries have not been invaded by the British: Andorra, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Guatemala, Ivory Coast, Kyrgyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mali, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Mongolia, Paraguay, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sweden, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Vatican City. Invading 171 out of 193 countries worldwide is no small feat. In contrast, the United States has only invaded 68 countries. The long-standing worldwide power of Great Britain explains how the Church of England became ‘universal’—through territorial conquest, commerce and colonisation. The Anglican Communion is one of English Protestant extensity, not some deep Catholic intensity shared worldwide. There is a world of difference between the two. The Anglican Communion essentially maps English colonial expansionism and many wars waged in the name of the British Empire.
Four: Unity Wasn’t Lost – It Was Never Found
The relatively recent adoption of four instruments of unity to enable the Anglican Communion to cohere—the Archbishop of Canterbury (recognised as primus inter pares), the Lambeth Conference (which first met in 1867), the Anglican Consultative Council (which first met in 1971) and the Meeting of the Primates (i.e., archbishops of other provinces, which first met in 1979)—are very late additions to the Anglican polity. Globally, there is no international judicial oversight, no shared canon law, and even the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith (dating from 1571) are not adopted by many of the 46 member churches. A number do not even refer to ‘Anglican’ as their denominational name. The attempts by global Anglicanism to express its purpose, unity, and identity have reached back to the strains and stresses experienced by early Communion from birth. The theological outlook of early Anglicans was essentially closer to Calvinism than Lutheranism, and the thirty-nine articles express that. It was only in the nineteenth century that Anglicans began to talk about themselves as some via media between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Five: Futurescape
The future, the age of crisis for the Anglican Communion and the Church of England, has yet to dawn. Looking ahead, 2034 marks the 500th anniversary of the Act of Supremacy (1534), in which Henry VIII formally and legally severed England’s links with Rome and established himself as Supreme Head of the English national church. For half a millennium, the Church of England has enjoyed its established status and claims to lead a vast global Communion. 2034 will also mark the 250th anniversary of Bishop Samuel Seabury’s consecration (1784) – the first bishop for American Episcopalians that the Church of England did not ratify. Yet few Anglicans in the global South will ever know or care about the English politics and foreign affairs that gave rise to the Anglican Communion.
Few will ever swear allegiance to some distant spiritual potentate residing in some ancient palace in Canterbury. Like his predecessors stretching back to the 16th century, Charles III promises to uphold “the Protestant faith of the Church of England.” He makes a different but similar promise in Scotland for the Scottish. Little of this concerns the rest of the Episcopal world. But without a monarch, empire or papal figure to keep everyone bound in unity, faith and order, or subjected to authority, it is hard to see what can keep Episcopalians together as a global entity. It is falling apart. Communions, like empires, end.
So, what sort of Anglican Church can the new Archbishop of Canterbury look forward to? True, it is diverse and vibrant; but also riven with schism and toxic debates that show no signs of being resolved. And the numbers are dwindling too.
The global estimate for Anglicanism is hyperinflated to around 80 million members. However, packed into that figure is a very generous estimate for the Church of England being able to claim 25 million members, though average Sunday attendance is now around 0.5 million. Church of England ordinations have declined by 38% during Welby’s tenure. A more realistic guesstimate for global Anglicanism is 50 million members
So, despite the English colonising one-third of the world, the statistics for Anglicanism within 21st-century Christianity offer a more sobering narrative. The Orthodox and the Pentecostal churches each account for around 300 million followers worldwide. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran and Reformed churches can make more reliable claims for followers (all have 50 million-plus) than those for global Anglicanism. Roman Catholicism can claim 1.5 billion followers. Anglicanism would be a relatively mid-sized middle-ranking denomination, if not for the military and trading history of entwinement with the British Empire.
Six: Sex Was Always on the Agenda
Regulative control of other people’s bodies, relationships, desires and passions consumed the episcopal mindset from the 19th century onwards. Homosexuality and gender are currently the main concerns and have preoccupied the Church of England’s agenda since the 1960s. It was not always so. As late as 1866, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York were supportive of the surgical procedure of clitoridectomy as a means of controlling ‘unruly female passions’. Likewise, many senior Anglican clergy and both archbishops openly endorsed tracts written on the evils and degeneration of masturbation well into the Edwardian period and beyond. (Sex is on the corporate brain, so to speak).
Seven: Class War
The Revd. Canon Dr. Sheridan Bailey, Secretary to the Church of England’s Moral and Social Welfare Council, noted with approval in an article in the 1959 Eugenics Review that many bishops regarded vasectomies as constituting a “major and irrevocable abdication of an important area of responsible freedom, a violation of the Body that is God’s gift and not ours to dispose of as we will and a step fraught with unknown physiological and psychological consequences that could only be countenanced as a helpful family planning device suited to poor and illiterate peoples.” So, more children for the middle- and upper-class British families was a good thing. But fewer children for everyone else was, likewise, equally desirable. The class war was an issue for the Church of England – and in the 19th and 20th century, that meant being against the profligate fecundity of the working class.
Eight: The Limits of Tolerance
In 1855, Bishop John Colenso published his Remarks on the Proper Treatment of Polygamy, in which, using his Old Testament scholarship and theological mind, he presented a cogent Christian-based case for the tolerance of polygamy. In his published commentary on Romans (1861), Colenso also questioned the doctrine of eternal damnation for non-believers. He pointedly refused to preach to the Zulu that their ancestors—who were not Christian—were to be unavoidably damned to hell. Colenso’s radical biblical scholarship, together with his no less radical conviction that Africans were not inferior to the white settlers and that all were equal, caused consternation and controversy in his day. Colenso’s critics refused to accept the possibility of biblical fallibility or that some parts of scripture should be read as analogy and not as history.
Nine: Contraception
What of Resolution 41 at the 1908 Lambeth Conference—the ‘artificial restriction of the family’? The 1908 gathering regarded artificial contraception as ‘demoralising to character’ and ‘hostile to national welfare’. It went further and decreed that artificial contraception was ‘repugnant to Christian morality’ and constituted the ‘deliberate tampering with nascent life’. Even with the trauma, social upheaval and diseases (especially venereal) that came in the aftermath of the Great War, the bishops approved Resolution 69 at the Lambeth Conference of 1920, which rejected the use of prophylactics, seeing them mainly as a means of increasing the potential for vice. By the time of the Lambeth Conference of 1958, and again in the aftermath of a major global war, the language of vice, restriction, control and censorship had shifted to that of ‘responsible parenthood’.
Ten: Polygamy
Suffice it to say, the polygamy controversy and disagreement were present from the outset at Lambeth Conferences. In 1888, the Archbishop of York and several other English bishops boycotted the event, as they felt it would increase confusion about ‘controversial issues’, thereby implying that the fact that there was any discussion at all on such matters signalled compromise. The Lambeth Conference of 1888 agreed that ‘the wives of polygamists could be admitted to baptism subject to local decision’, but not the male party, who could only receive ‘Christian instruction’. As late as the Lambeth Conference of 1920, these issues were called ‘missionary problems’. However, things had moved on by the time of the Lambeth Conference of 1958. Anglican bishops had twigged that there might be a socio-economic dynamic underpinning polygamy, which was ‘bound up with the limitations of opportunities for women in society’. At the 1968 Lambeth Conference, the clauses and resolutions on polygamy were dropped, following pressure from the African bishops, who had talked of the ‘great suffering’ caused by the ‘abrupt termination’ of polygamous marriages. The Lambeth Conference of 1988 finally resolved to welcome and receive ‘[any] polygamist who responds to the Gospel…[and wishes to be] baptised and confirmed with his believing wives and children’. Lambeth Conferences have steered clear of polygamy since then.
So, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” might epitomise Welby’s tenure as Archbishop. Currently, it is hard to see how any successor will manage any better.
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 teaches at the University of Bern, Switzerland and University of Saint Joseph, Macao. He is Canon Theologian to the European Convocation of Episcopal Churches.