I wasn’t going to write another blog this week, but the Holy Spirit intervened early this morning and I’ve learnt that the interventions of the Spirit are usually worth opening my consciousness to and worth taking seriously. The Spirit reminded me that with the Church of England finding itself in a crisis, there is need for movement, for A Movement to help it out of the state of crisis.
Whenever I write about the crisis that we are witnessing in the Church, a few people post comments telling me that parishes are in a healthy state despite the mess at the top. Indeed, one person today posted that “everything is all right in the parishes.” Does this mean that parish clergy are in a healthy, contented state and everything is feeling fine to them in their parish? Are clergy confident, content, at ease with their ministry and vocation? And what of the laity, the members of their congregations? Are they content with life and worship in their parish? If the answer to these questions is yes, what is the relationship between the people in parishes and their clergy and the hierarchy, their bishops and the dramas in the House of Bishops and what the General Synod is going to be occupied with next week? What of the reality of the crisis in the Church that is receiving so much public attention? One person commented: “It is very hard to be a parish priest at the moment, trying to faithfully serve while having no faith in the hierarchy of the Church of England.”
It has been a week when the lead story on Channel 4 News on Tuesday and subsequent evenings about accusations against the bishop of Liverpool has dominated, to the exclusion of almost everything else. I looked more carefully at the report of the House of Bishops meeting held on 20 January 2025 and the General Synod Agenda and Papers issued on 23 January 2025. The HoB meeting was concerned with two things – Living in Love and Faith and the Makin Review including the Clergy Conduct Measure and the National Safeguarding Team process. Well over 50% of the time allocated on the General Synod agenda is given to debates, motions and legislation relating to LLF and Safeguarding. These concerns dominate, and in both, progress is slow and inadequate.
Against this background, writing about the future and a new vision pursued by a new movement in the Church of England feels almost futile. Comments on Thinking Anglicans are dominated by references to LLF and Safeguarding to the almost total exclusion of a future vision.
The Vision and Strategy document
The Church of England has a vision and strategy document for the church in the 2020s. It will be a “Church for the whole nation which is Jesus Christ centred. It will be a church that is that is simpler, humbler, bolder”. The strategy has three priorities: To become a church of missionary disciples; To be a church where mixed ecology is the norm; To be a church that is younger and more diverse. This vision and strategy with three priorities selects churches that are assessed as being capable of fulfilling these priorities (Or so it seems to me. I’m making this up as I go along in the absence of information on the CofE website). Planting new churches and resourcing successful hub churches will reverse decline and achieve growth. Ambitious targets have been set. The project is almost entirely in the hands of the HTB/Resource/CEEC enterprises. If you are a rural church or a struggling inner city parish or an average congregation, you are not eligible (hence the Save the Parish movement).
A Christian Essence
In my 90 minutes of silence this morning the Holy Spirit manifested with a question: What about the essence of a Jesus-centred Church, the Christian essence that infuses the Church, Jesus’ transformational message and energy, life in all its fulness, justice for the poor, that all are equally invited and welcomed and unconditionally loved in the Kingdom of God? What happened to all that stuff? If you read the Gospels, this Jesus teaching comes across as pretty fundamental.
Nah, that’s not what we’re able to focus on, say the leaders and institutions of the Church of England. We’ve got other priorities now – vision and strategy is so last year. This year we are addicted to safeguarding, the failure to deal with abuse and our inability to make progress with men having sex with men and wanting to get married so they can do it legitimately as Christians. (Oh, think the bishops – is that really why we’re investing all this time and all these resources in the LLF process and PLF?)
Where are we now?
So the bishops find themselves dealing with repeated crises. They are almost addicted to creating repeated crises over safeguarding and the Living in Love and Faith process. I notice that certain bishops and a certain archbishop are under pressure - ++York, +Oxford, +Lincoln, to name just three. +Dover and +Stepney (Joanne Grenfell, lead bishop for safeguarding, in case you wondered) both gave distressingly inadequate, incompetent interviews on C4 News this week.
We need a new Archbishop of Canterbury, someone who is competent, open, articulate, has a healthy vision and an understanding of the dynamics that are creating chaos in the Church. I am unable to identify a single candidate in the current House of Bishops. The Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, has displayed some of the necessary gifts, the only bishop to question the bullying, manipulative behaviour of Archbishops, the only bishop to call for +Canterbury’s resignation. She is unafraid, speaks with directness and clarity, is open and engaged, but on the downside has both ardent advocates and opponents. +London does her best but it’s not quite enough – not enough courage, ultimately.
Any sign of a competent candidate?
If there is a competent bishop in the House with the abilities and qualities necessary to deal with the crisis essential to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, able to steer the Church of England out of the mess it is in, ready to begin laying the foundations for a healthier Church, that person, male or female, has at present managed to keep their timely gifts totally hidden.
A game-changing intervention?
I’m told there are a couple of potential game-changing interventions that might change the future trajectory. There’s the possibility that a priest with a licence might go ahead and marry his partner, challenging his bishop to sack him and face the consequences. Another possibility is that a cathedral dean might choose to do the same, marrying his partner and challenging his bishop with the same conundrum at an even higher level.
And here I am, about to post another blog dealing with the Church of England in crisis when I really want to be writing about the far more critical existential crisis going on in the Church of England of which this week’s events are but one element. There needs to be a far, far more radical transformation of the life and culture of the Church. The House of Bishops and the LLF groups are tinkering around with desperate attempts to hold the show together and prevent those unable to live with variety in God’s creation to walk off into a self-protective exclusion zone.
I don’t know whether I believe in the God believed in with so much insecure ardent addiction by self-styled orthodox, traditional, faithful to the institution Christians with their versions of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Bible. God has never been adequately represented by or contained by what goes on in and is approved by the institution. God knows how I ever got ordained. The same way as Don Cupitt, I suppose, and all the other visionary renegades. Achieving clarity about the basics isn’t easy. They are not part of the Church of England’s current vision and strategy. The basics for me are:
Jesus’ proclamation that he has come that we may have life in all its fulness and the seamless life energy that infuses all of creation with goodness, love, wisdom, compassion and a passion for justice.
There are already signs of movement in this direction as things fall apart in the institutional Church. The energies of God are always active, in movement around us and within us, a thread running through all of creation, through the universe, the cosmos, disturbing, energising, inspiring, enlivening and enlightening.