The Church at a Crossroads?

In my ‘day job’, I have the huge privilege (and pleasure) of working with senior leaders, lay and ordained, across the Anglican Communion, and of learning something of the challenges that face the member churches of our wider Fellowship.

These really are hugely varied: In some cases it is working with communities under regular threat from natural disasters during the hurricane season in the Caribbean or being subject to multiple typhoons in the Philippines. In these cases, houses and schools and livelihoods have to be rebuilt from scratch – and bishops and other leaders have a crucial role to play in encouraging communities in the ways of hope and resilience, in addition to galvanising practical support, locally and internationally.

In other churches, especially in much of Asia, Christians are often in a small minority and from marginalised ethnic groups or castes, and face active discrimination or persecution.

Then there are the ongoing ‘business as usual’ challenges of working within corrupt political and unstable economic conditions which make clergy stipends or housing or pensions (along with those of the majority of the congregations they serve) precarious – or in some cases, non-existent. And I haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of the challenges posed by war or chronic violence; of what it means to ‘be Church’ in the Congo, Myanmar, South Sudan or Gaza.

Everyday basic realities are rarely examined. They just are. But they too can create significant pressures. Some flow from geography: Leading a diocese that may take a couple of days to travel across (rather than an hour or two) – problems familiar to those in Brazil or Botswana or Madagascar. Others from issues of communication and mutual intelligibility. Polyglotism is the norm not the exception: Most churches serve multiple language groups and some operate with liturgies in a range of official languages: The Prayer book of Southern Africa is currently printed in nine languages. In South India, there are four main languages in addition to English (Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada), however the number of languages spoken across the region is in the hundreds.

This is just a quick snapshot of what bishops have to navigate – alongside the internal politics and tensions of the institutional and communal dimensions of ecclesial life. And of course, it is the latter which (almost) always generates the most disturbing challenges for any church.

The Church of England at the national level is very obviously in need of systemic change. That has been true for quite a while. And it is within this frame that we should approach the oft-repeated statement about the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘it’s too big a job for any one person’. Clearly the issue isn’t one of scale (see under ‘the Pope’). There are clearly powerful arguments for separating the Archbishop of Canterbury’s responsibilities to the Church of England from the Communion-wide role – though I’m not completely convinced that this is where the real issue lies.

Over the last seven years I have attended provincial synods across the Communion in wonderfully diverse contexts. I have enjoyed learning something of the different ecclesial politics in operation, not least of how primates and bishops are elected, or exercise authority within different churches – sometimes with great sophistication and wisdom. Inevitably, those conversations involve the articulation of broader cultural and political considerations within which episcopal authority is exercised.

Unsurprisingly, I am often drawn into conversations where I am asked to explain or interpret one church to another – rarely in terms of the formalities (canon law, etc) but rather – what really happens and why. And within all of this – the Church of England is a complete outlier. Nothing can illustrate this more clearly than the task of trying to explain to fellow Anglicans – many in countries which were formally part of the British Empire – why the committee responsible for appointing the next Archbishop of Canterbury is chaired by the former head of the State’s domestic intelligence service, MI5. To many, where a primate is simply elected by his or her fellow bishops, such deep entanglement with the State is incomprehensible, frankly ‘lost’ – without trace – ‘in translation’.

The challenge for the Church of England at the national level is not one of strategy, but of organizational culture – or rather cultures. When looked at from outside the UK this seems obvious. The Church of England’s organisational culture is too dependent on, and derivative of, institutions that form an integral part of the British State: Our Synod has shrined ‘a quasi-parliamentary form of institutionalised conflict’ with Church House an attempt at a centralised civil service for an organisation with 42 semi-autonomous regions each with its own county leader, aka Diocesan bishops. If you also throw into the mix an archiepiscopal court across the river – need more be said?

When any organisation faces a serious, even existential, crisis it has to have the humility to ask fundamental questions and to look beyond itself for models and examples. Not simply to copy or import them (the wholesale importation of ideas or practices really doesn’t work) but to ‘think with’. We are part of a global communion, so if, in the Church of England, we are serious about reviewing and refreshing the culture at the heart of our national church, we may need to overcome that characteristic British myopia and look beyond La Manche at our sisters and brothers and how they organise their lives together as Christians – in most cases with significantly less resource that we are privileged (and burdened) to carry. The humility and courage to walk this road may be one of the most important qualities in a new Archbishop.