Wednesday, September 26, 2012

The last thing the Church of England needs is a pleasant middle manager (Comment)

The successor to Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury will have an almost impossible jobWho would you like to be your next Archbishop of Canterbury?

You may think this an odd way to put it. 

You may be Muslim, Jewish, Roman Catholic, atheist, or just vague. 

How can the Archbishop of Canterbury belong to you?

Yet if you live in England, he does. 

The Church of England is “by law established”, and so it is there for any citizen who wants it. 

The Queen is the Church’s Supreme Governor, and her people, regardless of what they believe, are its people. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury, who stands at the Church’s head, must serve them. He belongs to them.

But we shall not choose him. 

This process is nowadays controlled by something referred to, with varying degrees of affection, as the Wash House. 

The Wash House is the old laundry of Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop’s London residence, and it is now inhabited by the Crown Nominations Committee (CNC). If it has dirty linen, it does not wash it in public: next week, the CNC will meet at a secret location to consider its shortlist and try to come up with two names – the first being its choice, the second being its “appointable candidate” if things go wrong – for who, at the end of this year, should succeed Rowan Williams and become the 105th man (the law still requires it be a man) to sit on the throne of St Augustine.

It is a 21st-century piety that politicians must have nothing to do with the government of the Church. When Gordon Brown became prime minister in 2007, one of his first acts was to declare that he would no longer be involved in the appointment of bishops. He got rid of the post of Downing Street patronage secretary and handed the whole thing over to the Church.

Far from being the piece of modernising openness Mr Brown claimed, this was what economists call “producer capture”. It meant that the Church, while retaining all the privileges of Establishment, could choose whomever it wanted and impose him, almost without challenge, upon the nation. It was like a privatisation, but one in which the public had no opportunity to become shareholders.
It does not work because, despite Mr Brown, the choice of bishops and archbishops still depends on the Queen. Constitutionally, she acts only on the advice of the prime minister. 

The Archbishop of Canterbury is a major and unique national appointment, so the prime minister certainly should advise her according to his sense of the national interest. 

But thanks to the “agreed convention” of Mr Brown, David Cameron has scarcely any power to do so. Downing Street has become little more than the Church’s forwarding address for Buckingham Palace.

This is dear old England, of course, and so the people who compose the Wash House team are as clean a set of ecclesiastical launderers as you could want, ably chaired by the fair-minded former Tory minister and Lord Chamberlain, Lord Luce. 

The 16 selecting members are clergy and laity of impeccable decency and exhaustingly full synodical experience. 

But the natural danger is that they will choose someone who is amenable to the bureaucracy they represent. No fewer than six of them come from the Diocese of Canterbury, though the Kentish bit of the Archbishop’s job is now largely delegated to the Bishop of Dover. For all the talk of “transparency”, their selection process faces firmly inward.

Even its details, which mimic secular recruitment, make it difficult for the right person to be chosen. No good Christian, after all, is supposed to seek power (“Let the cup pass from me”), so the sort of chap who is happy to rustle up the references now demanded, submit the CV and personal statement (does it begin “I want to run the Church of England because…”?) and endure the innovation of interviews is, almost by definition, the wrong man. Expect the winner to be a pleasant middle manager, liberal in his theological and political views, happy to climb on the carousel of consultation. The obvious choice in this style is Graham James, Bishop of Norwich. 

But if there is any point in an established Church of England, it must be as part of the culture, not a sub-culture of its own. For peculiar historical reasons, the Archbishop of Canterbury is in a unique position to help bring God to the people of England, and to do so in a way which is not oppressive and fanatical, but benign and inclusive. 

Despite the weakness of organised religion today, the media have actually made this role even more important than in the past. Once upon a time, the clergy in general performed it. 

Today, a great deal rides on one man.

That one man will find himself, to quote Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, a “sheep in the midst of wolves”, and will therefore have to “be… wise as serpents, and harmless as doves”.

Any candidate with that serpent-like wisdom would state at once that the job, as at present constituted, is impossible. As Dr Williams admitted in a recent interview with this newspaper, the combination of being national oracle, Establishment figure, ecumenical leader and interlocutor with other faiths, chairman of endless committees, and a sort of underpowered executive boss of the worldwide Anglican Communion cannot work.

The dreadful rows about homosexual clergy (small numbers of rich, liberal, mainly American whites infuriating much larger numbers of poor, conservative, mainly African blacks) cannot be solved by the Archbishop. He should be head of the Anglican Communion in the way that the Queen is head of the Commonwealth. He should be an honoured figurehead of unity, not a general without an army. Only the harmlessness of doves can work. He should swap being pseudo-papal for being spiritually pivotal.

The most important bit of the job to develop is that relationship – missionary, yet tolerant – with the people of England. 

In organisational terms, this means concentrating on reviving the parishes, not multiplying the committees. In terms of imaginative communication, it means trying to capture the spirit of William Blake’s famous poetical question (“And did those feet…?”), and his hope of an English Jerusalem.

No one, of course, can match this job description. 

But there are three candidates of real interest. 

The first is the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu. “Confused”, “maverick”, his opponents say. But when I hear this warm Ugandan disparaged as an African tribal chief, it strikes me that such qualities of leadership and theatre would be welcome.

The second, largely unknown because he is so new, is Justin Welby, the Bishop of Durham. He is praised for holiness, an ability to set an agenda and a readiness to fight. His is the freshest face.

The third is Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London. The media mostly missed him because he was, at first, on the selection committee, and therefore disqualified. In fact, however, he had to resign because of clashes of dates, so he is eligible. Supporters (including, it is said, Welby of Durham himself) are pushing him forward. Dr Chartres has a skilful way of defusing problems – look at how the St Paul’s protest melted away when he took charge. He has a deep institutional understanding and love of what the Church of England is. This gives him a lively, well-grounded hope of what it can be. 

We, the people, have no power over what comes out of the Wash House, so there is no point in seeking out a people’s candidate. 

But if the eventual choice does little for us, the flock, why should our nation continue to empower the shepherd?