How Justin Welby hollowed out the Church Tradition has been tossed aside

“Take the purchase of a former Chinese takeaway in Manchester,” comments a priest in the city. “At least £7 million was spent on this venture. Several clergy and a youth worker were recruited. Yet it was only a few minutes’ walk from the 12th century parish church, where the incumbent would have given an arm and a leg for investment on that scale.” This example is not seen as untypical. Another source told me an unnerving story about St George’s, Portsmouth, a more or less viable church that was taken over by HTB when a problem arose with the city centre premises the church-planters had originally rented. “The congregation were told that they could keep their Sunday-morning parish eucharist for year one. But it was made clear that after that, drumkits and a big screen would take the place of the altar.”

Save the Parish campaigners judge that current forms of church reorganisation are highly damaging. Its mission is to reverse what it describes as the accelerating process of “church closures, parish amalgamations, clergy reductions, increasing parish shares, expanding bureaucracy, mindless central initiatives and general bad governance that are strangling mission at the grassroots level”. Other clerics, while sympathetic to Save the Parish, nevertheless question the value of binary solutions. One of my friends recently spent a year helping out at a cluster of rural parishes in East Anglia. “Many of the churches concerned are on their last legs,” she told me. “Even if it were possible to provide more clergy — and that would be a big ask — it’s not clear what kinds of strategy could simply rebuild traditional Anglican worship from the ground up, except in certain places.”

A priest of great experience close to retirement, she makes several other germane points. One is that church-planting and initiatives such as “Messy Church” — informal worship in café-style conditions — have kept people who might otherwise have fallen away, and drawn in others who might never have attended worship in the first place. Another is that diocesan projects are usually bottom-up processes. The Church Commissioners’ interest is piqued by attractive-sounding proposals. It is no surprise to learn that Evangelical parishes have in the main been quicker off the mark with their funding applications. An archdeacon who himself has a high-church background expressed the matter in salty terms: “Whenever I find that Anglo-Catholics get money, they tend to buy a new set of vestments, but Evangelicals employ a youth worker.” He insisted that, on the whole, “Evangelicals have been more strategic, better organised, more able to exploit contemporary culture — perhaps for obvious reasons — in ways that mean they have a bigger footprint among student populations in particular.”

Another cleric in northern England expressed a less nostalgic view: “Fortunately, we are not polarised between slick HTB plants on the one hand — which may be culturally appropriate in parts of west London but can lack self-awareness about how they appear elsewhere — and Save the Parish on the other, which can become a little like nostalgia.” He has retired with his wife to live a mile or so from the parish church and “the parish priest is never seen on the estate and no one from this estate is a regular worshipper there. Where parish priests have responsibilities beyond the luxury (found in London but not far beyond) of a single parish, the fiction of universal cure of souls within the parish becomes even more ridiculously hard to maintain.”

There was greater agreement among those with different outlooks on the thinning out of theological education in the contemporary Church of England. A major chapter of the recent past has been the rise of St Mellitus College, co-founded in 2007 by the then Bishop of London, Richard Chartres. In the view of some, however, the college is a victim of its own success. Having become a franchise with outposts across the country, it now offers non-residential (and thus much cheaper) training to about a quarter of all ordinands. ( It is also worth noting the high number of candidates for ministry in the C of E: 591 priests were ordained in 2020, almost 15 times the number of new Catholic priests in the whole of Germany.) The current Dean of St Mellitus, Russell Winfield, has emphasised the priority given to academic rigour. But I also heard private complaints that elsewhere in the country students are not learning biblical languages or receiving a solid grounding in theology.

Concerns about a sparse intellectual diet are repeated by critics of the Church’s current leadership. “I regularly encounter bishops with very little theological scholarship or depth,” comments a priest who has served as an episcopal adviser. “This poses enormous problems. There is now not a single diocesan bishop who has taught theology at university level.” His charge in essence is that the “Go for growth” cast of mind much evident under Welby has promoted assumptions that the show should be run by successful middle managers who have demonstrated that they can boost congregations. The shift underlying this change is influenced by changes to vacancy-in-see committees, now usually dominated by local voices. These representatives are likely to say that appointing a theologian could be a good thing in theory, but the best candidate for preferment to the bench is a parish priest.

My friend from East Anglia was gloomy: “We face a really unfortunate mix. Shrinking organisations have very few options. The choice on my own patch is stark. Do we strip the countryside of resources because there are very few people who go to church there, and favour the city, where lots more people attend church? Or do we strip the city of its resources to better prop up the countryside, where churches are in such obvious decline? There are very few good options.” And, she adds, “the dilemma is replicated across the Church of England in so many different contexts”.

Add to all this negative publicity about safeguarding — along with endless debate on sexuality — and it is easy to sound dispirited. But that verdict strikes me as over-hasty. On child protection, the Church is not different in kind from secular settings such as sport and education, where many outrages also took place in less transparent times. Everyone I spoke to while researching this subject insisted that the welfare of minors is now taken with utmost seriousness by British and Irish Anglicans. Meanwhile, sexuality remains a hot topic because it dovetails with wider teaching on biblical authority and the limits of diversity. In response to Living in Love and Faith, a long-awaited report, the Bishops have presented the General Synod with prayers for blessing same-sex unions, a move against which conservatives are fighting hard. Parishes and deaneries across the land remain divided for the same reason as the Catholic Church is split; it is too soon to tell whether a question that has already polarised the Anglican Communion will trigger a formal schism in the Church of England, or (more likely, perhaps) a peeling away of traditionalists to other Christian folds, as happened with the ordination of women. What seems certain is that Anglicans face biting headwinds ahead.

Does all this tell in favour of disestablishment? Not necessarily. Jonathan Chaplin, author of Beyond Establishment opposes the notion of a state Church on the grounds that it generates “conflicting and inevitably compromising expectations”. He adds that disestablishment ought to be accompanied by the shaping of a positive vision of how the state should engage with religious bodies generally. This would contrast with French-style laïcité, in which the state supervises a thoroughly secularised public realm, where religious identity is largely invisible, and religious voices silenced.

But Chaplin also has the grace to acknowledge the extent of support for the status quo in other faith communities. Tariq Modood, the Muslim political scientist, speaks for many in holding that the vestigial nature of Anglican establishment expresses a recognition of religion’s public character. It is thus less intimidating to minority faiths than a triumphant secularism. (I have regularly heard Hindu, Jewish and Muslim friends express gratitude for the way bishops in the House of Lords speak up for faith in general, rather than just their own version of it.)

At another level — earthier and for that reason all the more compelling — stands the novelist Anne Atkins’s defence of the status quo. Having lived in a number of inner-city vicarages for many years, she has seen lives turned round seven days a week “because we are the Established and official Church of the nation”. When you’re at the end of your rope, she adds, you hold fast to what you recognise. “Far fewer strangers would have rung on our… door — desperate, lost, poor, cold, or without a passport — if we’d been non-denominational, however much purer in heart and freer of fault we might have been.”

Atkins’s comment points to a reality insufficiently acknowledged by secularists and believers alike. The Churches — and Christian endeavour generally — form the largest source of social capital on earth. That will remain true, whatever the scale of institutional failings or the wrongs committed by individual believers.