Calming the waters
The C of E's new ABC makes her debut and sets out her stall, while the gay blessings saga comes to a bitter and frustrated end
Hello! This week’s newsletter is all about the Church of England’s synod (that’s its governing assembly for the uninitiated) in London this week. First we reflect on Sarah Mullally’s opening address and what it tells us — if anything — about what kind of archbishop she wants to be.
Then we get to the spiciest debate of the week: the formal end of the Living in Love and Faith project — or is it actually just another beginning?
We touch on yet another new model for outsourcing church safeguarding to an independent body, and there’s also another few rounds in the ring between those for and against using some of the C of E’s assets to make recompense for historic links to the slave trade.
Finally, there’s our latest podcast, exploring a landmark social media addiction trial underway in the United States, and whether Christians should be leaping on this bandwagon to try and tame big tech firms supposedly harming our children.
Unfortunately, the same factors which made meant this newsletter is arriving later than usual also mean I haven’t had time to add the normal links to interesting church news stories around the web - sorry! Usual service will resume not next week, when I am away, but the week after.
Calming the waters
Until we got to the gay blessings finale on Thursday (don’t worry, we’ll get into that later on), the main news interest in this week’s meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod was the appearance of Sarah Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury, becoming the first ever woman to give a presidential address.
This address is typically theology-forward rather than policy-heavy, and has previously been used by either Justin Welby or Stephen Cottrell (the Archbishop of York) to try and zoom out from the hustle and bustle of synodical business and frame the gatherings with some blue sky Christian thinking. In other words, they’re rarely newsworthy speeches.
But even by this standard, Mullally’s presidential address on Tuesday morning was spectacularly vanilla from a journalistic perspective. I really felt for the dozen or so reporters and broadcasters who had gathered at Church House in Westminster to observe this historic occasion, and then had to call up their news desks and explain what the top line was. Even I, as I tried to write up her address for the Church Times, sat somewhat befuddled for several minutes trying to come up with a headline to pull out from the thousands of words she had said without actually seeming to say anything at all. I joked to one of the religion correspondents sitting next to me to get ready for six more years of this: bone dry speeches with all the news expertly filleted off in advance.
In the end I landed on the themes of service and stability. Several times Mullally said she understood her role as the new ABC to be about quietly enabling others while unshowily holding things together. Her job was not to “develop new programmes and initiatives” (in what some are interpreting as a veiled swipe at her predecessor Welby, who loved starting new things) but to instead simply be a “shepherd” who worked in partnership with others.
There were some flashes of humour, including when she rattled off the daunting list of expectations she was given at her confirmation of election service last month:
“I was also told during that charge that I am expected to be an evangelist, a pastor, a prayerful, penitent and resilient disciple, and a teacher. I am also to be faithful, prophetic, a sign of unity, trust and accountability and provide Christ-centred moral leadership, loving the church in all its breadth and diversity, and encouraging others to love her. I was told to work collegially and enable the gifts of others to flourish.”
“Well — I’ll try!” she concluded, to ripples of laughter across the chamber. At heart, she saw this new role as rooted in her original calling to “know Christ and to make him known”:
“My Christian vocation first led me to become a nurse – then later a priest, then a bishop, and now an archbishop. The theme that has run through of all those chapters of my life has been washing feet, and serving and caring for others.”
The rest of the speech was essentially an immaculately controlled piece of institutional hedging. Yes, there were serious challenges facing the Church, Mullally said, saying all the right things about safeguarding and trust and scrutiny, as well as global instability and social injustice closer to home. But, there were also “green shoots of hope”, and she firmly believed “the best is yet to come” for the church. She name-checked parish ministry, chaplaincies, cathedrals and schools. She was careful to thank Cottrell for holding the fort during the long Canterbury interregnum. She was even more careful to butter up the ever self-important synod itself, and assure members they would have a truly vital role to play. She mentioned the Anglican Communion, she spoke about big churches and small churches, she thanked both the safeguarding professionals and the victims and survivors of abuse. She hailed both the breadth of traditions and diversity of worship within the C of E, and she praised unity. Let’s challenge each other, she said, but always with kindness.
Once you wade through this, what is left is what I think is genuinely how she understands her new role: to be a calm, steady, and unruffled presence at the centre of the bureaucracy, delivering ego-less consensual servant leadership. This is who she has always been. She will bring, in her own words, “calm, consistency and compassion”, as she shepherds the church through its many storms:
“When the wind and the waves are rocking the boat, I recognise my responsibility to focus on Christ, who calms the waters. I pray that I am able to approach this ministry with calm, consistency and compassion – as we seek to be what the church has for so long been: a stable presence in an unstable world.”
This is utterly consistent with who Sarah Mullally has always been, in every job she’s ever had (something that came out strongly while researching for the book chapter I’ve written about her life — which is out next week, more in the next Critical Friend). Whether this is what the C of E needs right now is another question.
The end of the line?
Other than Mullally, the most substantive debate came yesterday, when we embarked on one last marathon debate about gay relationships. Since February 2023 when the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF, services of blessing for same-sex couples) were first proposed, synod has spent something like 40 hours arguing about this. And so it was appropriate the final ever debate under the Living in Love and Faith (LLF) banner was another almost five-hour epic.
You can remind yourself what the bishops were proposing this time by re-reading this edition of the newsletter. In essence, it was the end of the LLF project, began some nine years ago after another contentious February synod vote in 2017. Before we got to the feisty and lengthy debate yesterday, the bishops delivered a presentation on Tuesday in which they tried to re-tell the story of LLF and explain again why they had concluded, with no small degree of reluctance, it had to come to an end.
The Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, who was spearheading this, was quite frank and even a little glum as he tried to sum things up. This wasn’t easy, there was stuff left unresolved on the table, and yes it was a bit dispiriting to look back and see how the church had embarked on this journey with optimism only to run into the sands of partial failure.
“There have been twists and turns and unexpected dips – I don’t think many of us would choose to do LLF this way, given our time again.”
But, but, but — it was not a total failure. He hailed the introduction of gay blessings as part of regular church services, which have been on offer to any parish which wants them since Christmas 2023. And, perhaps more nebulously, the church had learned stuff about itself, about how to have these difficult conversations more honestly and “undefended” across its disagreements. There was both “lamentation”, but also “realism”.
This spirit was supposed to mark the substantive debate on the bishops’ proposal which took place two days later. But rather than a pragmatic welcome of the inevitable if depressing end of LLF, most on the synod instead wanted to refight the same old battles. Actually, not even fighting battles — most of them wanted to argue about who had been hurt more by the way LLF had unfolded.
The liberals were, perhaps understandably, pretty bitter about things. They’d been marched up the hill, had huge long-awaited progressive reforms dangled in front of them, and then told actually, no, none of this is going to happen. What had come of the “radical new Christian inclusion” promised by the previous archbishops (both of whom are no longer in post and not around to defend themselves) back in 2017 which had triggered LLF in the first place?
Cottrell had tried to frame this as equitably as possible, but the liberals weren’t having it. “There is hurt on all sides, but the Bible tells us when one of us is hurting, we all hurt. Let us continue to reach out to one another and pray that the Holy Spirit will lead us in all truth,” Cottrell had said. Nope, said progressives — LGBT Christians remain excluded, gay vicars cannot marry their partners. That’s real hurt. The conservatives have just had their consciences troubled, or their theology challenged, that’s nothing like as bad. Reject this false equivalence, many stood up to argue.
And, so, in return we had scores of conservatives getting to their feet to insist that they really, really, were hurting. That LLF had been a deep wound to their souls and their integrity, that they felt misunderstood, falsely accused of bigotry and homophobia, denounced and rejected. They were still shocked and appalled to see their church so readily abandon its traditional and Biblical foundations. Especially for those gay conservatives who believe they are called to celibacy and uphold traditional doctrine on marriage and sex at great personal cost.
I don’t question that both liberals and conservatives have been bruised and scarred by the past nine years of LLF. If you held a gun to my head, then yes I think probably gay liberals have endured it the worst. But I’m not sure it really achieves much to try and figure out who has been wounded most grievously. It felt, at times, that was what the debate had degenerated to — who could secure the most unimpeachable victimhood, and then use that as a cudgel against the other faction.
Other liberals sought to pull the rug out from under the bishops’ feet, and effectively un-cancel LLF. For some this was about messaging: if you draw this season of listening and openness to a close, this will be heard as the C of E turning its back on LGBT Christians. For others they just wanted to re-open the debates the bishops have very much sought to turn the page on. So we had some amendments trying to resurrect standalone services, despite the bishops very clearly saying that these were not possible legally or theologically under the present synod arithmetic.
And then, in a sign of just how much the two sides often talk past each other, there were conservative efforts to properly kill off LLF. Because although the liberals are sad LLF is dead thanks to the bishops, the conservatives are sad LLF will never end, also thanks to the bishops. Part of the motion synod was debating was to endorse a new working group on relationships, sexuality and gender which was being established to continue these conversations. So conservatives feared LLF was ending in name only, and that exactly the same divisive and unorthodox (as they see it) debate would roll on under a new label.
So we had some amendments to scrap this working group, which failed, as well as others which tried to force the bishops to first conduct a review of how they had stuffed up LLF so badly before they began a new chapter. These were also voted down. There was quite a bit of honest reflection and even self-flagellation from some bishops, who were not afraid to admit they had made mistakes. But the vast majority also seemed to think that it was simply not credible to wrap up all discussion on sexuality and marriage now, even if LLF needed to stop.
One of the interesting side-arguments which unfolded was around the now infamous legal advice given to the House of Bishops over the PLF journey. It has been established via earlier questions and speeches by bishops, that the fundamental outlines of the legal position had not changed since 2017, when all this started. That is, the lawyers had told the bishops that some kind of gay blessings could impinge on the doctrine of marriage, and therefore needed full synodical authorisation under Canon B2 and couldn’t simply be introduced on the bishops’ say-so (much, much more on this in previous Critical Friends if you need it). Something similar was true for lifting the ban on gay vicars getting married.
So, the conservatives wanted to know, if the legal position was unchanged all this time, why did the bishops change their minds so many times about it? Why did they begin in 2023 saying that the whole package could be done by simply commending the PLF? Only to then backtrack and pursue a trial of the standalone services? Only to then scrap that and now conclude they will need full synodical authorisation even if only temporary?
Several bishops got up to insist that it was reductive to claim that they ‘ignored’ legal advice in 2023 only to later decide it was binding in 2025. Cottrell tried to argue that legal advice is just that, advice, but that deciding what to do in the light of it remained in the bishops’ hands, and there were multiple different responses which could have been made. I am sure it is too simplistic to believe that the House of Bishops simply stuck their fingers in their ears and pretended not to hear the lawyers back in 2023.
But I’m not convinced (while accepting I am not an ecclesiastical lawyer, nor was I in the room when these discussions happened) their denials quite stack up. Something did change over the last three years. They did unambiguously intend in January 2023 to implement all forms of gay blessings through commendation alone, when they had at that very moment legal advice which warned them that was at best risky and at worse flat out unlawful.
Back to yesterday’s debate: There were some more compelling contributions from conservatives who argued that given nothing had changed in the legal or theological advice, surely this new working group would run into the same barriers LLF had. Now, this is a little self-serving to be sure, but these speakers basically said starting a new round of debate on these issues which would also end in failure was cruel to liberals and LGBT people. Once again, the bishops risked raising hopes which would then only be dashed years later.
I have some sympathy with this point of view. I’ve been banging this drum for years now, but the fundamental hurdle which caused LLF to fizzle out so depressingly was the lack of a liberal two-thirds supermajority in all three houses of synod. That is why there cannot be standalone PLF, that is why the ban on gay vicars getting married cannot be lifted, that’s why we are piffling about with blessings rather than having the more substantive debate the liberals actually want: can we change doctrine so that gay marriage itself is permitted in church?
And so there is a lot of merit to the argument that starting a new working group to take forward these same debates about standalone blessings, gay marriage for vicars, or even gay marriage for all in church is foolish, or even cruel. Because there are no clever solutions just waiting to pop out if we knock heads together on yet another residential weekend. That working group will hit up against the same legal and theological barriers which LLF did.
But we are having new synod elections in September. So rather than kick off another round of work, not knowing if it can actually achieve anything, why not pause for six months and then see how things unfold when a new synod convenes in November for its first meeting? Why not then do some indicative non-binding votes to test how the factions and majorities have changed, and then decide if we want to spend another five years plugging away at this? How can we credibly set up a new working group until we know if the next synod will have the magical two-thirds majority needed to unlock all the things this last synod could not do?
Anyway, in the end all amendments — both those brought by conservatives, those by liberals, and even the sole amendment which had some cross-party backing — were defeated pretty comfortably. And so the vote came on the bishops’ original motion, and it also passed in all three houses quite easily. If you add it up, the final tally was 252 in favour and 132 against. There was no majority, not even a simple 50%+1, for either abandoning entirely the sexuality debate, nor for pressing the accelerator and moving faster in a liberal direction. And so we lapsed back to the bishops’ mushy middle ground compromise plan. Plus ca change.
My overarching reflections are that I’m not sure Cottrell was right when he argued that even though LLF had mostly failed it had helped the church do these conversations better. It’s undoubtedly positive that we get more honesty from the bishops about where they disagree, and it’s a huge win to have commitments from all sides to due process and following legal/theological advice. But judging by the speeches, I don’t get much sense that either liberals or conservatives have learned much.
We had the same low-quality argumentation, constant appeals to emotions, incoherent chains of reasoning, and endless shouting past each other, failing to grasp what the other side really believes and truly wants. Lots and lots of time spent trying to police your antagonists’ language and views, rather than respond to them in good faith. Far too few synod members are ready to move beyond their intractable theological differences, and begin having the next level conversation about what we do given our intractable theological differences. Far too many synod members simply want to return to the well of their incompatible readings of the Bible, and shout past each other again and again. None of this really bodes well for the new working group and a renewed effort to find unity in diversity, let alone a lasting settlement.
‘Not on my watch’
One of the very first flashpoints at synod concerned Project Spire. That’s the hyper-controversial plan by the Church Commissioners (who oversee the Church of England’s £11bn endowment fund) to set up a new investment fund with £100m to make recompense for their historic investments in slave trading companies (see a recent Critical Friend for more).
It wasn’t really on the agenda as such, but it came up nevertheless on Monday evening during question time. I’ve expressed my deep disillusionment with synod questions before, but it does sometimes produce something worth noting. The first 16 questions (which are sent in in advance by members of synod in writing) on the docket were all about Spire, and 15 of them were pretty hostile.
The project will require the Commissioners to set up a new charity and then transfer £100m of their funds to it, as they have been told by the Charity Commission that they cannot deliver on Spire’s aims under their existing charitable objects. Partly this is due to the fact that one strand of Spire will be using the returns on the £100m invested to make grants overseas, whereas the Church Commissioners for England (to give them their full title) are constrained to only making grants to, well, people in England.
But this fairly technical question around charity law and regulation was still getting folk hot under the collar, and there was a barrage of questions around how the Commissioners were going to set this new charity up (answer: they’re still working on it but getting close to making an application to the regulator).
The Bishop of Salisbury Stephen Lake, who sits on the Commissioners’ board, was the unlucky soul sent like Daniel into the lion’s den to answer questions. He set out his stall early on:
“The Commissioners remain committed to establishing a new charitable fund to be an agent of change focused on achieving healing, repair and justice for all. We are progressing this work in a responsible, lawful and diligent manner.”
But many synoders were unimpressed. Richard Brown, a lay member from the Diocese of Chelmsford, noted that there was an expressed hope to grow the Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice (the official name of Project Spire) from £100m to a billion. Given Lake had conceded that no other organisations had yet publicly pledged to contribute funds, would the Commissioners end up topping up the remaining £900m themselves, he asked the bishop.
The answer came back quickly: “Not on my watch.”
Other members probed at the fundamental basis of Project Spire, research commissioned by the Commissioners which concluded its predecessor fund in the 18th century had benefitted financially from investments in companies involved in slave trading. Had the Commissioners tendered for this research or utilised professional historians, several members wanted to know.
But Lake gave no ground, insisting the Commissioners believed they had “proven the case”, and urged those concerned about the project to engage with their research published online. “Inform yourselves”, he pleaded with the Synod, rather than simply uncritically swallowing what Spire’s partisan antagonists were filling up the Telegraph’s comment pages with (I’m paraphrasing here but that’s essentially what he meant).
You can understand the weariness that oozes off the hierarchy whenever they are forced to speak on this issue, because they have to spend so much time responding to either bad faith or just objectively wrong criticism. Some of that happened again, when Lake was quizzed by synod members convinced that inevitably the £100m for Spire will mean less money for parishes.
No, as has been explained literally countless times before, no reduction in the Commissioners’ spending on C of E ministry will happen. The £100m is not being taken from the billions set aside to spend on the church over the next three years, Lake said once more (incidentally, the Commissioners funding for ministry has almost doubled in the last ten years thanks to the success of their investments).
In fact, the vociferous opposition to Project Spire had grown so heavy that the Commissioners had had to put in place support to protect the “wellbeing” of their staff working on this, Lake added. The public debate (which has spilled over into parliament and the national media in recent months) and hostility from some had become “deeply personal”, he lamented.
It’s important to note that not everyone on Synod (or in the C of E) is hopping mad about Project Spire. We saw plenty of this during the question time, as a series of friendly supplementary questions also came in to Lake. Several people asked what they could do to push this work forward or better communicate the truth about Spire in their parishes. One sympathetic priest argued that “justice delayed was justice denied”, noting it was now more than two centuries since the slavery-tainted money became entangled in the church’s coffers. Lake kept pointing people to the FAQs on the Church Commissioners website, which seems a bit limp in the face of the co-ordinated national media and political campaign they are trying to face down.
Even if the Charity Commission does reject their application to start a new charity and transfer the £100m (as many on Synod are hoping/demanding happens), Lake said the Commissioners would not abandon their efforts entirely. “The reasons why we engage in Project Spire will not change,” he insisted. Ultimately, as a “responsible Christian investor” the church could not ignore its links with a “fundamental historic wrong” without torpedoing its “moral leadership in the present or the future”.
But if this is so, if the Commissioners are so utterly convinced of the moral urgency of this programme, surely they need to put some more communications firepower behind it? I’m not convinced a website FAQs, plus a twice-yearly Q&A session late one evening at Synod is quite enough. Lake did say his own diocesan press team were currently preparing some info for parishes to correct misapprehensions locally around Project Spire, but this should really be happening centrally (and ideally with something a bit punchier than another sheaf of technical documents).
Squaring the circle
If you attend enough synods you feel like you talk about the same four or five issues year after year. Exactly 12 months after we had a titanic debate about outsourcing the church’s safeguarding to a new external body, we basically did it all over again. You can refresh your memory here about last year’s debate, which was really interesting, but in the end synod voted for a half-way house solution.
They agreed to create two new external arms-length charities. One would be in charge of scrutinising safeguarding in the church, outside of the control or influence of the bishops. The other would absorb the National Safeguarding Team (NST, who handle the biggest and most complex safeguarding cases) and lead on creating guidance and policies. But, local diocesan and cathedral safeguarding teams would remain employed by the dioceses, while the church carried out more thinking into how and whether these teams could also in due course be spun out to join the NST in the independent organisation.
A year of work behind the scenes on implementing this later, and we were back talking about independent safeguarding once more. And there was now yet another model on the table, after tweaks from some outside experts. The main expert leading the church through this maze is a woman called Christine Ryan, who was a teacher, then school inspector, then chief inspector and ultimately chair of Ofsted, the schools regulator.
Her observation, she told synod, was that while she could tell the church was ready to change, it was not yet actually changing fast enough to satisfy the sceptical public and watching parliament. So she had reworked the proposals to try and simplify them, to streamline them so they could be delivered faster and more securely. The new idea is just one independent body, provisionally called the Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA). They would absorb the NST, do national casework and write policies. Rather than a second scrutiny body, there would be further layers of independence built into the ISA to try and reassure the sceptics the church really was no longer marking its own homework.
The ISA would have a board made up of a majority of non-church members, and its safeguarding operations would be led by a chief safeguarding officer who was not accountable to this board, but to another external regulatory body (which one is still tbc). The ISA would supervise from a distance local teams, but not go through the complicated legal palaver of taking on their employment (which is fraught with difficulty around retaining safeguarding responsibility with the trustees of each diocese, as required by charity law).
There would be a simplified and uniform complaints process across all 42 dioceses, if you feel that the local team (or indeed the national ISA) has not handled your allegation well. And if that does not resolve things, there will be a new national ombudsman service as a final court of appeal to complain to. Lots of the finer details remained to be worked out, but all this would begin to rebuild a healthier culture, Ryan told synod:
“My ask today is simple: endorse this direction of travel. The cost of delayed action will be measured in the harm that it enables.”
Joanne Grenfell, the church’s lead bishop for safeguarding, was candid that this was not the model she presented last year, nor was it the model synod ended up endorsing either. But she insisted that it was best to follow the advice of external safeguarding experts, and that Ryan’s plan would “square the circle” of retaining embedded safeguarding teams and culture, while creating enough separation to win back trust. And, critically, it would be simpler and faster to implement, with some elements of it not even requiring legislation through synod and coming into force later this year.
Most of the synod seemed fairly on board with this change in direction and backed Grenfell/Ryan’s new approach, including the Archbishop of Canterbury who said they seemed to have broken through what had seemed “intractable”. Others reiterated the urgency of this, echoing Ryan’s warnings that the watching world would not tolerate more dither or delay and noting that both parliament and the Charity Commission were increasingly frustrated at how long “fixing” safeguarding was taking.
But not everyone was content. One person complained about the idea of a non-church majority on the ISA’s board, and another tried to amend the motion to impose a hard deadline of July 2027 for concrete legislation implementing this to be brought back to synod. There was also a second amendment trying to revive the idea of moving local diocesan safeguarding teams into the ISA.
Grenfell managed to persuade synod to vote both of these down, arguing the first would impose needless inflexibility on the programme (which hoped to move faster than July 2027 anyway), and that the second would be a distraction from actually implementing this better model as soon as possible. In the end, the motion endorsing Ryan’s new approach was passed almost unanimously, 345-1.
The social media addiction trial: Can Christians use the courts to protect the vulnerable?
A landmark trial is beginning in Los Angeles, as a series of people, parents and schools sue major social media giants, accusing them of harming their teenage users through the platforms’ addictive design. While some governments (such as Australia with its ban on under-16s) are taking bold steps to regulate social media, in other places legal action seems the only plausible route. How should we think about these developments as believers? Is trying to shake down tech companies in court a wise way to protect vulnerable teenagers? Can we adopt a ‘harm-minimisation’ strategy or is a blanket ban the only ethical option? What does it look like to be salt and light and prophetically speak for the needy in our secular societies?
No time for any quickfire links today I’m afraid (the synod’s not even finished yet!), and there was also plenty to get our teeth into in future newsletters that I didn’t have time or space to include today. Thanks for reading, and to show your support please could you upgrade to a paid subscription for just £5 a month? Every paying subscriber really helps me to afford to put aside the hours needed to research and write The Critical Friend each week, and I’m very grateful to all of you: