Independent-ish
Synod gets stuck in factionalism, but stumbles into a reasonable compromise on safeguarding reform - and in between manages to unban gluten-free Communion wafers
Hello! This week’s Critical Friend is all about the General Synod of the Church of England, of which I was privileged/doomed to attend this week.
Read on to find out how the synod got stuck into safeguarding reform but did not go quite far enough for some survivors. Then, the synod banned before speedily un-banning gluten-free Communion wafers in church. Next, read about how we are finally getting round to asking the real questions about the Prayers of Love and Faith. And at the end, how we allowed factionalism to torpedo a probably quite necessary conversation on how we can appoint new bishops at a time of bitter division.
There’s also a link to my latest podcast: Should Christians fear our new social media overlords in the age of Trump?
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Independent-ish
The big news from this week’s Church of England synod meeting was undoubtedly Tuesday’s at times spicy debate on safeguarding independence. We’ve discussed this before in the newsletter, but as a brief recap - synod members were basically choosing from two different options, confusingly named Model 3 and Model 4 (Models 1 and 2 had already been junked by the working group).
Model 3 would involve setting up a new independent organisation to run national safeguarding investigations, absorbing all the staff from the C of E’s National Safeguarding Team (NST). It would be entirely outside the control of the hierarchy and bishops, but the church would be obliged to do what it said.
Model 4 is the same, except that all local diocesan safeguarding officers (there is at least one and often more in each of the 42 dioceses) and cathedral safeguarding teams would also be transferred into the independent body, and employed and managed externally from their dioceses/cathedrals.
(In both models there is a second external organisation also set up, which does scrutiny of safeguarding work and resolves complaints - it is pretty uncontroversial as everyone agrees it’s a good idea.)
This project of outsourcing safeguarding began over 18 months ago after the spectacular implosion of the church’s Independent Safeguarding Board, an earlier catastrophically failed attempt at independent scrutiny (you can refresh your memory on this episode with my podcast here).
So it’s really a massive slice of luck for the C of E that after months of bruising and relentless headlines about its safeguarding failures (Makin, Smyth, Welby, Cottrell, Tudor, Perumbalath and just last week Fletcher) it just happened to have a synod convening this week to vote for a radical overhaul on safeguarding.
But while these plans were not in response to the current crisis, it obviously hung over the debate like a dark cloud. As the discussion got underway, there was a definite theme between the speeches. Those arguing for Model 3 largely talked about technical issues, and in particular the legal and regulatory challenges the more sweeping Model 4 would throw up.
There are apparently 85 different employers of local safeguarding officers at present, so it would be a mammoth task to wind up all of those and transfer their staff onto new contracts with this new, as yet non-existent, independent body. Most of these professionals have come out in opposition to Model 4, arguing in reality there is no conflict of interest and they feel free to criticise the hierarchy despite being employed by the bishops.
And there were also worries about legal requirements - dioceses and cathedrals are registered charities and cannot abdicate their safeguarding responsibilities according to the Charity Commission. So, yes, they might be able to outsource work to the new independent body and commission it to do safeguarding on their behalf. But they had to retain ultimate responsibility and that may mean having the ability to end their contract with the independent body and commission someone else if they felt its performance was lacking. But that would not be possible under Model 4, as the body will be permanently enshrined in canon law.
When you heard speakers in favour of Model 4, the tone was very different. They tended not to dwell on the boring technicalities and charity regulation. Instead they spoke, often passionately, about the crisis of confidence in the church. They spoke of the demands for action from survivors (most of whom, but not all, seem to back Model 4). To pick the less radical Model 3 would be to spit in their face, some suggested, and prove the church was still trying to protect itself rather than do the right thing.
The irony, it seemed to me as I watched on from the press gallery, was that it was actually the Model 4 faction which was most focused on protecting the church’s reputation. There was almost two parallel debates happening simultaneously. If you thought we were having a conversation about the best way to structure operational safeguarding in a federalised and decentralised church, you leaned towards Model 3. This is, after all, the option favoured by the professional safeguarding teams (largely former police officers, social workers, lawyers etc) who do the work day in, day out.
But if you thought we were having a different conversation, if you thought we were primarily talking about how to rebuild trust in the church after its months of crisis, you leaned towards Model 4. If you thought the most important thing about the new system the synod was choosing was that it could restore confidence, you obviously wanted Model 4, the most independence on offer. The fact it might be more complicated to deliver, more expensive, more untried (no comparable organisation has ever entirely outsourced all its safeguarding to a statutory body in this way, so the church is blazing a trail here) - that is secondary to the fact that Model 4 would look to the outside world and the survivors like a church determined to start afresh.
The Bishop of Leicester Martyn Snow made this point quite explicitly in his speech. He had arrived at synod intending to vote for Model 3, after chatting with his diocesan safeguarding team, but had now changed his mind. He said he was less concerned with the technical details than about the culture in the church. Bishops ultimately were called to be “shepherds, not managers”, and Model 4 would best drive through a reset of a broken culture and restore trust.
And, I kind of get it. The church obviously is in a crisis and it is vital that people come to believe it is getting its house in order. There may be very minimal evidence that bishops ever do lean on their safeguarding officers to protect dodgy vicars or their incompetent fellow bishops, but the perception exists nevertheless. Perceived conflicts of interests and corruption can be just as corrosive as actual conflicts of interest and corruption.
Without restoring trust in church safeguarding, people cannot be safe because without confidence nobody will feel able to make reports and disclosures. But, at the same time, it did seem slightly unfortunate that so many synod members appeared to be choosing between Models 3 and 4 not based on which was best at protecting people, but based on which looked best to the outside, fairly ill-informed, watching world.
In the middle of the debate an amendment in favour of Model 3 came to a vote and was fairly comfortably defeated. At this point, the Model 4 side must have thought their ultimate victory was a fait accompli. But they hadn’t reckoned with the Bishop of Blackburn Philip North.
North then launched his own amendment, which could perhaps be summarised as Model 3.5. It would endorse implementing Model 3 straight away, along with an aspiration to figure out how to move to Model 4 at some point down the line, provided all the legal hurdles can be ironed out.
Given the synod seemed to have a pro-Model 4 majority, you’d imagine this would get short shrift, as it was pretty obviously a second bite of the apple at the just-rejected Model 3. But no. North very cleverly pitched his amendment as a middle ground, a “third way” between the black and white of Model 3 vs Model 4. A way to skirt around the binary winner-takes-all approach of the debate so far. It would secure immediate deliverable improvements through Model 3, and then give the Church the chance to move further if Model 4 could be made workable.
I was watching on in awe really as the whip-smart North appeared to be out-maneouvering the mass of synod members. Joanne Grenfell, the lead bishop for safeguarding, tried to forestall his amendment, arguing his two-stage process would create more delay and bureaucratic clunkiness. But when his Model 3.5 came to the vote it remarkably passed quite comfortably, 243 to 165. Given you could fairly summarise his approach as “Model 3 and then maybe some time in the future we’ll get round to Model 4, perhaps”, it was striking it passed so easily when straight Model 3 didn’t even get close to a majority.
North was under no illusions how his cunning ploy would be perceived beyond the chamber, and even in his speech proposing it stressed he was not trying to kick Model 4 into the long grass. Instead, he argued the worst outcome would be for the C of E to swing behind Model 4 only to later discover the various worries about it could not be overcome, and then be left with no independence at all and the unsatisfactory status quo.
At an impromptu press conference after the debate, he told journalists:
“What would have been irresponsible would be to vote for something we could not implement and then have to come back to synod to apologise. That would have been a disaster.”
But when we tried to press him on whether his objections to Model 4 could ever be overcome and what the odds were we ever got round to implementing it, North effortlessly dodged the questions. He instead made a compelling case that this was not a rebuke to the survivors or a sign the church had learned nothing from its recent travails, but an unambiguously “good news story”:
“It shows a Church that is repentant, that wants to change, and is moving ahead as fast as feasible towards greater independence of safeguarding.”
It probably won’t shock you to learn this valiant effort to spin the outcome did not convince many beyond the synod walls. Grenfell was quite blunt about her disappointment that the synod hadn’t gone for her preference, full-fat Model 4, saying afterwards the church had missed an opportunity “to send a message to victims and survivors that we hear their concerns about trust and confidence”.
And those victims and survivors, who were brought up endlessly in the debate by the Model 4 side, were not best pleased, as this Church Times summary of reaction to the vote shows. “Devastated”, a “punch to the gut”, “we feel betrayed”, “we do not trust you”. Here’s more of a flavour from one survivor who is also a priest, on Twitter.
The headlines were also, predictably if a little unfairly, pretty negative. The BBC went with ‘Church of England rejects fully independent safeguarding’, while the Telegraph had ‘Church of England accused of ‘punch in gut’ by abuse victims’ and the Guardian had ‘C of E votes against full independence for safeguarding against expert advice’.
Where do I stand? I think on balance I would have gone with Model 3, and the North Model 3.5 plan is a decent effort to try and split the difference. I can see the attractions of a having all safeguarding work, local and national, done by a single independent body to ensure simplicity and consistency. But it’s hard to overlook the fact the actual experts, contra the Guardian, generally think Model 4 is an overly ambitious and untested experiment, that may not even be legally viable.
In serendipitous timing, a safeguarding audit of ten dioceses and nine cathedrals by an outside consultancy reported back on Monday. And these independent experts concluded safeguarding should continue to be delivered internally not externally:
“When it comes to delivering effective safeguarding practice — practice that genuinely works and makes a difference — it is most effectively delivered from within, not imposed from without.”
Again and again, advocates for Model 4 kept saying in the debate that the church should just do what the survivors were asking of it and go for full independence, no questions asked. But does it really make sense to simply outsource the church’s thinking to the survivors (and, in reality, their loud and often self-appointed advocates)?
This is for understandable reasons not a position anyone wanted to air on the floor of synod, but survivors of abuse are not necessarily experts here. Of course the voices and perspectives of survivors are incredibly valuable and important, and any new system the church builds must include survivors at every stage. But, to be blunt, being a victim of an abusive priest does not grant you any special insight into how to construct a robust and effective safeguarding operation.
Yes, it is a bit of a PR disaster, but I think in the end we want the synod to do what is right, not what will play best on tomorrow’s Channel 4 News bulletin. And, if we get Model 3 up and running (itself a mammoth undertaking which will probably take at least two or three years, if not more), we can always return to Model 4 down the line if we really think it adds value.
But if you held a gun to my head, I don’t think we’ll ever go there. The diocesan safeguarding officers don’t want it, it will be super expensive and legally complicated, and once things calm down (assuming they ever do!) will it make sense to re-open this perilous can of worms? I would not be surprised if moving to Model 4 full independence becomes a vague aspiration, a fig leaf akin to our ecumenical ambitions.
Of course, we are working towards full, organic, visible unity with the Roman Catholic Church. That’s the headline goal. But does anyone working on ecumenism in the real world actually expect this to happen in the next 50-100 years? No. Similarly, perhaps we will end up in a place where, of course, we are working towards full-fat Model 4 independence, one day, hopefully. Just, not yet.
Multiple things can be true at once
A brief additional reflection on safeguarding at synod. The day before the big debate on independence and reform, there was a smaller item reflecting on the Makin report into the John Smyth scandal. The actual debate was not particularly noteworthy, but before people started pontificating there was an electrifying moment at the start.
The deputy bishop for safeguarding Julie Conalty read aloud statements from four anonymous victims of Smyth. The silence as these messages were taken in was total. You couldn’t fail to be gripped as Conalty spoke. It was a powerful way to begin the debate, dragging everyone’s focus back to the people who really matter - the men whose lives were ruined by their dreadful ordeals in Smyth’s shed.
But what was especially helpful was how the four survivors had such radically different perspectives. It drummed home something we all know in theory and sometimes pay lip service to in debates, but rarely properly grapple with - survivors are not a monolith. They are as varied as any other group of people in the church. They think differently. They want different things.
The first survivor Conalty spoke for was angry, accusing the synod members of being in part “complicit” in failing victims “so catastrophically” in the eight years since the Smyth story broke. In what was presumably a reference to the upcoming debate on safeguarding independence, their statement ended with a warning: “We have been failed by so many, do not fail us again.”
But the second survivor had a different take. He said he “unreservedly forgave” anyone who knew something about Smyth but did not tell the authorities. “I accept there are other matters to be considered in the daily life of the clergy and that at times something like this can be overlooked.” But it seemed to him some people had been actively lying about their role in the story. Anyone who had consciously sought to protect the church’s reputation from the scandal had to now “come forward and explain themselves”, they added. “If the Church of England does not show moral leadership then she will die.”
The third survivor was different again. They turned their fire on Keith Makin himself, arguing he had throughout his report prioritised the perspectives of only some of the survivors and not others, favouring those who were the most “vociferous and litigious”. He forcefully disputed Makin’s conclusion that Smyth’s abuse was an open secret in conservative evangelical circles, and said many in that constituency were now being “vilified” as if they knew the whole story, whereas than in reality they only had a small piece of the jigsaw puzzle. Strikingly, the survivor said many of those who had chosen not to speak out still appreciated the efforts of Mark Ruston and other Iwerne leaders in the 1980s who tried to protect their anonymity by effectively covering up the abuse.
The fourth survivor was equally angry, but over very different things again. They castigated the entire current C of E hierarchy, the National Safeguarding Team and others for their failure in “trauma-informed” engagement with survivors. Astonishingly, this person said the treatment of survivors in the last few years has often been worse than the original abuse meted out by Smyth in the 1970s and 80s.
There isn’t really anywhere to go with this, except to say it is a fascinating snapshot of what four of the more than 130 Smyth victims think. I don’t doubt that there are another 126 very different perspectives if we asked the others too. Survivors are not a monolith. People, even those with very similar public school conservative evangelical backgrounds, respond to the same kind of abuse in very different ways.
Nobody should be allowed to get away with saying ‘the survivors want this’ or ‘the survivors say that’. Which survivors? If you’ve heard the perspective of one survivor… you’ve heard the perspective of one survivor. Sometimes the church has fallen into the trap of seeing survivors as a kind of talisman, or a token. You have to get one or two of these magical specimens onto your committees and working groups, but then you’re sorted because they’re all basically interchangeable and the same.
But we cannot treat survivors like this. To seriously attend to their views requires deep consultation, lengthy conversations with dozens of people. And just as we cannot distil their views down to just one take, neither should we try to determine which of them are right and which are wrong necessarily.
Multiple things can be true all at once. Safeguarding in the church is objectively a thousand times better than it was in Smyth’s time, and we have not got it all right and it must still improve. The Iwerne leaders who uncovered Smyth’s beatings in 1982 were genuinely trying to protect the victims from further embarrassment, and they were also covering up the scandal to preserve the church’s reputation. The bishops and officials of the national church are increasingly well trained in trauma and safeguarding, and they inevitably have made mistakes and upset survivors in their interactions. Safeguarding issues always resist the reductive narratives many in the church (and especially in the media) try to force them into.
Multiple things can be true at once, and until the church and synod accept this difficult truth I’m not sure how much progress we can make.
Tithing our dill
This is all feeling pretty heavy, so let’s lighten the mood with a classic bit of synod silly season. Every time a session of the synod approaches, someone at the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph goes digging through the question section of the documents published in advance to gin up a nonsense story.
Questions at synod are a bit like questions in parliament - any member can in writing ask something factual of the national church and they get a response published in the synod papers (and at some point on the agenda an opportunity to ask follow-up questions too).
The question time part of the synod itself is a tedious bore. Most questions are either highly technical to and fros about stuff only an ecclesiastical ultra-nerd could possibly care about. Or they amount to shadow-boxing on the church’s over-debated culture war fights, where activists on the synod ask the same question ten different ways to try and trip up the increasingly exasperated bishop answering and force him or her into accidentally saying something contentious.
But for the mildly unscrupulous journalist looking to drum up a story before the debates begin, the question section can be a goldmine. Hence we got the story ‘Church of England rules non-alcoholic wine and gluten-free bread cannot be used in Holy Communion services’.
This derived from a question which asked the Liturgical Commission (the church body which unsurprisingly is in charge of liturgy) whether the rules on wine and bread in Communion could be changed so that alcoholics/teetotallers and coeliacs who cannot consume alcohol or gluten could be included in the sacrament. The answer was basically, to do so would require rewriting the canon law of the C of E, and that not receiving one or both elements of Communion is not that big a deal anyway.
But this written response, in the name of the Bishop of Lichfield Michael Ipgrave who chairs the Liturgical Commission, was a little cursory and basically presumed it would only be read by those who are already familiar with the nuances of the church’s position on bread and wine. It did not spell out with absolute clarity what was meant/understood by the phrases ‘alcohol-free’ and ‘gluten-free’, and so gave a opportunity for headlines like ‘Church of England refuses call for gluten-free wafers and non-alcoholic wine’. Ironically, the first I heard of this mini-row was when a BBC radio producer rang me up on Monday morning to ask if I could come on to talk through this story about “the Church of England banning gluten-free wafers at Communion”.
Which is confusing, because the Church of England quite quickly put out a statement entitled ‘No, we're not banning ‘gluten-free’ bread or ‘non-alcoholic’ Communion wine’. As a long-time connoisseur of church press releases, this heading is unusually catty/weary (delete as applicable) for the otherwise quite formal church comms team. The situation was doubly confusing because I’m pretty sure every Anglican church I’ve ever been to has offered non-alcoholic wine (and increasingly gluten-free wafers too). Now, it’s not impossible that they were all doing this in flagrant breach of the rules - it wouldn’t be the first time. But it is odd.
So what is going on? The upshot is that the church’s big liturgical brains have studied the wording of the canon law sections on bread and wine, and concluded it means only bread with wheat in it and wine with alcohol in it is legitimate. But, but, but! You can meet this requirement with any amount of wheat and any volume of alcohol. So wafers can, and in fact are, produced for use by churches which have tiny traces of wheat in them to satisfy the canonical requirements, but these traces are so small that they can legally be classified as gluten free and don’t cause harm to coeliacs. Likewise, you can make wine from fermented grapes and then remove almost all the alcohol, leaving only a fraction of a percent left. It’s de facto alcohol-free, but technically has some, meaning it still counts as wine as the church’s canons define it.
This is how so many churches have long squared the circle, Bishop Ipgrave explained apologetically to the synod during the question time session (he did, to be fair, also concede he had cocked up his original written response and opened the door to confusion). To coin a phrase, multiple things can be true at once. You can really have a gluten-free wafer that also has some gluten in it still.
This is actually a well-established legal principle. The definition of ‘gluten-free’ is not ‘chemically proven to have not even one molecule of wheat in it’ but anything which has less than 20 parts per million of gluten in it. Or in everyday terms, something can be 0.0019% gluten and be legally labelled as gluten-free. When it comes to alcohol it’s a higher bar - you can be legally considered alcohol-free as long as a drink is less than 0.05% alcohol.
Now from a legal and medical point of view, this is fine. Tests have shown that, for instance, coeliacs won’t get sick from consuming such tiny trace amounts of gluten. But spiritually speaking, doesn’t this start to veer towards having your cake and eating it? Is the C of E Liturgical Commission not guilty of some pretty pharisaical logic here?
If we truly believe there is spiritual and theological significance to bread being made of wheat and wine being fermented grape juice in Communion (about which I have my own doubts, but let’s leave that for another day), can this be satisfied by only 0.0019% of the wafer being made of wheat?! Is God so easily tricked? I could have sworn Jesus had something to say about super religious folk who were careful to tithe even their mint, dill and cumin, while missing the point of God’s commands to be generous…
Putting the cart before the horses
The Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF, the blessings for gay couples in church) have dominated most synod meetings in the past two years but were very much sidelined this week. As mentioned before, this is because the bishops have not got anything concrete to vote on this time round. Indeed, the Bishop of Leicester Martyn Snow, who leads the PLF project, warned synod he couldn’t even promise when exactly things would be ready for a final debate and vote - it might not even be ready for February next year.
So instead we had a very brief update and some Q&A for less than an hour on Thursday morning. The questions aren’t really worth dwelling on here, as they were little more than the usual figures airing their usual arguments (thinly veiled as questions). But what is worth mentioning briefly is why the PLF were such a non-event this synod.
As another bishop, the Bishop in Europe Robert Innes, explained, there’s nothing yet to vote on because the theologians are still hard at work trying to answer the questions posed to them by Snow and his team. Innes leads the Faith and Order Commission (FAOC), which is the C of E’s theological advisory committee.
Innes explained that contrary to what some would assume, the 470-page Living in Love and Faith book which paved the way for the PLF - published in 2021 and the fruit of four years of work by the church - did not actually address any of the quite obvious and pressing theological questions the church needed answering.
So, it was only last year that Snow and the House of Bishops formally asked FAOC if they could put their heads together and think about some staggeringly basic questions: What is the church’s doctrine on marriage? Can this doctrine change or develop over time? Can same-sex marriage be included within the church’s doctrine, or is it at odds with it? Is there a difference between Holy Matrimony in church and civil marriage in a town hall? Will servings of blessing for gay couples contradict the church’s teaching on marriage? Can gay vicars marry without breaching their obligations to live out the church’s doctrine? Can bishops disagree with each other and still collectively uphold the church’s teaching? What canon laws would need to change, if any, to implement gay blessings?
This work was, unsurprisingly, not something that could be rushed, Innes explained, hence the delay to the timetable in resolving the final three elements of the PLF package (standalone services, provision for conservatives and the question of gay vicars getting married).
Now, on one level it is of course right to hold fire and see what the church’s big theological brains think before we draw up massive policy change and put it to the vote. It is to Snow’s huge credit that ever since he took over the PLF brief last year he has been ready to slow the train down in order to properly think through all the implications of where we are going. This has obviously infuriated most of the liberals, who thought they’d already won the day in 2023’s crunch synod votes and are incredulous that they are still waiting for the full implementation of these reforms. But Snow has mostly held firm and said, we’ll get there when we get there, better to go slow and get it right then go fast and end up a cul-de-sac.
But when you step back, it’s hard not to see this as a damning indictment of the whole process. How can we only now, in 2025, be starting to properly dive into these critical theological questions? The LLF process began in February 2017, a full eight years ago. It’s frankly absurd that it’s taken this long for someone in authority to realise that having answers to these theological questions was necessary.
The PLF have been done backwards, in truth. The bishops decided first what they wanted to do - introduce gay blessings but not change marriage doctrine - and only belatedly realised they should probably also look into whether this was theologically coherent. Any sensible good faith process would do it in reverse: ask your probing theological questions, build a clear foundation of what we think, and only then do we start working on a practical policy to implement.
This is why so many of the conservatives have lost any faith in the bishops over the past few years. It’s so blindingly obvious things have been done backwards, that the difficult theological questions have not been asked or explored, that most conclude it was not cock-up but conspiracy. That the bishops didn’t simply forget to check in with FAOC whether their generational flagship reform was theologically sound, they deliberately chose not to ask questions they worried they wouldn’t like the answers of.
But if that is the case, and the hierarchy wilfully refused to undergird their headlong rush to the PLF with any theological study, it has failed. Not only was it duplicitous, it was also counter-productive. Because the bishops haven’t yet managed to land the prize, they are now having to do the difficult theological work anyway, and in the meantime they have alienated most of the synod and the wider church. The PLF are only half-done with no end in sight, the conservatives distrust if not despise them for playing such cynical games, while the liberals feel betrayed and abandoned. Slow hand clap all round.
Proxy wars
The last really meaningful debate at synod came yesterday, when we got stuck into the Crown Nominations Commission. The CNC is the committee which convenes to choose new bishops, and is made up of the two archbishops, six locally elected members from the diocese which needs a bishop, and six centrally elected members from the synod itself.
It’s historically been pretty uncontentious, but since the PLF erupted it’s become another crucible of the culture war over sexuality and gay blessings. I won’t rehash the full details (read these previous Critical Friends for all the back story) but after two CNCs deadlocked and couldn’t agree on a candidate, rumours began to fly that a conservative minority from the central elected members were ganging up to veto pro-PLF people from becoming bishops.
Then, further controversy emerged just in the past month following the Bishop of Liverpool safeguarding scandal. After John Perumbalath was forced to resign (just two years after he’d been appointed), a ‘whistleblower’ who sat on his CNC in 2022 claimed the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell and the Bishop of Oxford had bullied the committee into appointing Perumbalath against other members’ misgivings over his safeguarding performance. Cottrell and Stephen Croft, the Bishop of Oxford, both strongly deny this.
Yesterday, the Bishop of London Sarah Mullally brought to the floor of the synod a package of reforms on behalf of the House of Bishops to try and break through the deadlock and make the CNC work again. There were four planks to this:
Not counting abstentions. CNC rules state a candidate needs a two-thirds majority to win. There are 14 members, so this means you need ten votes. But it’s a two-thirds majority of all members, not just those who actually vote. So if, for instance, two members abstained on a vote, you would still need ten votes to win, not two-thirds of the 12 who voted (i.e. eight). Effectively, an abstention counts as a vote against. Mullally suggested the two-thirds threshold should be of votes cast, not of members in the room.
Lowering the threshold. Mullally’s proposals would reduce the threshold for victory from two-thirds to 60%. In real terms, you would only need nine votes out of 14 to win, not ten.
Giving the archbishop an extra vote. If a CNC cannot agree on a candidate and keeps falling short of the ten (or nine if amended) votes to win, the archbishop who chairs the committee gets to cast a second vote to try and push one side over the line.
Scrapping secret ballots. The CNC’s deliberations are strictly confidential, but how each member votes during its meeting is also hidden from the other members. Mullally proposed voting in the room by a show of hands instead.
Somewhat to my surprise, this quite technical bit of standing orders revision turned into a really heated and intense debate, which dragged on for over three hours. Because while there was lots of genuine disagreement over the best way to organise an appointments committee, it was at heart another proxy battle for bigger currents underway in the C of E.
The contours of the debate in general were pretty clear (and mirrored the disputes we saw within the House of Bishops when they first discussed these proposals last year internally). On the whole, pro-PLF synod members were in favour of the changes, while anti-PLF types were against. If you were a liberal you tended to see these as small-scale sensible tweaks to make it easier for CNCs to come to a decision and prevent minority groups from abusing the procedure. If you were a conservative you tended to see a malign conspiracy by the hierarchy to stick their thumb on the scales and execute a naked power grab against the clergy and laity.
There was criticism of the “audacity” of the bishops in trying to push through CNC changes in the middle of a crisis of confidence in their leadership: “Is this how trust is restored?!” Even some evangelical bishops, such as the Bishop of Guildford Andrew Watson, criticised the plans for moving power away from ordinary church members and towards the archbishops.
The most electrifying speech came from a vicar called Esther Prior (who has ironically just been named as the incoming Bishop of Aston, although that role is not appointed via the CNC). Prior, visibly angry, railed against the changes which she said made her “furious”. More than that, she said she was “triggered” by them, as they took her back to the trauma of growing up in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe where “we created a dictatorship, standing order by standing order”. “Do not let this stand, synod,” she concluded. Her speech was followed by thunderous applause which went on so long that the chair had to ring his bell to try and restore order.
There were a handful of more liberal-minded voices also opposing the changes, but the battle-lines were drawn pretty clearly. One liberal kind of gave the game away when in her speech she argued that female and pro-PLF candidates were being blocked by conservatives on the CNC, utterly undermining Mullally’s insistence that this was not about partisan infighting to get more of our preferred people appointed, but about creating a better discernment process.
This suggestion, which has repeated so often in recent months it has been accepted as truism by many despite almost no evidence, was strongly denied by one other CNC member, Paul Benfield. Benfield said it was no secret he, as a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic, did not agree with women bishops and indeed would not receive Communion from one. But it was an outrageous slur to imply this meant he would automatically veto any female candidate who came before the CNC, noting two recent CNCs he sat on had indeed appointed women.
How can we be considering giving more power to the archbishops at a time when nobody trusts them, was a common refrain. One evangelical who had been on a CNC openly said she had been “belittled and patronised” by Cottrell (who was sitting just a few metres away listening to this speech) as he pressured her to vote in a certain way.
One other evangelical CNC member, a London vicar called Lis Goddard, proposed her own amendment to Mullally’s plans as a compromise solution. This would keep the threshold at two-thirds, unless after several rounds of voting the CNC could still not decided between the last two names on its shortlist. Then, the threshold could be lowered to 60%, but with the caveat a majority of both the local members and the central members had to vote for the winning candidate.
This pretty sensible idea didn’t really go anywhere, partly because people thought it was needlessly complicated, but really because Goddard, although clearly a fan of women bishops, is also an anti-PLF evangelical. And so the pro-PLF bloc in the synod lined up against her proposals, just in the same way the anti-PLF bloc trooped through the metaphorical lobbies (they actually vote in their seats via little handsets) every time to prevent anything proposed by their factional opponents.
And so in the end, basically nothing of substance passed. All four elements of Mullally’s plan were kiboshed by the synod, one by one. When it came to the idea of giving the archbishop a double vote, the Archbishop of York stood up to say even he would vote against this and, even if it was passed, he would refuse to use his double vote in any future CNC. By the end you almost felt sorry for Mullally, who sat on the podium tight-lipped and looking grim as her carefully constructed package of reforms was ripped to shreds, often by her own episcopal colleagues.
But while the three hours of arguing did not produce any changes to the CNC, it did make clear just how deep the factional dysfunction in the C of E goes. Mistrust is rife on all sides. Some evangelicals even began offering up slightly wild conspiracy theories, accusing the bishops of having secret plans to later increase the numbers on the CNC to further dilute the conservative vote. Both sides repeatedly exploited a procedural loophole by calling for a vote by houses to try and make it even harder for the other side to win their amendments.
I think it was a bit naive to try and ram through changes to the CNC which did unquestionably shift power to the bishops at a time when their role is under question like never before. Much like the similar synod rule when it comes to passing major changes to doctrine, the two-thirds supermajority rule on the CNC is in place for a good reason. We want bishops to command the respect of a large swathe of the church, not be foisted on the embittered minority by the majority. The CNC was very intentionally set up so that no single church faction can impose their will on anyone else, but is forced to build coalitions and make compromises. Undoing any of this, even in the face of deadlocked CNCs which leave vacancies open for years, does not seem wise.
But one element of Mullally’s package did have merit: scrapping the secret ballot. For one, this was first recommended by an earlier in-depth theological review of the CNC by the (evangelical and highly respected) theologian Oliver O’Donovan a few years ago. But it also seems bizarre to me that we let the 14 members hide from each other how they are voting. How can you as a de facto interview panel have a proper and thorough debate if nobody knows how anyone else is voting?
A telling moment came when one synod member recalled their own CNC experience. It was striking, they said, how the votes very often bore no resemblance to the discussion beforehand. When talking over a particular candidate members had seemed strongly in favour of them, only for the secret ballot to reveal that candidate had almost no support. This was why the secret ballot was so needed, to prevent the unspoken expectation to conform.
No! He got it entirely the wrong way round. It’s ridiculous that the votes do not resemble the conversation beforehand. If we scrapped the secret ballot, people would have to honestly account for how they are voting, and wide gulfs between how they speak about a candidate and how they vote for them would disappear. This would force real honesty and therefore more meaningful debate. This is also, incidentally, how almost any other interview panel process in the secular world works. Voting by an open show of hands would make every CNC member accountable to each other for how they voted, and therefore stop the duplicitous games of pretending you’re into a candidate when you really have no intention of ever appointing them.
Cottrell and Croft interestingly used the existence of the secret ballot to defend themselves against the accusation they bullied other members during the Liverpool CNC that appointed Perumbalath. How can we have pressured people to change their votes when by definition we did not know how they’d voted?
Several synod members made this point in defending the secret ballot too, but Mullally attacked this argument well. Of course there are unhealthy power plays at work in the CNC, she said - she’d seen them herself. But the secret ballot should not be used as a shield against these, that would amount to colluding with the dysfunction and accepting it as inevitable. Instead, if we vote by a show of hands we can no longer ignore it if/when CNC members try to throw their weight around and bully others - we have to address it and fix it.
But, in the end the endless proxy wars won out. The secret ballot was retained and Mullally’s proposal defeated by a combination of anti-PLF conservatives and anti-hierarchy laity and vicars. The merits of any particular reform always come second to whether we think it might hurt or help our own tribe’s interests.
Should we fear our new social media overlords in the age of Trump?
Elon Musk, the mercurial billionaire who owns Twitter, is increasingly wielding his enormous political power via his social media network, interfering in politics in America and far beyond. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Facebook, has tried to align his business with the new regime in Washington by abolishing fact-checking. Should we be alarmed at where social media is going in the 2020s, with populist right-wing movements leveraging their online influence in very real offline consequences? Can Christians continue to use their platforms, or should we join the progressive exodus to alternative sites? And how can we work out who to trust and where to get our news from in this confusing post-truth, post-legacy media world?
I’m afraid that’s all for this week - I’ve not had time in between all the synod stuff to do our usual list of quickfire links to interesting church news stories, but will promise a bumper crop of them next week to make up for it.
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