Canterbury contenders

Who are the names in the hat to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury?

Hello! We’ve spent a lot of time in this newsletter digging into the gory details of how the Church of England is going about appointing its next Archbishop of Canterbury. Mostly, quite incompetently. But we haven’t dwelled as much on who is in the running to claim Lambeth Palace.

So I thought while I am on holiday and regular newsletter service is paused it might be fun to a do a comprehensive rundown of the names in the frame. Of course, the caveat here - as I always say - is that nobody really knows, and Crown Nominations Commissions (CNCs, the committee which appoints new bishops) often surprise us with who they land on.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t indulge in some extra-curricular speculation just for fun. So I’ve spent some time trying to whittle down the longlist. Technically anyone in Anglican holy orders (i.e. has been ordained by a bishop in communion with the C of E) is eligible, but realistically it’s going to be one of the 40-odd diocesan bishops we already have here in England. And, for reasons I will get into below, we can discount a chunk of those off the bat. It’s who is left who most interests us.

This piece is for paying subscribers only, but if you’re not yet signed up you can join that elite group of seasoned church-watchers for just £5 right here, right now:

The criteria

Before we get into the names, how do we draw the parameters? As I said above, technically any Anglican bishop is eligible. And it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the CNC looks beyond the borders of England, as in very recent memory we did indeed have an archbishop who came from elsewhere.

Justin Welby’s predecessor Rowan Williams was serving as the Archbishop of Wales when he was nominated as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury. But, my suspicion is they won’t go international again. Never before in modern times had the archbishop not come from England, and Williams was in many ways an exceptional case, after all.

He was British (obviously) and did all his theological training in England, before then working as a theologian at both Cambridge and Oxford universities. He then went back to Wales to serve as Bishop of Monmouth and later Archbishop of Wales, but it was only a short trip back across Offa’s Dyke when the call to Canterbury arrived. He was also widely regarded as one of the most brilliant theological minds of his generation who also had significant episcopal experience.

If there was a comparable bishop in Wales, Scotland or Ireland’s Anglican churches then perhaps they would be considered, but no-one comes to mind. And going even further afield (the Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba’s name has been floated) would be very unusual and utterly unprecedented. Given the position of the ABC in modern British life, bringing in someone with no experience living or working in England (let alone the C of E) would be bold, to say the least. So I think we can relatively safely restrict our longlist to serving English bishops.

We can then whittle this down further by age. I’ve looked back at all archbishops in the modern era going back to William Temple (who was the last to die in post in 1944) and the average age they were at appointment is 56. The only person to become ABC when they were already in their 60s was Donald Coggan, who was 65 in 1974. Even then his age was a talking point. Because clergy have to retire at 70, everyone knew he could only be a sort of caretaker leader. So I think any current bishop who is 60 or older can probably be ruled out (although it’s not impossible an exceptional candidate in their early 60s might be chosen if they could do maybe seven or eight years).

Looking at our list of post-war archbishops we can also see some interesting themes in what kind of career they’d had before entering Lambeth Palace. On average, they’d served 11 years as bishops (and very often had been theologians or college principals before becoming bishops too). Welby is the major outlier here, as he had only done four years as Dean of Liverpool Cathedral before a single year as Bishop of Durham before becoming archbishop.

It’s also fascinating to see in the historical list the principle of ‘thin pope, fat pope’ in play. This, you may recall, is the tradition borrowed from the Catholic Church that a pope or archbishop should represent the opposite kind of theology from their predecessor. Since Temple (who was a hard-to-place kind of liberal who doesn’t really fit into modern categories) the archbishops in order have been a broad evangelical, an Anglo-Catholic, an evangelical, a liberal Anglo-Catholic, a moderate evangelical, a liberal-ish Anglo-Catholic and a moderate charismatic evangelical (that’s Welby). There’s no guarantees of course, but it is likely the CNC may lean towards another more liberal-minded Anglo-Catholic name.

So, what do we have? Probably a liberal-ish Anglo-Catholic, almost certainly in their 50s and no older than 63, and probably with at least five or more years of episcopal experience under their belt (and being a theologian also doesn’t help, as this is the background of five of the eight modern ABCs). Given the current context the church finds itself in, it’s also very difficult to imagine someone openly opposed to the gay blessings being appointed, as this would throw the whole C of E into crisis and chaos from day one. Having worked so hard for so long to force the current version of the Prayers of Love and Faith (PLF) through, it seems inconceivable the church would choose a leader who wanted to scrap it all and start again. So I think we can also scratch off the list those bishops who have publicly come out against the Prayers of Love and Faith.

With these parameters in mind, we can work through the list of current bishops to find out who might be on the longlist.