As many readers will know, in the wake of the Makin Report concerning the Church of England’s handling of the horrific abuse by John Smyth, Justin Welby has now resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury. The resignation has come amidst mounting pressure from different wings of the church, including a growing online petition calling for Welby to step down. Welby insisted it was right to stand down now “in the best interests of the Church of England”. So, let me make four comments.
Why now?
My main observation is simply that I do not understand why this issue has suddenly come to a head for Justin Welby. Don’t mishear me here. I understand fully why people believe he ought to resign given what the Makin Report says and his culpability in the handling of matters. What I am surprised by is not that there were growing calls to resign, but that they have only come about as a result of this report.
Let me be as blunt as I can be: the report didn’t really say anything new to my knowledge. The heinous behaviour of John Smyth has been well known and well documented for some time. The Makin Report insistence that it is “very unlikely” that Welby knew absolutely nothing about it and had no inkling of Smyth’s behaviour – whilst recognising he may not have known the full extent of the matter – is similarly not really a new finding. The fact that the Church of England, under Welby’s watch, has botched the handling of the entire matter isn’t really new either. All of this is in the public domain and pretty well known. So, I’m unclear what the need was for a report telling us what even this nonconformist dissenting observer largely already knew nor why only now, in the wake of it, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been pushed to resign?
Wasted compromise
It also strikes me that the most recent little compromise from the Archbishop – delivered on The Rest is Politics podcast – as a sudden change of mind on the pressing cultural concern of the moment currently engulfing his church was entirely wasted. I say wasted not in any sense to condone compromise. Rather, if you are going to compromise – having at least attempted to tread a careful line seeking to hold everybody together but sound broadly like you still hold to orthodoxy – what a waste to finally affirm your compromise only to resign a few short weeks later. It seems to be the epitome of pointlessness.
One almost wonders if the Lord looked on at that and, to prove that such compromise is to put one’s trust in entirely the wrong place, he would allow it to play out as it has done to show the utter futility of doing so. It is a bit like (as we are reading in church at the moment) how the Judean remnant in Jeremiah’s day trusted in Egypt over God’s Word, so the Lord allowed them their folly of trusting the Egyptians and then sent the Babylonians to destroy their Egyptian protectors, along with the remnant themselves, to show the utter futility of putting their trust anywhere but in him. I don’t want to hold this reading of matters too tightly, it can be easy and yet seriously wrong to assume we know the mind of God by reading current events, but I do just wonder if the timing of all these things was a God-ordained means of showing the futility of such cultural and political compromises which the Church of England as a whole has been up to its neck in for well over a century.
Papering over cracks
I can understand liberals leaping on the report to oust the Archbishop. I was more surprised by the evangelicals, who initiated the petition calling for resignation, signing the petition too. That is neither because they view him as their benign, benevolent leader of the same evangelical mind (not many seem to do) nor because they viewed the cover-up as somehow appropriate (I don’t think many did either). I was surprised because some seemed to be of the belief that ridding themselves of Justin Welby would somehow mean things would get better from an evangelical point of view. It is hard not to view that as preposterously naïve and unwarrantedly optimistic, even as far as evangelical Anglicans go!
The majority view – leaving aside how credible such claims are in reality – is that Anglicanism has tried out a series of evangelical Archbishops of Canterbury and the experiment (as they judge it) has failed. For many, the time has come to move in a different direction. That would seem, if you are an evangelical, to mean a direction that is not going to be better. The best hope might be in a traditionalist high church direction, which whilst coming with its particular problems, aren’t the specific cultural ones current engulfing the church. A worse direction still may be a thoroughgoing liberal-revisionist one. The Archbishop of York, for example, may be an obvious step up. Another (in my view, potentially likely) move – given the principle was sold quite some time ago – would be to appoint one of the women bishops to the top job. That would be a stepping stone for the liberal-revisionists and would cement some of the hermeneutics that allowed for that move into the upper echelons of the church and allow them to trickle down to permit their application to other doctrinal and ecclesial areas that may allow for similar revisions.
What seems clear is that, whatever happens, it won’t be for the better from an evangelical point of view. Whatever one thinks of Justin Welby, it is hard to imagine he will be worse than what is most likely to come after him. The problems in the Church of England are far beyond laying at the feet of one man. I can’t help but sense evangelicals have joined forced with liberals to oust him not reckoning with the fact that the problems they face are so far beyond the removal of a single man.
Things can only get worse
Given all of that, it is almost impossible not to see the torrid time those wedded to the Church of England have faced is only going to get worse. It seems deeply unlikely that a better, more amenable Archbishop of Canterbury will be appointed. It seems deeply unlikely any of the bishops are liable to change course. The problems that existed under Justin Welby will not simply disappear with his removal; not least, he wasn’t the fundamental problem. He was, at best, a symptom of the problems. Failing to reckon with this reality means the Church of England is now set to only get worse for evangelicals.
As ever, there are questions evangelicals must ask themselves in the midst of this. I won’t rehearse them all again here. I have written them up plenty of times and anybody with ears to hear, I suspect, has already heard. But it remains a mystery to me why a church led by people you disagree with, who wish to undermine the doctrine on which you stand and the majority of the churches with which you hold institutional fellowship you could not recommend anyone to attend is the same one which you would fight tooth and nail to remain part of. Genuinely, I find it utterly baffling.
Stranger still, seeing that things will not get better, seeing that whatever fight you put up has roundly failed – and to those of us outside, that fight has looked particularly wet and pathetic wherever it claimed to exist – many still affirm their resolve to remain. It’s like an abusive relationship that evangelicals remain committed to as they simultaneously beg their partner to stop whilst insisting they’ll never leave them and thus give them carte blanche to continue doing exactly as they please, no matter how damaging, knowing there will never be any meaningful consequence. With such a line, thing can indeed only get worse. The hitting and punching will never stop. The appeasement of redrawing red lines will continue unabated because there is no reason for anyone to do any other.
Evangelicals outside the Church of England need to ask whether we are okay with enabling evangelicals inside this way? Are we prepared to continue in fellowship with those who have purposefully, wilfully and actively hitched their wagon to a now unorthodox denomination they refuse to leave and in which nothing will improve? Are we prepared to continue in fellowship with those who say they are going nowhere despite the increase of heterodoxy? I fear evangelicals outside will have to ask their own hard questions and potentially reach some hard conclusions otherwise we may find – because we daren’t say our friends might be unfaithful – that we end up travelling down the same compromised road.