Justin Welby: a professional obituary

Justin Welby addressing the Church of England Synod.(Photo: Church of England)

Monday 6 January marked the last working day of Justin Welby as Archbishop Canterbury. His resignation was forced on him after his failure to act competently in the oversight of a devastating sexual abuse scandal. But it would be unfair to take that single act of incompetence and use it as a lens to judge his entire performance as Archbishop. Tragic though the end of his tenure was, we need to look at the other elements of the way he held office in order to assess it fairly.

There are four areas in which an archbishop needs to be competent in order to justify that existence: parish, province, communion and country. As regards the parish, ecclesially the C of E has always embodied two theologies it holds in tension: congregationalism - the priority of the parish on one hand; and episcopacy - the authority of the bishop on the other. The Archbishop of Canterbury has to find a way of balancing this contradiction, and at the same time motivate and enable the flourishing of parish churches and communities. This balance has always been very difficult to achieve.

As senior Archbishop he has to try to hold together and facilitate the two Provinces and the bureaucratic machinery which serves the Church as an organisation. Most people don't understand that the institution is organically so complex that the normal levers of management you might expect hardly exist. Welby set himself the task of creating them in order to control the organisation better. It didn't work.

The international Anglican Communion is chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury by historic right. He is chairman of the forty two autonomous provinces of the Anglican Communion, and needs to be able hold them together in the absence of any concept of authority. The provinces were just about to pass a historic resolution repudiating his right of chairmanship and replacing it with an election instead, that he would have lost.

The Archbishop needs also to be able to connect with the nation, the majority of whom have no allegiance to the faith or the Church by exemplifying the best and truest aspects of Christianity. Despite his platform at both the royal funeral and coronation, the nation never took him to its heart. Sadly for Welby, nowadays appearance counts for a good deal. Michael Ramsey and Rowan Williams at least looked like different versions of what people hoped an archbishop should look like - and looking as though you are suited for the role has become an even more important aspect of functionality in an age where image plays such a powerful part in our assessment of things.

It wasn't Justin Welby's fault that he looked like a slightly crumpled, middle-ranking bank branch manager, but neither did it help inspire confidence or affection. Welby's predecessors during the last century all excelled in at least one of these four areas. Tragically, Welby failed in all four.

The task was never going to be an easy one. The Church of England is an organisation like no other. It is immensely complex, lacking all kinds of instrumentation for governance. It is the hybrid to beat all hybrids. It was born as an organic compromise of different political and theological parties and groups coming together to keep at bay the alternatives they all feared more than they feared each other. Holding it together meant finding some kind of working balance for the successors of the Puritans (evangelicals), the Sacramental nostalgics (Anglo-Catholics), and the spiritually-minded socialists (liberals).

It used to be that they took turns under the protective patronage of their respective archbishops. But rather to everyone's surprise, that game has changed over the last 30 years. The culture has redefined everyone's allegiance in the Church just as much as elsewhere. The shadows of the Reformation battles have grown suddenly dim as a new shift of conceptual tectonic plates reconfigures Western society.

The advent of feminism and following quickly afterwards, the attempt to legitimise same-sex relationships not only divided secular society but also split all the tribes that constituted the historic Anglican factions. Welby kept up the appearance of neutrality for a while, but it seems as if his patience suddenly snapped. And that snapping took place months before personal debacles. Conservatives see his abandoning of historic Christian ethics as the metaphysical cause of his downfall. Whether that is true or not, it is the case that after that public gesture of impatience with the Biblical position - when Welby suddenly came off the fence and came out in personal favour of the legitimisation of homosexual relationships - his demise followed swiftly.

Welby presided over a sudden shift in theological and ideological culture that changed the shape of the tribal equilibrium in the Church of England. In fact, it was during the last 30 years that the landscape of theological and philosophical conflict embodied in the Reformation and its aftermath, changed profoundly and dramatically. It was no longer a matter of Protestant versus Catholic so much as progressive versus non-progressive.

One of the primary responsibilities of the Archbishop of Canterbury was to hold together both the Church of England, but also the Anglican Communion which emerged from the evangelisation of the British Empire. Despite his own profound personal preferences, Rowan Williams managed to hold the warring factions together with a skilful chairmanship that practised a diplomatic inaction.

Welby lacked both the intelligence and the diplomatic stature of Rowan Williams. He was unable to hide his preference for the progressive sexual agenda of the liberal faction. Where Williams took the trouble to ensure the episcopacy represented all the constituencies of the Church, under Welby only theological look-a-likes stood much chance of preferment. He was ideologically tribal before he was pastorally competent.

Perhaps the welfare of the parishes were a sign of his greatest failure. Under his tenure the parishes felt ignored, demoted and demoralised. It wasn't just the mountain of red tape that imposed impossible safeguarding burdens on elderly ladies who turned up to implement the flower rota, or churchwardens who became overwhelmed by bureaucratic overkill - as did their clergy.

Parishes were wholly demoralised on a series of fronts, when for example they found themselves robbed of their own capacity to make decisions for their own survival. They became unable, for example, to install new boilers to replace brown ones to keep people warm during evensong in winter, because the institutional bureaucracy had committed to an ecological Net Zero and re-written the rules to impose it.

Faced with the enormous difficulties of raising enough money to repair the roof, the infrastructure and pay for pastoral ministry, the pensioners on whom the church depends - the average age of congregations being about 70, the parishes were demoralised once again. Justin Welby dramatically and publicly committed himself to spending the investment resources of the Church Commissioners on the sixth generation descendants of slaves in reparation. It didn't matter that academic historians pointed out that the Church had, in fact, not benefited directly from slave income at all. The exercise turned out to be more about virtue signalling and the woke revisionist rewriting of history, without regard either to whether reparation should be done, or could be done.

Then there is Welby's appointment itself as Archbishop of Canterbury, following a startlingly and somewhat incomprehensible rapidity of promotion, which included very little parish experience. It was the product of a change in fashion driven by the former human resources admin from British Gas who became secretary to the Crown Appointments Commission. Instead of appointing experienced parish clergy balanced by spiritually-minded academics to the episcopate, a decision was made to exclusively appoint middle-managers who had experience in the business world before ordination.

It is certainly true that organisation with the internal contradictions of the Church of England is impossible to manage. The contradiction is that it is effectively driven by the parish, while at the same time being cosmetically directed from the episcopate. This has always been an almost impossible balance to maintain constructively, but under Welby, the balance was destroyed completely. He tried to create the levers of control and management efficiency that the business model might suggest, but they proved counter-productive by moralising, and diminishing the integrity and morale of the parish. Towards the end of his tenure, Welby even saw the rise of the Save the Parish movement. It was a grassroots movement directed by some extremely competent people who were afraid that Welby's managerial blinkeredness was going to destroy the very raison d'etre of the Church of England.

In the area of representing Anglicans in the public space to the rest of the population, and the interests of the rest of the population to the Church of England Welby opted for the easiest and most destructive course. He used the House of Lords as a soapbox for left-wing progressive politically-correct views and, his critics claimed, vacuous political propaganda.

He might have got away with this had he been representing the Anglican mind in the country. But endless social surveys showed that the people in the pews were by a large majority committed to looking at the world through centrist or conservative lenses. They were badly alienated from Welby and the rest of the episcopate who were speaking as if they were paid up members of the Labour party. Only one single bishop spoke in favour of Brexit for example.

As many critics pointed out, this wasn't just a disparity between the people in the pews and the managers. Neither Welby, nor his fellow bishops, managed to talk much about God or Jesus or discipleship, or the Kingdom of Heaven or redemption in the House of Lords. They stuck to socialism.

If you employ a manager to manage the Church and he fails to manage, the consequences are bound to be bad. The Smyth abuse case was a terrible tragedy. All Welby's inept managerial instincts might have been redeemed by just dealing with that one crisis well. Instead, he ignored the victims, allowed subordinates to kick the can down the road, appeared to be covering for his own culture, and forgot that justice delayed is justice denied.

Although he attempted to present his resignation as taking a bullet for the team and resigning on behalf of the whole inept, safeguarding incompetence of the Church of England, it remains a fact that he was personally responsible. He knew about the crisis from the 1980s. And so, when the facts first appeared over his desk, at a point where he had institutional responsibility, no excuse exists for his inactivity. Yet his tone deaf speech in the House of Lord displayed his moral and existential deafness in a way that many found profoundly offensive.

As just one example of his flawed moral judgement, people pointed to his support of Paula Vennells for the bishopric of London. It beggared belief in the judgement of many that a woman who not only had no experience of ministry in the parishes, but had failed catastrophically in institutional management - and as it turned out, proved to be unkind, incompetent and unaccountable - could be his preferred candidate to become bishop of London.

Welby failed the parishes by demoralising them, he failed the Anglican Communion by being unable to restrain his progressive partisanship, he failed the organisation by 'doing management' badly, and he failed the country by offering it socialism instead of Christianity. He is probably the worst Archbishop of Canterbury in living memory. Only historians are equipped to judge whether he was the worst Archbishop of all time.

Gavin Ashenden is Associate Editor of the The Catholic Herald and a former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II.