A few weeks back I wrote about the experience of job interviews in the Church.  This experience, which many of my readers have endured, is not far from our minds as we contemplate the enormously critical interview due to take place for the post of Archbishop of Canterbury, sometime in the summer months.  Two things make this interview stand out.  It takes place against a background of political division and intransigence that did not exist to the same extent when Justin Welby was scrutinised back in 2012.  Another thing is that the new incumbent will be aware that he/she is taking over a role that has demoralised and enfeebled the immediate predecessor.  A further point to be made is that, currently, the financial and spiritual health of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion could be said to be in a more fragile state than at any time in the past two hundred years.  The conclusion of many people is that the post of Archbishop of Canterbury has now become a thoroughly poisoned chalice in 2025.

In job advertisements for posts in many walks of life, recruiters have often included two useful lists to help a potential candidate decide whether to apply.  In one column there is a list of ‘essential’ qualities needed for the post.  In another list there are qualities mentioned which are ‘desirable’ for the applicant to have, and these go beyond the bare minimum.  The expectation is that, in a situation where two candidates of equal merit present themselves, the applicant with a greater number of desirable qualifications will be preferred.  Whether or not such columns exist for the next occupant of the chair of St Augustine, this does not stop interested parties (that includes some readers of SC!) creating fantasy lists as a way of thinking out loud about the qualities we would like to see in a new archbishop.  This speculation about the essential and desirable qualities for would-be candidates has been encouraged by the open invitation to every member of the Church of England. All are being asked to express their opinions and even suggest names of potential candidates.  It remains to be seen whether such attempts to open up the field to outsider contenders will make any difference to the process which begins in earnest in May of this year.

To return to our essential/desirable fantasy lists, we can start by recognising that there will never really be any widespread consensus as to what should be mentioned in the desirable list.  The thoughts in my mind and in that of somebody else on what is desirable, will, undoubtably, reveal something about the compiler and their own ideas/priorities for the Church.  Such desirable lists would, anyway, contain an impossibly large number of expectations.   The Church, as we all recognise, has so many opinions, manifestations and expressions within it that it would be difficult to find a leader capable of meeting even a small number of these expectations.  If we find it difficult to agree what should be on the desirable list because of the wide-ranging nature of peoples’ hopes, the same should not be true for the contents of an essential list.  If the next Archbishop of Canterbury is in any way to be successful in the role, it will be because he/she has in some way grasped the nettle of what is the essential direction of travel for the Church over the coming century.  What follows is in no way a complete essential list but an invitation to think out loud and share ideas about what is truly important for the future leader in our Church of England.

The rest of this piece will set out my ideas about some of the essential qualities that I believe might be required of an Archbishop of Canterbury today.  Some of them will be similar to the qualities we ask of our parochial clergy, but I do recognise that constant public exposure by a church leader to the press and the public requires a particular, even superhuman, resilience and stamina.  This is similar to that required of our politicians.  Apart from this need to have a enormous capacity for work and the gift of imperviousness to substantial pressures, I centre my remarks on three qualities beginning with the letter ‘I’.   They are integrity, inspirational and indwelling.  Every one of my readers will probably have further essential qualities to add to this list, but I allow myself the excuse that I only have 1500 words for these musings.  On such a big topic it is inevitable that important things will get left out.

I start my essential list with my old favourite – integrity.  The next Archbishop of C needs to be for the church’s sake, and that of society, a WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get – kind of person.  In this epoch of safeguarding anxiety, we also cannot afford to have a candidate with any involvement with past scandal or even having knowledge of such behaviour.   The more general meanings of integrity, involving openness and complete honesty together with a requisite and appropriate response to any wrongdoing, whether by an individual or group, has to be built in and assumed.  But the problem is that there has been so much bad behaviour or tolerance of such things as bullying, secrecy and cover-up, that there can only be a few bishops left of whom it can be said that there are no rumours around their actions and decisions in the past.  We are not here speaking about such things as mood swings or lapses into irritability but of endemic character flaws that would cause a negative response in anyone hearing about them for the first time.  Past attempts to bury scandal, using the tools of secrecy and institutional power, do not compare well with the kind of openness that genuine WYSIWYG integrity implies.  Even in our house of bishops, this genuine openness is not as common as we would like in an institution that claims to embody the wholeness and holiness of its founder.

The word inspiration has a special meaning in a Christian context.  It refers to the possession of the Spirit, ‘the Lord, the giver of life’.  To ask for an inspiring archbishop is to ask for a man or woman who can inspire as they themselves are inspired.  To mediate inspiration, the archbishop should be able to teach and preach in a way that makes a mark on the hearer.  There should be sound theology as well as memorable inspiring imagery.  Something of the excitement of good news should inhabit every public utterance and the impact of the archbishop’s spoken word, whether in a sermon or in the House of Lords, should have the quality of making people want to listen.

The final I word, ‘indwelling’, is not one that immediately releases its meaning without some word of explanation.  I want an archbishop to have some of the quality of relating to others which make all their encounters with people special, so that something important is given and shared.  This is a gift that I realise few people possess with any degree of completeness, so we can think of this as an aspirational quality to be aimed at, though seldom realised. I have yet to come up with another English word which captures what I mean by indwelling.  Such a word would need to encompass elements of true altruistic love, empathy and human sharing.  We all recognise this special empathetic quality of relating, when someone of complete integrity looks at us in the eye and gives/shares something of themselves.  It is not an act of dominance or control but simply a momentary indwelling and this is experienced as a kind of blessing.  An archbishop will meet thousands of individuals in the course of his/her work without the slightest chance of remembering names or anything else about them.  But a lot can be given and received in the five second handshake; relationships can begin, and human barriers can start to dissolve, whether those of race, language or culture.  The capacity of an archbishop to indwell another person will allow him/her to perform the vital task of building up the institution and helping the entire Anglican structure to find its way back to being the ‘Body of Christ’ in the true biblical sense.

The final question remains.  Does a qualified person with these three ‘essential’ qualities exist?  Part of me is gloomy in offering an answer to this.  But, if there can be found an individual who possesses these three ‘I’ qualities, then there is hope.  If on the other hand, serious compromises have to be made over the integrity, inspiration and indwelling/empathy of an otherwise promising candidate, then the further decline of our national church may be rapid.

The Episcopal Review of Winchester Cathedral was completed recently and a summary published on-line.  The presenting crisis was the departure last year of Andy Lumsden, the Director of Music, after more than 20 years in post.  The Review tells us very little about the events, disagreements and failures in communication that led up to the event, but clearly there has been, and, no doubt, still is, a great deal of unhappiness among staff and stakeholders in the management and running of Winchester Cathedral.   The Bishop, Philip Mountstephen, identifies ‘declining performance, unsatisfactory relationships and failings in leadership and management’ at the Cathedral, justifying both the current Review and the recommendations that flow out of it.    

The published summary of the Episcopal Review is only ten pages long and the reader is given little detail which would account, for example, for the Dean bringing forward her announced retirement from May 2025 to this month.  It is not profitable to speculate on these matters, and I have no access to any source of inside information.  What is hinted at in the Review, as the central concern, is the issue of music and the part that it plays in 21^st century cathedral worship.  While there are bound to be precise details about the management failings as well as the behaviour of individuals within the Cathedral community, the summary Review does not name names or apportion blame to anyone.  We are left to speculate on what might be the broad issues prompting the Review.  My own assumption is, from the evidence of the summary, that the context of the Review is a number of serious disagreements about the place of music among those involved in its provision.  A telling sentence appears on page 7, suggesting serious non-communication and diverging understandings of the role of music in the life of the Cathedral.  ‘It was felt that Chapter simply did not understand the musical side of the Cathedral’.  Such non-communication and misunderstanding are probably found in other centres of musical excellence in Britain today.  How do these centres best fit in with the rapidly changing face (and decline) of church life in this country?  The cathedral music tradition is for many still a compelling reason for attaching themselves to churches which maintain an active choral tradition, but which is so radically different from what is commonly termed ‘Christian music’.

Seventy years ago, I was a member of the cathedral choir in Canterbury.  The experience opened me up to appreciate a particular style of church music which has since become familiar to quite large numbers of people. At that time, the 50s, cathedral-type music was known only to those who attended cathedrals or one of a limited number of Oxford/Cambridge chapels and other foundations where choral traditions had been maintained.  Little of this genre of music was filtering through to the general public in Britain. The BBC radio programme with a reputation for the high brow, the Third Programme, seemed to show little interest in this rich vein of sacred choral music, whether in 16^th /17^th century polyphonic manifestations or later styles.  Two further reasons for the non-circulation of cathedral music were current.  The first was that LP records were extremely expensive.  If there were recordings of church music, they would have been priced at 35 shillings each, a sum equivalent to over £30 today.  The second fact was that there was simply no exposure to this style of music except among the vanishingly small number of active church musicians.  The only church music familiar to the general public were hymns and the yearly broadcast of the King’s Cambridge carols.  One piece of church music did penetrate into popular consciousness when the boy chorister, Ernest Lough, sung Mendelsohn’s ‘O for the wings of a dove’ in the mid-30s and the record was widely acclaimed.  The arrival of Radio 3 in around 1964 had the welcome effect that more music of every kind, including church music, was aired, no doubt creating a new ‘fan-base’ for what had been an extremely niche cultural taste.

Today we can note two major changes in the church music scene. One is that the music found formerly only in cathedrals and a cluster of Oxbridge chapels has spread out widely from this narrow base.  Both in terms of the number of musicians performing such music and those hearing it, there has been enormous growth and appreciation of this particular style.  Secondly there has been growth in the music available to be sung.  Some of this is as the result of new compositions by young composers who are fascinated by the ancient tradition that binds music and worship together.  There has also been a large amount of serious academic scholarship, bringing to light forgotten or neglected masterpieces of the past, particularly from the age of Elizabeth I when English music of all kinds excelled.

The rise in popularity in church music which I have witnessed in my lifetime has not been without its problems.  Winchester is one of the top cathedral choirs in the country.  Such a description comes with its own challenges.  What makes a choir good?  Is it that the style and quality of music inspires a quality of worship that is special and could act as an incentive to other churches aspiring to high standards, but lacking the endowments to meet the costs involved?  Having a ‘good’ choir could be a judgement based purely on technical and aesthetic factors.  It need have nothing to do with God or the reality of worship.  Finding out where is the meaning of excellence in terms of the choir achievements, is likely to be a constant cause of tension between clergy and the musicians who work for the institution.

A second point of tension, that will apply to every choral foundation in the country, is the rise of ‘popular’ Christian music.  For the majority of Christians, Christian music is found in what is known as worship songs.  Without expressing a value judgement on this style of Christian music, one has to say that such music emerges from a very different culture from the one in which cathedral musicians operate.  Church leaders working in cathedrals are acutely aware of the incompatible demands of the aficionados of choral mattins and those who prefer Graham Kendrick and Hillsong.  In a small way, I faced this tension in my parish and resolved it by allowing, as far as possible, both styles or cultures to co-exist.  The church choir and the music group appeared at different services and a kind of peace prevailed.  Whether the current tensions at Winchester have anything to do with these divergent styles or cultures of church music I have no inside knowledge, but the existence of such contrasting styles remains a very large elephant in the room called Christian worship.  It cannot be expelled easily.   In a centre like Winchester Cathedral where traditional cathedral music has reigned for literally centuries, it is hard to imagine that worship songs ever get an easy welcome, if at all.  But, if this is the only genre of Christian music known by a segment of the congregation, then it will be hard for the leaders to ignore it without causing upset and unhappiness.

In this piece I am suggesting that church music of all kinds is likely to draw into itself many of the other divisions and unspoken conflicts that already exist in the church.  Deep irreconcilable differences exist over the LGBT issue, climate change as well as theological attitudes to Scripture.  It is possible to distinguish a ‘liberal’ approach from a ‘conservative’ one, and, maybe, the two sides can have a discussion with a measure of civility.  When it comes to divisions over what church music is the preferred option, there are sometimes even deeper underlying issues, matters of taste, culture and social class.  These are difficult to address without sounding elitist.  I am well aware that my wanting to listen to Tallis’ Lamentations as part of my observance of Holy Week will not be understood by many sincere Christian people.  A greater number might fill a cathedral nave to listen to the Matthew Passion in Holy Week, but we are still facing the fact of widely divergent tastes in music among Christian people.  Somewhere in the unhappiness that has arisen in Winchester are, I believe, these cultural and aesthetic issues that arise when two incompatible musical styles are brought in close juxtaposition and found to be totally alien to each other.  Resolution of such cultural divergences will require a wisdom far greater than anything I see on offer in the Church today.

In writing this piece I am prepared to accept that the issues addressed by the Review and the resignation of the musical Director may have absolutely nothing to do with the clash of discordant musical cultures that we see in the wider church.  If I am wrong, this does not render all my comments of no value.  The tension between popular and classical church music is a live issue in many places and, sometimes, it can be said to exist as open warfare.   It is one of the ironies of today that one area of growth in church life at present is in an appreciation for the meditative, even contemplative style of BCP choral evensong.  It is for others to explain the appeal of the Psalms sung to Anglican chant, which also allows a renewed appreciation of the English language as spoken five centuries ago.  In a century’s time, it will become obvious which style has stood the test of time.  I suspect we all have our preferred guess.

The recent announcement that ten members of the clergy in the C/E are facing a disciplinary process, arising out of the Keith Makin report, was not an unexpected item of news.   The Makin report had named dozens of clergy said to have known of Smyth’s criminal activities, but these ten ‘represent those whose actions have been deemed to meet the threshold for instituting disciplinary proceedings’.  In other words, these ten clergypersons are to be subject to the scrutiny of the NST and under the terms of the CDM accept whatever penalties that the CDM process decides.

Back in 2020, I took an interest in the case of George Carey and the way that Makin chose to publicise, mid-enquiry, some apparent misdemeanour on his part.  This was followed by an immediate withdrawal of Carey’s PTO by the Bishop of Oxford.  Many people were puzzled that Carey’s apparent failing was seen to be so serious that, of all the failures being uncovered by Makin, this one alone required immediate action.  The removal of Carey’s PTO was reversed some months later, but much damage had been done to Carey’s peace of mind and reputation.  My blog piece, that I wrote at the time, focussed on whether Smyth’s brief and tenuous attachment to Trinity College Bristol, where Carey was principal, might have been so transitory that his presence was barely noticed.  An exploitation of Trinity’s name to help Smyth in his plan to flee Britain for Africa, where no scandal had yet attached to his name, might offer a plausible interpretation of the facts as we then knew them.  According to this interpretation, Smyth had registered as a student, but he was just exploiting a non-residential status at the college as a way of enhancing his CV.  Even a fleeting attachment to Trinity College might impress theological institutions abroad, especially in places where the British system was not well understood.  A non-residential student in a British college might be regarded as having a status that was not merited. No special reason exists for Carey to have heard of this very part-time student before his arrival.  Carey simply did not move in the prestigious evangelical circles occupied by Smyth and his former admirers that had worshipped him summer after summer at Iwerne.  The Bash ‘project’ and its focus on evangelising the public-school elite was not something that had any interest for Carey.  He would have found the focus on evangelising the privileged classes as something alien, even objectionable.  If this very part-time student, Smyth, was, as we suspect, keeping his attendance down to the absolute minimum, there is no reason for Carey to have got to know him or have had reason to consult the files about him. The politics of the evangelical world at the time seem to have been well outside Carey’s concerns.

This month I have had passed on to me Carey’s own autobiographical account of the background to the disciplinary process being currently undertaken against him by the NST.  This also sets out material from the work of the earlier 2020 core group.  Reading this narrative with the permission of the author, I am, I believe, able to see more of the dynamics of the 2020 core group and the way it became convinced of the guilt of an individual based on what appear to be hunches rather than actual evidence.  Stripped down to the bare bones, Carey was deemed guilty of having seen the original 1982 Ruston report on Smyth and having done nothing with the information.  The surmise that he had seen the report was based on two passing references in letters sent by David McInnes to David Fletcher. In the second of these two letters, David MacInnes was wanting to trace a number of ‘memos’ describing Smyth’s crimes.  He mentioned that a minister called David Jackman had a copy ‘and so had George Carey’.  It is this single unsubstantiated and uncorroborated claim that Carey had the document, and he had not reacted by going straight to the police, that is, both then and now, at the heart of the CDM accusation.

Carey’s account of his own self-examination about whether he might have had a lapse of memory, after seeing such an explosive document as the Ruston report, is at the centre of this new autobiographical fragment.  Carey rejects the idea that he could have read it, and then immediately put it out of his mind.  Such a notion, he concludes, is impossible.  Quoting Andrew Graystone, who knows more about the Smyth story than anyone else alive, he explains that the memo ‘is so shocking that I can assure that if you had been presented with Mark Ruston’s 1982 report you would remember it for the rest of your life.’ 

When my blog piece about Carey and his possible guilt over Smyth came out in 2020, a contributor to the comments section, called David Pennant, came up with a further valuable piece of information.  He wrote: I was a full-time ordinand at Trinity College Bristol from 1981 to 1984, and then stayed on researching there from 84 – 86. I went into the college only once a week in the latter period, but in the early period I was there five days a week. We lived a mile away in our own home. This blog is the first time that I have discovered that John Smyth had any connection with the college. Had I known at the time, I would have searched him out and welcomed him, remembering him from Iwerne days. So, I am certain that I never heard anything about his presence. I also only discovered the allegations against him from this blog in recent years. 

Reflecting on David’s testimony, we can make one or two observations.  If a Iwerne alumnus had been present at Trinity, it is inconceivable that John Smyth would have managed to be so utterly invisible unless he had arranged to make his attendance deliberately so.  Also, the evidence and testimony of the one member of staff who would have dealt with an external student, as Smyth must have been, Peter Wiliams, was never followed up by the core group.  This might have shown Carey was never party to any information about Smyth and his fleeting attachment to Trinity Bristol in those far-off days.  Here the Church of England core group system shows itself unwilling to pursue facts as far as they lead.  Certainly, there is plenty of ‘reasonable doubt’ to query the group-think conclusion held by the core group.  They decided that George Carey knew all about John Smyth and his crimes but chose to supress this knowledge in order to have a quiet life.

I do not know George Carey personally, though we met at a Hereford diocesan conference in around 1991 when he was Bishop of Bath and Wells.  The story that I have discerned now and in 2020 when trying, on this blog, to make sense of his narrative, is capable of more interpretations than just those given by the NST and the original core group.  Once again, we seem to be encountering a clear interest in the rights and privileges of institutions and how these take precedence over a concern for justice for the individual.  Having been permitted to glimpse the ‘evidence’ brought forward as a way of pinning guilt on Carey, I have very little confidence that church justice is or was being served.  We can say that whenever there is evidence that facts are not pursued in a thorough professional manner, any accusations made against an individual lack integrity and even credibility.  Common-sense questions also arise about the possible reasons for only one example of malfeasance, Carey’s, being acted upon prior to the excruciatingly delayed publication of the Makin report.  What made Carey’s ‘misdeeds’ so much worse than those of others? One word used by both Carey and Julie McFarlane to describe the operation of church justice, whether in the role of the accused or the accusing, is ‘brutal’.  There is a brutality about a process which seeks to attack and sometimes destroy those it disapproves of.  One thing I can hope for is that the exoneration of George Carey will eventually be complete.  Based on the evidence that I have seen, I hope that his friends in the legal world will be able to show up clearly the pettiness, vindictiveness and injustice which the Church of England has allowed to become part of its life.  That may lead to the eventual complete dismantling and rebuilding of the structures around safeguarding so that justice, honesty and harmony may be restored to this area of church life.