It is a sorry situation when church leadership in three parts of the United Kingdom is being challenged and called into question at precisely the same moment. To misquote Oscar Wilde ‘it is one thing to have church leadership challenged in one province, but to have three put under scrutiny at the same time is careless’. The critical calling out of the Archbishop of Wales, the Archbishop of York and the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church at the same moment must be an unprecedented event. It is also traumatising to the other members of those bodies under their oversight, especially those in positions of leadership themselves.
Readers of my blog will be familiar with the background to the current turmoil in Scotland, Wales and England involving church leadership. The precise reasons for unhappiness need not be rehearsed here, as there are other places, e.g. Thinking Anglicans, where the facts, such as we have, are explored. There is also nothing to be gained by joining in a blame game. Insofar as this is necessary, it has already been done by others with a greater grasp of all the facts than I have. What I do wish to consider here is to try and imagine what it must be like to be one of the church leaders under fire and having, not only their decision-making questioned, but also their integrity.
Exposure to criticism is one of the costs of occupying a position of high office in any walk of life. The job of CEO of a business leads one open to massive scrutiny, but the rewards in terms of salary and pension rights can be eye-wateringly huge. One of the ways that pressure and stress are managed in high-flying secular jobs is through the fact that executive positions seem relatively secure. Even if the company you are in charge of loses money and your resignation from this company is demanded, it seldom seems to prevent you, the leader, from successfully moving to head up another company. A senior member of the clergy is in a much more fragile situation. The ‘tied cottage’ method of employment means that the threat of losing or leaving a post represents a greater threat to well-being and welfare. A clergy person, forced for whatever a reason to depart from a post, will typically have no property, no savings and no immediate prospect of obtaining new employment. New opportunities for retraining get increasingly challenging and difficult, especially after the age of 50. It is also not easy getting on the short lists for an incumbency position after the age of 58/59. In short, it is highly risky treading the path of a clerical maverick. The possibility of ending up homeless, impoverished and alone is just too great.
Taking risks in one’s style for practising leadership in today’s church is thus not to be recommended. Making the wrong decision can seriously rebound and the harms that can descend on the clergy leaders and their families are possibly catastrophic. Recycling senior clergy, even with decades of practical experience behind them, is not easy either. Some senior clergy successfully move ‘down’ from cathedral canon or dean to incumbent status and seem to thrive. This option is not given to very senior clergy who have reached the status of bishop. Such clergy have reached a point in the trajectory of promotion where ‘demotion’ does not seem to happen. Some defensive cord is wrapped around them, and the only viable option for a bishop who fails badly in the complex task of leadership is retirement. One such episcopal departure covered by Surviving Church was enormously complex and cost the Church a great deal of money to resolve.
This consideration of even the possibility of career collapse among the clergy is a prelude to the thought that the clerical profession carries with it considerable pressure and stress. My thoughts about the three leaders of the branches of the Anglican Church that we have mentioned as being currently under pressure, is to consider the stress they have been and are under. Calls for them to resign, whether deserved on not, must be hard to bear. Whatever their failings, they are human beings having to deal with opprobrium, and this must directly attack their quality of life. No one becomes ordained with the expectation of having to face levels of stress that could cause Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. For leaders to know that there are people who want to attack and put pressure on them, is a hard burden to carry. Having to face the hostility of individuals who hate your position on the LGBT issue, or the ministry of women is also very debilitating, spiritually and physically. There cannot be many clergy who have not felt something in the way of political or personal opposition which has been the cause of unhappiness and stress. Such episodes, especially for bishops, must have the tendency to spill over into family life. The question that immediately comes into one’s mind is this: Why would anyone accept the perceived gratification of high office in the church in return for PTSD levels of stress? Another way of asking the same question is to wonder whether we are reaching the point where candidates of ability routinely turn down senior posts for fear that their mental health might be compromised, if not destroyed.
In last week’s Church Times there appeared a half page advertisement for the post of Dean of Bangor Cathedral. The number of suitable candidates is first restricted by the requirement to speak and write Welsh. The numbers who can cross this first hurdle and then feel able to offer themselves for consideration to be a church leader in this part of Wales will be tiny. It will shrink further, possibly to zero, when the candidates acquaint themselves with the current crises at Bangor. Candidates have to be prepared to negotiate an extremely tense and volatile set of issues related to finance, safeguarding and personal relationships. Does the Archbishop of Wales really expect to find someone who is prepared to handle all the issues when so much has yet to be resolved in the Cathedral and Diocese? It requires super-human qualities that surely would be already manifest in one of the Welsh speaking clergy of the province, if such abilities in one person existed.
The gloomy point I am arriving at is to suggest that senior posts in the Church are becoming so complex and stressful that there may soon be insufficient people with the skills, calibre and mental stamina able to do them well enough to allow the Church to function well. Looking at the impossible list of requirements for the next Archbishop of Canterbury, one wonders if a person with the right qualities and abilities actually exists. One suspects that some who might be qualified to do major sections of the A/C’s tasks may have already withdrawn their names in a desire to escape the crushing responsibilities of the post. We are still processing the news of a candidate for the Bishopric of Durham pulling out of the race at quite a late stage. Perhaps the word race suggests a completely inappropriate image. You can only have a race if there are several runners or riders ready to compete. At Durham, Canterbury and in Wales those who operate behind the scenes collecting competitors, seem to be having a hard task getting the candidates to enter starters orders.
A recent article on the net about the lot of clergy, addressed the issue of burnout. Certainly, something has to happen if this problem of stress and burnout trauma is not to destroy the energy and vitality of those who lead and work for the Church. One or both of two things must happen. Either a great deal of thought and planning must be given to making the clerical task doable, by offering much more in terms of support, training and proper R & R. The second thing is that the senior clergy should never be put in the position of having to manage a situation where they do not have relevant skills and competence. The failures in church safeguarding have come about partly as the result of an institutional hubris which seemed to be saying that anyone can do the work with minimal skills and training. Being out of one’s depth should never be a cause of shame, but a sign of the right kind of humility. ‘I cannot do this, please help me’ should indicate a Church where giving and receiving are part of the routine fabric of its life. Such a Church is one worth belonging to – a place where hardships and struggle are alleviated by sharing, as well as glimpses of joy in service.
Hmmm…. seen this chart somewhere else. What is “positivy”? Should “passion” therefore be “passiton” in this context?
DOWN AND DROMORE DIOCESE (extending in and beyond Belfast) is another UK Anglican catastrophe. BISHOP DAVID MCCLAY should be removed.
The almost 50 year cover up of the deceased Canon W G Neely child abuse story is shameful. KRWLAW (a legal group) have posted this online: ‘Neely abuse: Church of Ireland Bishop ‘apologises’ for unnamed rector – ignores Belfast-Tipperary transfer’. It’s a long way to Tipperary! But evidently not anywhere near far enough for bishops and/or an abuser, once the media and lawyers get the scent.
Then there’s the mysterious disappearance of multiple recent New Wine trainees from the Diocese in suspicious circumstances. There’s a question for Bishop David McClay to answer! Bishop Darvo [Deny-Attack-Reverse-Victim and Offender] Clay-foot might be a better title for DAVID MCCLAY.
Clay-footed leadership comes at a cost! A lot of people impacted by David McClay’s failure to address glaring abuse or bullying left the Down and Dromore Diocese. I saw 4 adult victims (business and professional people) advised to leave by a more senior cleric from outside the diocese.
And then there’s the 30.1.22 posted Olive Tree Media YouTube film about revival at St Brendan’s parish in Belfast: ‘Karl Faase interviews Joe Turner for Jesus the Game Changer Season 2’. Why has yet another New Wine trainee (Joe Turner) in the Down and Dromore Diocese mysteriously vanished?
What will it take before the Anglican Church evicts David McClay, or asks him to resign? Will it take a suicide, a rape, child abuse, bullying, harassment or embezzlement? Or might a combination of some of these already be discovered?!?
I personally saw how Bishop David McClay failed to thoroughly investigate violent ill-treatment of a number of people. His cowardly dereliction of duty saw no independent inquiry convened into vile student abuse. A professor and senior teacher left the diocese in disgust at how evidence of students being abused was dismissed or not properly dealt with.
David McClay showed contempt for national law and church rules. He blasphemously disregarded horrific treatment of people. Under David McClay the Down and Dromore Diocese is a site of Kangaroo Court Justice.
Quite. The stress and the relative modesty of the pay/rations might – just – be worth it if the positions aimed at actually conferred some status. However, the public reputation of the Church has now sunk so low, and that of its hierarchy lower still (up to and perhaps beyond the level of contempt), that there is now no status whatsoever in being an ecclesiastical dignitary, and perhaps rightly so, given the levels of entitlement and presumption which were/are periodically in evidence. The trade off between pay and status has therefore collapsed. Indeed the absence of status and prestige now makes any exercise of episcopal ‘authority’ seem almost inadvertently comical, as if the Church is now deep in David Brent territory.
It doesn’t help that the ‘talent’ pool has evaporated. I wrote in recommending a suffragan bishop for Canterbury because the diocesan bench has struck me as a complete desert and, frankly, the episcopate as a whole strikes me as being almost unrelievedly mediocre, if not almost anonymous. However, given the state of contemporary Britain, we arguably get the bishops we deserve, just as we get the police, politicians, business leaders, artists, etc., we deserve.
Hard to balance a quasi-judicial and CEO role with needing to do populist daytime TV slots. Would anArchbishop with senior legal experience be the antidote to so much of the kangaroo court stuff which has devastated contemporary Anglicanism? And would it be better to leave the daytime TV ‘BS’ to media celebrities? An Archbishop able to make proper judgements would be worth their weight in gold……
There’s still considerable deference towards bishops within the C of E.
What is the “brief” for the new Archbishop of Canterbury? I’m not referring to the detailed job spec. which will be as long as your arm, or rather a lot longer. What’s the new bloke (or woman ) going to be expected to do?
If we cast our mind back to Welby, he was brought in as a pawn to be placed front and centre, and to be sacrificed if it all went wrong, which it inevitably did. Did he have any of the above qualities, as depicted on the chart? Perhaps. Personally, and obviously I can’t prove this, but it seemed to me he was often hopelessly out of his depth. Originally I’d been surprised they appointed an evangelical. Evangelicals are hated, sorry strongly disliked, across the Anglican world. Welby was drawn from the Eton-Iwerne-SoulSurvivor-HTB axis, so would have been unlikely to see the set up coming. Ostensibly the “successful” wing of the Church his brief was to roll out the business-ey model of growth and colonise the entire Communion. Of course this was never possible. Non evos don’t want ever to become evos.
When they appointed him I think they knew this. With the exposure of Pilavachi, and the collapse of the youth feeder stream of Soul Survivor, someone who represented this world exactly could be put forward for sacking, and the disliked (albeit profitable) arm of the Church consigned to history, but hopefully some of the constituents subsumed into middle of the road liturgy-dom.
So what’s next? What’s the brief for the new ABC?
The latest trend is exemplified by the Dept. Of Government Efficiency. Also known as “move fast and break things”. Brace yourselves for an ecclesiastical Musk-like character, with a brief to sack loads of clergy and support staff. For this , the personality traits of low empathy, high sociopathy and prodigious amounts of narcissistic tendencies usually does the trick. It’s your standard hatchet man or hatchet woman. The assignment will be short (à la Musk) and painful. My one proviso is that the Church of England is usually running about 20 years current management thinking, or indeed any other, but I wouldn’t bank on them not planning something like this with the next ABC.
Do Rev William Nye and his “Council” membership live in tied cottages? How polished are their pastoral skills? Do they care whether parishioners have anything to believe (I think this has got little to do with “LLF”), or anyone to pray to? Surely no prospective bishop or archbishop would want to work for them. The basis of their being instituted hasn’t been established: did it have something to do with politicians linked to George Carey, Kansas City, and the opponents of women vicars?
As for the incompetence of Canterbury bosses around appointing their own search committee (and they are the crucial diocese), the one they had before should have been declared suitable on an extraordinary basis.
Did Rowan Williams scare the Council, or was I out of touch with events then?
I know of two CDMs which were conducted well by bishops. But to summarise the safeguarding situation as I have been reading about it, it is being fatally damaged by: i – the Council’s defying Synod as their calculated insult to archbishops and laity alike, ii – DSAs who are out of line, iii – core groups. Criticisms must bring up all these troubles simultaneously and not just bits and pieces.
This is before we start on the documented financial immoralities, presumably backed by politicians again. So keep politics pure, the only hatchet that needs wielding is to disestablish appointments (and forget “communion”).
I find ordinary ministers and volunteers are now looking over their shoulders, while Anglican entryists with reductionist doctrines are taking over erstwhile “independents”, Baptists etc.
HM KC III has now to be moral Defender of the Faith (i.e of religions of Britain) against Hegseth’s congregation. Will C of E attenders as a whole, without awaiting any permission of sectarian triumphalists such as Tim Wyatt and without fussing about our personal contorsions like HTB / St Helens do, intercede in support? Austria was saved from the Soviets by nine days’ prayer.
You mention burnout among deans and I’ve seen it in volunteers. Will C of E attenders as a whole and all other friends of His Majesty intercede in support of each other and all of us? Evangelicals were never short of influence as they have complained. But their newfangled incarnations have eviscerated doctrines (why “conservative” theology is in fact “liberal theology”) and thereby practices (prayer was seen as un-evangelical). We were supposed to copy (meme-like) the pictures we saw on the visual display units.
Would church bosses stop fussing how we intercede (let alone whether). What style you do: whether on your knees or facing some wailing wall, using set words or freestyle – do it, 16 hours a day (often under our breaths).
My Bible (one of the non-tampered with versions) from the first to the last page is about how the possibility of intercession was made effective.
The kind of Defender of the Faith we need, but allowing of later toleration of nonconformists, is Queen Anne, who pre-dated the present international factions. It is possible for a Communion to be actually spiritual in basis.
An elderly Canon taught my Primary School class-and countless other year groups-basic RE in primary school. My younger brother remembers the departed Canon’s marvellous tutorials, especially the one about the design evidences within our Solar System.
One of his other tutorials was about the the solid historical evidence for the life of Jesus Christ, plus our future need (over our allocated future years or decades of lifespan) to make up our own minds on the real identity and facts of the Lord’s life/death/resurrection.
But the old Canon also had a third central tutorial, about the absolute reality of the human moral compass (conscience) and ethics-absolute moral laws. This latter point is where our Anglican denomination has fallen off the rails completely.
There are countless covered up examples of bullying and abuse, where protecting a diocese (or diocesan bigwigs) has trumped protecting ordinary people in the Church: adult members, junior clerics, ministry trainees and children.
Perversely, we have seen evangelical bullies cynically cover up lots of abuse of children and adults. Bullying, harassment, rape, child sexual abuse, exploitation and various other abuses have been swept under the carpet to supposedly-“protect the reputation of the Church”-.
Examples have been cited across England-Scotland-Wales. But let’s also look at Ireland. A single diocese (centred around Belfast) is the Diocese of Down and Dromore. There are adequate examples in this one location (overseen by successive GAFCON bishops) which exemplify so much that is desperately (or demonically in a literal sense) wrong across Anglicanism in the UK and Ireland.
Canon W G Neely received a sedate burial in the grounds of Armagh Cathedral (Ireland’s equivalent of Canterbury). But latterly the deceased cleric has been exposed as a child abuser. The media and court evidence is compelling. My medical employment, in a local psychiatry clinic, drew me into contact with the alleged scale of this horror story way before it broke in media reports about more recent compensation awarded to one victim (the late Eddie Gorman).
KRWLAW have this interesting report posted: ‘Neely abuse: Church of Ireland Bishop ‘apologises’ for unnamed rector – ignores Belfast-Tipperary transfer’. Why did Down and Dromore Diocese cover this abuse horror up for almost half a century? Why, even now, is Bishop David McClay not formally and publicly naming Neely as a child abuser, so that the compensation of other ageing child victims of abuse is facilitated?
The Down and Dromore Diocese prides itself on having an evangelical pedigree, and having celebrity GAFCON leaders successively holding the reins as bishop. So why is there no public statement about the mysterious disappearance of so many New Wine course trainees from this one diocese?
An ‘Olive Tree Media’ online YouTube film celebrates revival at Saint Brendan’s parish in east Belfast: ‘Karl Faase interviews Joe Turner for Jesus the Game Changer Season 2’. The film was posted 30.1.22 but was the Australian film maker aware of Joe Turner’s strange disappearance, and the mass deletion of parish Facebook or internet sites.
Locals have approached me with concern about this unexplained disappearance, and have asked if Bishop David McClay is cynically covering up some kind of sinister abuse catastrophe(s). The opening image of this film is fascinating. It looks like something from a Hamas promotion. Is this a fair or decent reflection of contemporary Irish Anglicanism?
There is yet another covered up tragedy. Robert Graham (farmer/businessman), Jill McClelland (schoolmistress) and Prof Helen Roe (Belfast academic) all suffered serious harm when savage bullying of innocent people was not addressed by Bishop David McClay. Two out of five New Wine trainees in my year group complained that they felt falsely and unfairly accused of sexual misconduct (extramarital sex) in foul language.
Both Down and Dromore Diocese students (myself and Robert Graham) felt insulted and wounded. Robert Graham was witnessed crying over several hours in my living room after a meeting with a diocesan/New Wine representative. He was observed by the other three professionals referenced above. He claimed foul language-“Any of us might fancy a change of breasts”-caused him immense hurt.
Robert Graham later advised me how the New Wine representative also boasted to him (on the same night) about their plans to block me from ever receiving a single parish placement after successfully completing the 2 year training programme. Weeks later I was called to a meeting by the same tutor, and callously accused of sexual misconduct (‘living in sin’) and told that my presence in a pulpit would ‘defile’ it.
I had worked extensively in the NHS as a medic and was resilient. But the attack on my character felt vicious, and almost reduced me to tears. It gave me an insight into what Robert Graham had suffered. There is zero evidence to support what seem to be totally false allegations levelled against Robert Graham (or me) in such a manner.
Prof Helen Roe and Ms Jill McClelland left the diocese in disgust when these matters were not addressed by Bishop David McClay. I witnessed how both women had very good reason to feel defiled. Robert Graham and I were advised to leave the diocese by a top tier cleric, unconnected to Down and Dromore Diocese.
Bishop David McClay has shown wanton contempt for biblical standards of justice. He has disregarded national law and Anglican Church standards. Were innocent professional or business people sadistically cast aside on the basis of malicious gossip about sexual misconduct?
It is far from clear if placements or post-training opportunities were offered on the basis of qualification and credentials. An ex-prisoner, Pastor Joe Turner, received a placement, but also seems now to also have mysteriously vanished.
Archbishop John McDowell, All-Ireland Primate, holds the equivalent position to the Archbishop of Canterbury. A simple question must now acutely arise-Irish Primate-in regard to all this “monkeying”: Have you asked Bishop McClay to resign? And if he is too much of a narcissist to resign in disgrace over abuse cover up sagas, then a different question must arise. Here it is!
Should you be resigning Archbishop, for repeated failure to fix a formal and independent inquiry into the savage abuse of innocent Church members being covered up in Down and Dromore Diocese?