Most members of the clergy living in Britain are familiar with the experience of being interviewed.  Posts are, these days, advertised in the Church Times and would-be incumbents and other more senior posts face a grilling from a group of individuals to establish whether they are the right person for the role.  The interview process now replaces, for the most part, the older method of an anonymous committee of two or three individuals meeting informally to decide who should be appointed for a post, regardless of whether they were looking for a change.  Sometimes the ‘committee’ appears to have been a single individual.  Normally a male, this individual felt he had the combination of experience, good judgment and maybe, a little guidance from the Holy Spirit to make the appointment on his own.  A combination of patronage, secrecy and networking seemed to carry along the appointment process.  Who can now say whether it was a successful system with all its evident potential for corrupt favouritism? 

In my years as an incumbent, I too applied for posts via the Church Times.  The number of times that I was called for interview but failed to get the advertised post does not need to be revealed.  I can admit the fact that I was offered a vacant post after interview on three occasions.  Twice, over a twenty-year period, I accepted the offer.  On the third occasion I realised, for practical and family reasons, that the offered post was an impossible undertaking and so withdrew.  There were other posts that revealed themselves as being unsuitable for a variety of reasons.   The interview process often revealed appalling impediments attached to an advertised post.  The result was that I received the ‘unsuccessful’ letter with a certain relief.  Dioceses then seemed reluctant to spend money on vicarages.  My first vicarage (obtained without an interview!) was heated by paraffin heaters because the diocese was convinced that an incumbent on £3k would not be able to afford to keep a central heating system running.  Today those same paraffin heaters would be condemned on health and safety grounds, particularly in a home occupied by very small children.

Returning to the interview experience, I believe that most people would concur with the notion that the appointments system works reasonably well when all posts are advertised and interviews take place.    The advantage of the interview process is to provide a check on any strong bias felt by an individual member of the panel towards the candidates.  A young mother on the panel may have a strong preference for a man or woman with youngish children.  This strong preference needs to be balanced by a need for appropriate experience of a parish, particularly one comparable to the advertised post.  A chair person will guide the committee into understanding the choices on offer.  He/she will understand that there will be a need for compromise somewhere.  You cannot realistically expect any candidate to have every qualification that the selecting committee have asked for.

The task of an interviewing committee to choose the right person for a post will require old-fashioned human wisdom, especially in its chair person. This is the kind that is obtained by living life with a good dose of curiosity and common sense.  Wisdom of this kind can rise above the short-term politics of the parish and its vested interests.  It manages to gather a variety of threads and see what might work in terms of character and personality as they face up to the challenges of the post on offer.  Wisdom of this type is far more than a box-ticking exercise. It is always needed when evaluating an individual and requires a particular kind of maturity. The ability to discern the right candidates for important posts is an important, even vital, skill and we should expect it in those we appoint to the most senior posts in the Church.  

In recent weeks, as we have been absorbing the implications of the public failings of both Archbishops in England, many of us have been struck by one thing that is, on reflection, totally unexpected..  Whatever may have been the wrong decisions taken by these two men in their response to and management of scandal, one other failing binds them together.  Each of them is guilty of being hoodwinked by powerful charismatic (in its secular sense) personalities and promoting or favouring individuals in roles where they were able to be a serious threat and danger to others.  In the case of Welby, one can, for the moment, try to overlook his failure to understand the deviance of John Smyth, but the same is not true of his dealings with Mike Pilavachi and the Soul Survivor organisation.  Clearly Welby believed he had enough information on Pilavachi to award him a Lambeth award.  Superficially Soul Survivor was a success story, but a man or woman with the kind of wisdom mentioned above, would have asked searching questions about this ministry.  Welby had been associated with the evangelical charismatic scene for over thirty years.  He must, on at least some occasions, encountered or heard about its excesses.  The rise and fall of the Nine O’Clock Service in Sheffield, another toxic movement in the 90s attractive to young people, must have been noted by him.    Although expounding a different theological vision, NOS functioned with similar crowd dynamics.  It is hard to believe that Welby never had a conversation about NOS in the years that followed its collapse.  Naive is not a strong enough word for his apparent failure to evaluate and have a ‘lessons learned’ opinion about what had happened there and notice striking parallels with the later Soul Survivor phenomenon.  If we can expect a degree of wisdom on the part of every chair of an appointment committee in a parish church up and down the country, surely, we can expect it of an archbishop, even when blinded by the ‘success’ of a Pilavachi or the business ‘skills’ of one Paula Vennells. 

Failing to pick up on the weaknesses or incompetence of another person can have serious, even devastating, consequences for other ordinary members of a church organisation.   A similar failure of discernment is found in our other Archbishop, Stephen Cottrell.  Apart from serious questions about the inadequacy of his actions with regard to David Tudor, the disgraced priest in the Chelmsford Diocese, there is the breath-taking fact, revealed by the BBC, that Cottrell, when Bishop of Chelmsford, described Tudor as a ‘Rolls Royce priest’. This was said when he knew about the court cases involving Tudor and all the other information accessible to him in the personnel files.   The comment clearly shows Cottrell to have been in a measure of awe of Tudor’s strong personality.  At this point I am reminded of the story of the choosing and anointing of David by the prophet Samuel.  The comment is made that Yahweh does not look at the outward attractiveness and strength of the individual but at the heart.  Surely our Archbishops should be skilled and adept at looking at the ‘heart’ of candidates for promotion or preferment.  If they lack this skill themselves, do not they have access to professional help in this area, because of their exalted roles in the church?   We expect wisdom in committees choosing a parish priest; how much more do we expect it from those at the top of our church hierarchy?

This blog post has not meant to be in any way an attack on the character of archbishops, past or present.  It is rather a plea for a better understanding of the science of how to pick people for preferment in the Church.  We need high degrees of skill in this area from the people who have the ability to rise above the expedient, the popular or the political.  The values we long for in the Church of England in this uncertain period of its history are, to repeat, wisdom and profound integrity.   Archbishops and, indeed, all Christians should be people of discernment and good judgement and know how to recognise it in others.  If poor judgement in the issue of recruitment is exercised at the highest levels in the Church, it is going to be repeated at all the lower levels.  When square pegs are regularly put into round holes, the morale of the whole institution quickly suffers and goes into a spiral of decline.  For this reason alone, if for no other, we must insist that enormous care is taken in the system of appointments for church posts.  A church dignitary making an error of judgment over a management matter is one thing, and it probably can be, with effort, reversed.  A senior person consistently failing to exercise the highest levels of judgement and discernment with appointments will damage and even destroy the fabric of an entire institution.   The failure of judgement that existed with George Carey (and other bishops) and the NOS experiment, together with a similar naivety prevailing between Welby and Soul Survivor, has been a serious cancer for the Church of England.  The failure to manage the Tudor affair on the part of Cottrell is also an indication of an institutional malaise in the church.  If the top people cannot spot and weed out the seriously corrupt in the system, how can ordinary Christians put their trust in, let alone work for the structure?  

 The message from this rather sad post is a simple one.  It calls on church people to come forward and make sure that the people of the highest calibre and integrity occupy the top positions in the Church.  Among the priorities in this ability requirement list, is the need for inner goodness, complete honesty and trustworthiness.  The Church of the future is not impressed with the institutional defensiveness of church leaders of the past.  We have the opportunity to put things right but that chance may not for ever be available to us when the next safeguarding earthquake hits the Church of England.