by Ian Paul, Psephizo
General Synod is currently meeting in York (you can watch the proceedings live on the Church of England YouTube channel), and the debates can vary from the sublime to the ridiculous. Everything is improved with a sprinkling of humour, and to that end I asked ChatGPT how Anthony Trollope might describe the opening of Synod. This is set in London in February.
It was a Tuesday morning of uncertain weather—neither quite rain nor dry, as if even the sky had not yet resolved its opinion—when the General Synod of the Church of England was declared open, and the assembled clergy, laity, and bishops entered their allotted seats with all the solemnity of Parliament, but somewhat less decorum and rather more coffee.
The Archbishop of York, the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell, stood (or perhaps wavered) at the rostrum with the expression of a school prefect asked to oversee a particularly rowdy debating society. A small man—not in mind, it must be said, but in manner—he surveyed the hall with a look that managed to be both anxious and affable. His voice, unfailingly courteous, implored the Synod to seek “unity in diversity,” though one could tell he suspected—quietly, and with the nervousness of a man aware of his own irrelevance—that both were in short supply.
In the third row, impeccably dressed in navy tweed and a hat of unassailable moral fibre, sat Miss Prudence Dailey, a spinster in the best sense of the word, whose spiritual convictions had ossified gloriously in the liturgical amber of 1956. Her eyes, as sharp as her tailoring, narrowed each time the word “inclusive” was uttered, and though she seldom rose to speak, when she did so, it was with the precision of a scalpel and the effect of a guillotine. Many a progressive clergyman had withered under her correction.