Bishop of Chelmsford front-runner for Archbishop of Canterbury after Dover rules herself out
by Julian Mann, Anglican Mainstream:
Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford, is now emerging as the front-runner to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury after the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, ruled herself out in a television interview last week.
In an interview with ITV Meridian after the publication of her memoir, The Girl from Montego Bay, the Church of England’s first female black bishop said:
‘You are definitely not looking at the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Who in their right mind would want to take on a role like that and in particular how we have just treated our Archbishop?’
She said she did not believe Justin Welby should have resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury after the publication of the Makin Review into the John Smyth abuse scandal:
‘I did not want Archbishop Justin to resign. I am very sad that he has resigned. I think that if we are not careful what we have done is to scapegoat one individual.’
She said Justin Welby was ‘not even in ordained ministry’ when Smyth perpetrated his abuse.
Both the Bishops of Chelmsford and Dover have, in the current cultural climate, a clear diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) advantage in being both female and from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Even if Bishop Hudson-Wilkin were still in the field, I would suggest the Bishop of Chelmsford is the most able candidate in the current House of Bishops in terms of intellect and eloquence, having spent many hours since leaving C of E ministry in 2019 watching bishops in action at General Synod, at press conferences and in the House of Lords.
Bishop Francis-Dehqani became a diocesan bishop in 2021, seven years after the then new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, had managed to persuade General Synod to agree to women bishops. Like other ambitious female bishops such as the Bishop Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, she is not among the first generation of women bishops allowed into the House since 2014 and so does not have a sense of owing her position to male patronage.
She is a penetrating critic of the ‘Vision and Strategy’ programme which the Archbishops’ Council has been spearheading to try to reverse the C of E’s numerical decline through glitzy church growth initiatives.
In her plenary lecture last September at the Church Times Festival of Preaching at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, she recounted how she had shared with her Diocesan Synod in Chelmsford her discomfort with the language of Vision and Strategy:
‘There’s now a national Vision and Strategy Department with a large staff team. In order for any diocese to access funding, they have to demonstrate fidelity to the central vision, which is predicated on growth and predictions of growth. Money will not be released to help us appoint additional parochial clergy, but only for projects and resources over and above the basic framework that any diocese is managing to fund through parish share and endowments.
‘When I was still relatively new in Chelmsford, I explored some of this during an address to Diocesan Synod and this is what I said. As a rule, I’m not so comfortable with the language of “Vision and Strategy” being deployed in the Church. It risks, it seems to me, putting too much emphasis on our human powers…
‘The language of Vision and Strategy risks ignoring the reality of frailty, brokenness, sin – all of which can of course be redeemed, but it risks missing the blessings in that which is small and vulnerable and marginal. It leaves us relying heavily on our own strength, instead of remembering that everything depends on our faithfulness and our reliance upon God.’
To laughter and applause from the audience at St Mary’s, she said: ‘These reflections seemed to chime with a number of people and, to my great surprise, gained a little bit of traction on Twitter (as it was then). I should also say that they earned me a slap on the wrist from central Church – who told me that such talk undermines the work of the Vision and Strategy department.’
Breath of fresh air though she is in many ways, I would not be able to describe her as a faithful teacher of the traditional Christian faith because she supports the revision of the biblical sexual ethic. In successive votes at General Synod since February 2023, she has consistently backed the introduction of services of same-sex blessings in parish churches.
It is a big thing for the Church to abandon its traditional sexual ethic. Witness the chaos that the abandonment of the Christian sexual ethic has caused in British society since the advent of the permissive society in the 1960s. Does the Church really want to see the broken lives that this moral mayhem has unleashed replicated in its congregations?
If as seems likely she does get the top job, I am struggling to see how she could faithfully obey this exhortation in the Book of Common Prayer’s Order for the Consecration of an Archbishop or Bishop, as the Bible is handed to the candidate:
‘Give heed unto reading, exhortation, and doctrine. Think upon the things contained in this Book. Be diligent in them, that the increase coming thereby might be manifest unto all men. Take heed unto thyself, and to doctrine, and be diligent in doing them: for by so doing thou shalt both save thyself and them that hear thee. Be to the flock of Christ a shepherd, not a wolf; feed them, devour them not. Hold up the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the outcasts, seek the lost. Be so merciful, that ye be not too remiss; so minister discipline, that ye forget not mercy: that when the Chief Shepherd shall appear ye may receive the never-fading crown of glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.’
So, if she is the best that the House of Bishops can produce for Archbishop of Canterbury, this does not bode well for the national Church.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire, UK.