Is the future for the Church of England’s General Synod…Dan Andrews?
by Julian Mann, Anglican Ink:
The readiness of the English middle classes to sacrifice democracy on the altar of political correctness was evident at last week’s meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod.
It was during a debate on the dry subject of the CofE’s governance structures that the growing anti-democratic spirit on this largely democratically elected body asserted itself.
On the last day of its February sessions, Synod voted to ‘take note’ of a report from the CofE’s Governance Review Group (GRG). This means the GRG’s plan to reduce the number of National Church Institutions in the CofE and have fewer governance bodies can move forward to the legislative stage.
The report includes a proposal to set up a ‘nominations committee’ which would ‘sift’ candidates wanting to stand for election to the CofE’s national bodies.
The aim of the pre-election sifting would be to ‘verify that they (the candidates) have the appropriate skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours to be able to perform their trustee duties responsibly and effectively’.
‘This pre-election sifting – whilst rigorous – should not be so onerous as to remove democracy,’ the report claims.
Save the Parish campaigner Prudence Dailey, former chairman of the Prayer Book Society and a lay Synod member for Oxford Diocese, smelt an authoritarian rat. She tabled an amendment to withdraw the proposal for the ‘too powerful’ nominations committee.
‘It will undermine the democratic processes of this Synod and replace them with something that is profoundly technocratic,” she declared.
She pinpointed the plan to sift out candidates according to their ‘behaviours’.
‘I have a particular concern that those who might be inclined to rock the boat would be excluded. And we can all think of occasions on which the boat needed to be rocked in this Church and it was resisted by the establishment – for example, safeguarding is an obvious case in point.
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