Why the Church fails to get answers from above

Aug 13, 2022 by

by Graham Stewart, The Critic:

The Anglican hierarchy is obsessed with management structures over the real issues of morality, theology and falling congregations.

Dr John Sentamu’s replacement as Archbishop of York is the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell. Having been suffragan Bishop of Reading and then Bishop of Chelmsford, holding the Church of England’s second most important job means Cottrell will likely also be in the running to succeed Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury, when the time comes.

Cottrell’s promotion is a textbook case of what the Church of England presently thinks leadership looks like, and how it measures success. At Chelmsford he was known for large-scale thinking and diocesan initiatives. By the time he left for York, the diocese was managed by its bishop, three suffragan bishops, and seven archdeacons. Yet in 2021 it advertised for a diocesan chief executive on £90,000 a year — a manager to manage the managers — while also being in the process of rolling out 61 clergy redundancies.

There were sighs of relief when Cottrell’s successor at Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, assured her clergy — some of whom she recognised as being “close to feelings of despair” — that there would be no more Cottrellesque initiatives. “I’m not so comfortable,” she told them, “with that kind of language which is currently widely deployed in the church. It risks, it seems to me, putting too much emphasis on our human powers — that if only we try hard enough and pull together well enough and all follow the same programme, then we can solve the problems and challenges and ensure the future survival of the church.”

Read here

 

Related Posts

Tags

Share This