A SPECIAL Adviser to the Office of the Archbishops at Lambeth Palace has been appointed, to work on strategic and governance changes in the Church of England.

The Revd Margaret Cave, currently Team Rector in the East Greenwich Team Ministry (News, 17 May 2019), will step down from her parish post at the end of April. Her new, part-time, voluntary position at Lambeth Palace has arisen from work that she did while on placement at Lambeth Palace in autumn 2021 as part of the Strategic Leadership Development Programme, a national programme launched in 2015, designed to support clergy “identified as having potential for taking on significantly wider responsibilities in the future” (News, 7 October 2016).

Her priorities will include researching issues and facilitating projects in relation to the work of the Bishop to the Archbishops, Dr Emma Ineson, including those related to strategic and governance changes in the Church, and facilitating the closer working of Lambeth Palace and Bishopthorpe.

Against a backdrop of declining attendance and financial deficits, reviews of the Church’s structures and finances are currently under way, led by the Archbishop of York. Since 2019, four groups — Vision and Strategy, Recovery, Governance, and Transforming Effectiveness — have been working on the “Emerging Church of England” programme, set up to “help leaders in every diocese to discern the shape, life and activity of the Church of England in the 2020s” (News, 16 July 2021).

In September, a report from the Governance Review Group, chaired by the Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Revd Nick Baines, proposed changes (News, 17 September 2021) that include scaling back the powers of the House of Bishops to set national policy, and placing most of the activities currently overseen by the Church Commissioners and bodies such as the Archbishops’ Council under the auspices of a single charitable body: the Church of England National Services.

In a General Synod update in June 2021, Archbishop Cottrell identified an urgent need to “simplify our life, only doing at the centre what absolutely must be or is best done one or fewer times, avoiding duplication wherever possible, even beginning to think about whether dividing the Church into 42 dioceses is the best way of managing our life”.