THE Most Revd Justin Welby was, one episcopal colleague has suggested, “our most efficient Archbishop since Fisher”. Against a backdrop of complaints about increased managerialism in the Church of England, this was not meant as a barb. “It is a clerical fantasy to think we can bring the systematic change now called for with the kind of bishops who write monographs and drop mildly by when passing,” the Bishop of Ramsbury, Dr Andrew Rumsey, wrote. “I can’t be the only one asking themselves if they’re up to it.”
The 105th Archbishop of Canterbury inherited a Church in steady numerical decline, shrinking by about one per cent per year for the preceding decade, and, with the support of the Archbishops’ Council, had an energetic vision for reform. Given his work as a treasurer in an oil company, and following in the footsteps of an academic and poet, he was perhaps inevitably going to be described as bringing a corporate and technocratic approach.
Certainly, in his 12 years in office, the national church institutions looked for inspiration about reform to the business world — and, as it turned out, to business leaders whose record in their secular calling was later to come under criticism when it was asked (as it was later to be asked about the Archbishop by the Makin inquiry) what they knew when.
There was the report by Lord Green, a priest but also a former CEO of HSBC, setting out a programme for “talent management”; and the governance review by the Revd Paula Vennells, the former CEO of the Post Office (whom it was widely believed that the Archbishop had sought to succeed the Rt Revd Richard Chartres as Bishop of London). In addition to these, there was a £198-million programme of grants secured by competitive bidding from the dioceses.
Bishops now attended a leadership-development course with content such as “Applying concepts around value creation, value destruction and resource allocation to support the ministry and mission of the Church.”
But Archbishop Welby was more complex than merely a would-be CEO of C of E plc, as he was sometimes characterised. He was fascinated by the religious life, and invited both Chemin Neuf (a Charismatic Roman Catholic community) and young members of the new Community of St Anselm to live at Lambeth Palace. An Old Etonian whose candour could sometimes disarm critics, he talked frankly about his family history of alcoholism and his “black dog” of depression.
Three years after his enthronement, a DNA test suggested by a national journalist prompted an anxious check to ensure that ecclesiastical law no longer regarded illegitimacy as a bar to episcopal office. “They’ve got to know it’s a human being preaching to them,” Archbishop Welby told the Church Times in 2018, when asked about his openness. He was in his honeymoon period with the media.
ENTHRONED in March 2013, Archbishop Welby arrived enthusiastic and making self-deprecatory jokes, having risen swiftly through the ranks from parish priest to dean and then bishop. He was openly optimistic. “The ice is thawing; the spring is coming,” he told New Wine in 2016. But the idea that he could single-handedly resolve the Church’s problems was “barking mad”, he said.
A defining feature of his archiepiscopate was the Renewal and Reform programme — “the biggest reform of the Church since the mid-19th century”, he said — which set out to address the “existential crisis” of numerical decline, and addressed the Church’s structures and funding flows. “We can’t simply go on as we are, if we are to flourish and grow as the Church of England,” he declared. “Our call is not to manage decline.”
Richard WattArchbishop Welby interviewed in his study in Lambeth Palace in 2018, for an interview to mark five years in office
The tone was set by the chair of the Archbishops’ Council’s Finance Committee, John Spence, who lamented that, when it came to the distribution of central church funds, there was “no sense of accountability: the money is dished out in rather a sense that, this is your right, without any expectation of what it will achieve”. His speech setting out a vision to “return this Church to numerical and spiritual growth, and to return Christ to his rightful place — at the centre of this country, its conscience, and its culture” secured rapturous applause in the General Synod in 2014.
Among the goals was a 50-per-cent rise in ordinand numbers. The Strategic Development Programme, designed to secure the accountability desired, was expected to win 89,375 disciples between 2014 and 2021. The centre widely appeared to be increasingly directive. “You bid for what you think you’ll get a ‘Yes’ to, rather than what you need,” one Bishop commented. “More of the same” simply wouldn’t meet requirements. Church-planting, “new worshipping communities”, and diocesan reorganisation all opened the purse-strings.
With the Commissioners’ coffers boosted by impressive returns, swingeing cuts to clergy posts in the dioceses raised questions about the use of the Church’s wealth. A disconnect was noted between the ambitions of national strategies and the straitened circumstances of many dioceses and parishes. In 2021, the formation of a protest movement, Save the Parish, led by the Rector of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield, in London, the Revd Marcus Walker, was one of the most obvious results.
THERE could be an impatience in the Archbishop’s response to criticism, and a tendency by both Archbishops to put unhappiness about the direction of travel down to a misunderstanding. “We’ve both been parish priests, for goodness’ sake,” Archbishop Welby told the General Synod in 2021.
In fact, from his earliest days in office, he expressed a positive attitude to the local church. “There are 16,000 parishes, 9000 parish priests who are doing an absolutely superb job on the ground every day of the week,” he told LBC in 2013. “They are the people who will lead the Church into growth.”
The fresh emphasis on resourcing estates ministry — Renewal and Reform pledged a “bias to the poor” — and children’s and youth workers tended to secure less attention than the sums going to Evangelical resource churches. As collective anxiety and mistrust deepened in later years, it proved difficult to get a fair hearing for concepts such as the “mixed ecology”, which, in fact, had their roots in the report Mission-shaped Church, penned under his immediate predecessor.
The vision of a Church of “missionary disciples” had a longer lineage. “There will never be a conversion of England until every Christian disciple is equipped to share the good news of Jesus,” wrote the authors of Towards the Conversion of England, dedicated to the Archbishop’s hero, William Temple, in 1945.
FOR those who hold to the view that history is “one damned thing after another”, the Welby years supplied plentiful support. In the decade from 2013, there were four General Elections and six Prime Ministers. The UK left the European Union, experienced a global pandemic, and lost its longest-reigning monarch. It was a period of global terrorist attacks, in which Islamic State at one point controlled an area the size of Portugal, home to eight million people.
The Archbishop took to the national stage with enthusiasm — at a time when Vanity Fair observed that Old Etonians were once again centre stage in the national life in a way that they had not been since the 1960s. His pronouncements tended to be reassuring, confident that the country would weather whatever came next, with an appeal to its better angels, and an emphasis on the vital importance of “good disagreement”. It was a confidence that later held good, overall, for the Coronation, though he came unstuck with the innovation of a “homage of the people”.
AlamyThe Archbishop of Canterbury places St Edward’s Crown on the King, during the Coronation in May 2023
Having an Archbishop with experience of corporate life — whose dissertation was titled “Can companies sin?” — proved timely. Appointed to sit on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, he proved a shrewd interrogator, asking the Chancellor, George Osborne, about why he lacked the “will” to break up big banks.
Some of this work — the championing of credit unions and “war on Wonga”, sitting on the IPPR commission on economic justice — has since faded from view. But, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it impressed many. As austerity took hold and foodbanks expanded, the Archbishop was unapologetic about his “political with a small ‘p’” contributions.
The Guardian columnist Marina Hyde confessed to having a “bit of a crush”. A Financial Times interview concluded with the journalist “unexpectedly moved”, offering a prayer of thanks in the gardens of Lambeth Palace.
But political interventions — including his condemnation, during an Easter sermon, of the Government’s Rwanda policy for asylum-seekers — had plenty of detractors.
Against the backdrop of culture-war skirmishes — not as intense as in the United States, but gathering in heat — the Archbishop was denounced in some quarters as “woke Welby”. The Archbishops’ Council’s three-year spending plans included £190 million to support the Church in the transition towards Net Zero 2030, and £20 million for racial-justice initiatives (the Archbishop told the Synod in 2020 that the Church was still “deeply institutionally racist”).
In the wake of a study highlighting historic links with the slave trade, the Church Commissioners announced a £100-million “impact investment fund”, prompting — the Archbishop revealed — “hundreds and hundreds” of letters of complaint.
ACCUSATIONS in the right-wing press that the Archbishop had failed to talk about God, opting instead for political causes, glossed over his focus on evangelism, illustrated by the launch of the “Thy Kingdom Come” Pentecost novena, which was supported by Pope Francis.
Archbishop Welby’s Evangelical background showed in his fondness for testimony: talking about how faith had shaped his life, and candid about periods of suffering. His upbringing, in his own words, had been “chaotic, very scary, sometimes violent”. In an episode of Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, he described a grim Christmas Day when his alcoholic father — “always unpredictable, sometimes very full of rage and anger” — stayed in bed while his son searched for a sandwich in the fridge.
The Archbishop’s grief for his seven-month-old daughter who had died remained a “constant reminder of the uncertainty of life”, he told the programme. “The only certainty in life is Christ. Everything else is contingent.” When front pages announced that a DNA test had revealed that his father was, in fact, the late Sir Anthony Montague Browne, his response was both phlegmatic and powerful: “My identity is in Jesus Christ, not DNA.”
The Archbishop spoke of being dim, incompetent, and dogged by impostor syndrome, and of experiencing “self-imposed guilt”. He admitted to having a temper: outbursts were occasionally attested by those who had been on the receiving end. “I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified, and in weakness and fear and in much trembling,” he declared at his enthronement.
RODYCLOUD PHOTOGRAPHYThe crowd in Trafalgar Square at Thy Kingdom Come’s Pentecost event in 2019.
He often reminded audiences of the limitations of his archiepiscopal powers: “The big mistake in this role, which I’d sort of worked out before I came, but it has been amply confirmed, is: don’t waste time looking for levers to pull, because there aren’t any,” he told the Church Times, in a reflection on “responsibility without power” (Features, 16 February 2018). This was evidently a source of frustration, but also, to some, not the whole truth. There were critics who regarded him as only too successful in remaking the Church in his own image.
IN THE same interview, conducted after his first five years in office, the Archbishop did not equivocate when asked about the hardest part of his post. “Safeguarding,” he replied. “You’re dealing with the Church’s sin. You’re dealing with profound human weakness. You’re dealing with the consequences in damaged people, in people who’ve been terribly, terribly hurt.”
This was the year in which the first hearings of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse began, exposing decades of failings in the Church of England. The Archbishop was, he said, “ashamed of the Church”.
During his tenure, the number of employees on the National Safeguarding Team increased from one (part-time) to 55. On occasion, he was criticised for being too quick to push for action. Lord Carlile’s review of the handling of allegations against Bishop George Bell was critical of a “rush to judgment”. It was four years before the Archbishop withdrew a comment about the Bishop’s remaining “under a significant cloud” and apologised for his previous refusal to do so.
“The experience of discovering feet of clay in more than one person I held in profound respect has been personally tragic,” he commented in 2018, years before he would learn that two personal heroes — Jean Vanier and Mike Pilavachi — were themselves perpetrators of abuse. The Wilkinson review of the dismantling of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) highlighted the “extreme time pressure” under which it had been designed, “imposed principally by the Archbishop of Canterbury”, as a factor contributing to the débâcle. A former Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Revd Christopher Lowson, described himself as “bewildered” when he was suspended over a safeguarding matter in 2018, on the agreement of the Archbishop. It was almost two years before he was reinstated.
Ironically, it was an assessment of his own safeguarding practice which led to the Archbishop’s own reluctant resignation. Particularly noted was a 2017 Channel 4 interview about John Smyth’s abuse, in which the Archbishop appeared to distance Smyth from the Church of England.
RATHER than safeguarding, it was his handling of the Church’s divisions over sexuality which prompted the Archbishop to ask, late in 2023, whether he should resign before his planned retirement date. According to an account by the director of the Church Society, the Revd Dr Lee Gatiss, two people in the meeting of conservatives raised their hands.
Clergy who who taught “serious, soul-destroying error” ought to leave the Church, Dr Gatiss told the Archbishop, and be “disciplined by the Bishops, who promised to banish error at their consecration services”.
It was a conversation that conservatives are unlikely to have expected on the Archbishop’s arrival in office, when he described himself as “reasonably conservative”. During the 2016 Primates’ Meeting, he referred to the Church’s exemption from the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act as evidence that “our voice is still heard against the prevailing wind of our society”.
Lambeth PalaceArchbishop Welby, the Pope, and the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Rt Revd Dr Iain Greenshields, in South Sudan, in February 2023
In 2014, he warned in a phone-in on LBC Radio that permitting clergy to bless same-sex relationships would have a “catastrophic” impact on countries such as South Sudan. “I’ve stood by a graveside in Africa of a group of Christians who’d been attacked because of something that had happened far, far away in America,” he said. “What was said was that ‘If we leave a Christian community in this area’ — I am quoting them — ‘we will all be made to become homosexual; so we are going to kill the Christians.’ The mass grave had 369 bodies in it, and I was standing with the relatives. That burns itself into your soul — as does the suffering of gay people in this country.”
But the Archbishop was also conscious of a “revolution in the area of sexuality”, and the distaste with which the Church’s position was viewed by many. “Sometimes they look at us and they see what they don’t like,” he told the Synod in 2013. There was a growing momentum in the Church for change — a suitable challenge for a man fêted as a reconciler. There were “facilitated discussions”, “shared conversations”, and pleas for “good disagreement”. One booklet for participants contained a plea from Oliver Cromwell to “think it possible you may be mistaken”.
In the end, he himself appeared to have changed his mind. By 2023, and despite the pleas of conservatives, he was calling for the blessing of same-sex couples, so that they could feel that they were a “valued and precious part of the body of Christ”. There appeared to be little of his previous agonising when he set out his position on the podcast The Rest is Politics last year (News, 25 October 2024). Having once won a standing ovation at a leadership conference held by Holy Trinity, Brompton, he was now threatened with the formation of parallel structures by an alliance led by its former vicar.
THIS was not the only issue on which the Archbishop proved capable of a radical change in thinking. His suggestion in September that he “might as well go out with a bang rather than a whimper”, a reference to racial-justice work, might also apply to other areas. In 2013, he spoke of his regret at backing a Synod vote in support of an ecumenical accompaniment programme in Palestine and Israel. By 2024, several months into the Gaza war and on the receiving end of some stinging rebukes, he had charged Israel with “systemic discrimination” and warned that its government was “not above the law and must stop acting otherwise”.
Geoff Crawford/Church TimesArchbishops Cottrell and Welby at the meeting of the General Synod in Church House, Westminster, last February
But if conflicts internal and external tested the Archbishop, not all proved intractable. the settlement achieved over women bishops and driven by the Archbishop personally was largely recognised as a success. In 2013, there were just two minority-ethnic bishops in post; there are now nine. The consecration of the Bishop of Woolwich, in 2017, marked the first BAME episcopal appointment for 14 years. The Church’s leadership looks very different, and also behaves differently: it was previously unheard of a diocesan bishop in England to call for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s resignation.
A LASTING image of his time might be his celebration of the eucharist in the kitchen in Lambeth Palace on Easter Day 2020. The reaction to the move online during the Covid-19 pandemic — some celebrating an exciting opportunity, others devastated by being unable to communicate — put in stark relief the theological breadth of the Church, revealing a degree of mutual incomprehension. One young priest who left for the Roman Catholic Church spoke of the C of E’s lockdown response as demonstrating an “essentially incoherent” eucharistic theology.
At the online meeting of the General Synod that July, the Archbishop described questions about the closure of churches during the pandemic — when priests were banned from entering even to offer private prayer — “depressing and slightly surprising”. Some observers were shocked when ban was redefined retrospectively as “advice”. But, when a second national lockdown came into force, the Bishops offered more resistance. The Archbishop subsequently said that it had been wrong to go above and beyond the Government’s requirements. He spent time during the pandemic serving as a chaplain at St Thomas’s, praying with the dying.
Lambeth PalaceThe Archbishop of Canterbury’s service for Easter 2020 conducted online from his kitchen in Lambeth Palace
A review in 2024 of diocesan finances review revealed a bleak post-pandemic picture and warned of funding flows that were a “mystery to many”, contributing to “resentment and confusion”. Diocesan deficits hit £62 million in 2024 (23 held less than three months’ cash reserves). Giving was falling, and congregations were down 29 per cent on the 2015 figures. A poll of clergy by The Times in 2023 found that just 10.5 per cent expected church attendance to grow in the next decade.
Ten years after Mr Spence’s barnstorming speech, numerical analysis has raised questions about a programmatic approach to church renewal. Qualitative evaluations have underlined the strain for those in ministry caused by setting ambitious targets. A peak in vocations proved temporary, as numbers then tumbled; the “new disciples” reached through the £180-million SDF programme proved to be fewer than than one third of the target figure; and, amid a financial crisis for some colleges, reforms in ministerial education were found to have “significant weaknesses” (of which principals had warned).
The finding of the independent evaluation of SDF, that it had served as a “lightning rod” for a lack of trust in the Church, found echoes in other areas. The recent governance review diagnosed a “culture of mistrust which harms the reputation and effectiveness of the Church and diminishes its prophetic voice”, while a 2023 Synod report on trust detected a “viral sense of despondency” among clergy. It called for an account of the Church “that is so compelling as to dispel the implicit overarching narrative of decline”. This task will now fall to the Archbishop’s successor.
COMMENTS uttered in recent years suggest that the Archbishop has reflected on his legacy. “Am I going to be the one who they’ll say finished the Church of England off?” he asked the Radio Times in 2022. “None of us want to see the thing go down on our watch.”
The following year, he admitted, while “not sure I know what else could have been done”, he regarded further decline as “a personal failure”. It was a confession that others could have made. “A church . . . which faces decline in social influence and economic stability will be prey to potent collective anxieties,” the Revd Dr Margaret Whipp warned, in a theological reflection appended to a 2018 paper on clergy well-being. “Clergy who uncritically embrace a strong sense of responsibility for the thriving of church communities can be prone to corrosive fears of personal, and vocational, failure.”
But the sense of failure was mitigated by his acceptance that “in the end . . . the future of the Church, and its survival or otherwise, does not depend on archbishops. It depends on God and the providence of God.”
In 2019, the Archbishop told the Church Times of a priest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who had liberated him from anxiety about results. “Yes, I am accountable, and I will stand before God and be judged. And there will be all kinds of things, and part of it will be to be judged on . . . not on the graphs, but on who I was as Archbishop. That will be about relationships and love and holiness and lots of other things I’ve still got a lot to learn about.”
When the dust has settled from the manner of his departure, it will, perhaps, be the Archbishop’s humanity — and his readiness to hold it up, in all its complexity, for scrutiny — that will linger in the memory.