THE Archbishop of York, on the opening of the General Synod in York on Friday, addressed confusion in regards to the consensus of the Archbishops’ Council in its decision to disband the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB) last yr (News, 23 June 2023).
Before starting his presidential address, the primary item of business, Archbishop Cottrell said that he had made a mistake, last yr, when he had told the Synod that the choice by the Archbishops’ Council to disband the board and sack its members had been “unanimous” (News, 14 July 2023).
“It has come to my attention that once I spoke within the ISB debate on the July Synod in 2023 I mistakenly said that the choice by the Archbishops’ Council to terminate the contracts of the 2 remaining members of the ISB was unanimous,” he said.
Dr Sarah Wilkinson’s report on the demise of the ISB, which was published in December (News, 15 December 2023), drew on emails and interviews and recorded that the council had voted 11 to 4 to terminate the contracts of Dame Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves the subsequent day, with 4 members abstaining.
“Some members of the Council, including the Archbishops, wished to attend and never to proceed to a direct termination,” she wrote. “One member of the Council proposed a pause before the termination to see if some other way forward was possible.”
Archbishop Cottrell told the Synod on Friday that the session wherein he had made the remark last yr had been “heated and difficult”. “I spoke incorrectly, and because it’s been identified to me, I desired to take this chance to apologise and to place the record straight,” he said.
Before that session last yr, the Archbishop of Canterbury had said that “each Archbishops had wished to attend a bit”.
The next day, a Church House spokesperson had confirmed: “The Archbishops supported the unanimous decision to terminate the contracts of the Independent Safeguarding Board members,” and that “the selections of the Archbishops’ Council, as with every board of trustees, are collective” (News, 8 July 2023).
The same day, Archbishop Cottrell had said: “The decisions that [the Archbishops’ Council] took in getting here were unanimous.”
In his presidential address, Archbishop Cottrell referred to a letter sent to faith leaders by the now Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. “It is evident that he sees and desires to know more in regards to the impact people of religion have on communities today.
“Let’s be clear, we all know that politicians of all parties admire and covet the values that underpin our faith . . . that it’s our instinct to place the needs of others before our own.
“But that is where we may should be a bit more daring. We must say that these values that we hold dear, these values that shape our life and witness, they don’t exist in a vacuum. They come from and are shaped by beliefs and practices; what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, and what we do in response: the every day reading of scripture, the lifetime of prayer and worship, the iron rations of the sacramental life. Then these values then turn out to be real and turn out to be the lived outworking of a Christian life.”
