A DEBATE on the issue of mistrust within the Church of England was dominated by the problems that are causing divisions, most notably the Prayers of Love and Faith.
The Bishop of St Edmundsbury & Ipswich, the Rt Revd Martin Seeley, introduced the report, and in addition his colleague, Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, the Dean of the Business School on the University of Bristol, who has previously researched trustworthiness in a C of E diocese and worked with businesses on the query of trust. She had interviewed a variety of clergy on this.
Research had shown that higher levels of trust in organisations promoted higher flourishing and well-being. Trust was a present from a trustor to a trustee, and was inevitably uncertain and vulnerable, she said.
What builds high trust? Trustworthy behaviours at every level of systems and decision-making, Professor Hope Hailey said. Ability, benevolence, integrity, and predictability were core to establishing and increase trust.
It had turn into obvious in her interviews that major breaches of trust around racism and abuse within the Church had made some people despondent. Others complained about how these issues had been managed by the institution, one describing this as “the cover-up of the cover-up”.
Loyalty to a church tradition or tribe was felt to be more vital to some than loyalty to the most important institution. Younger clergy sometimes felt afraid to talk out and contradict their tribe’s leadership on critical issues.
Social media was also exacerbating the “toxicity” already present in the interior discourse of the Church, Professor Hope Hailey said. Furthermore, a culture of fragmentation and animosity had “infiltrated” the Church, others had said.
Bishops were seen as too distant, and were said to be elevated in an “almost messianic manner”, despite being revealed usually as human and flawed. Decisions were also believed to be managed from above, and never genuinely open, which also diminished trust.
“The crisis of trust can be in regards to the failure of the C of E to carve out a particular recent role in Twenty first-century society,” she said. But something more authentic was emerging, even when painfully.
Creating high trust within the Church would require more time together and creating “protected spaces for discussion” — something that had been a key a part of the lengthy debates over the ordination of ladies within the C of E, she said.
Professor Hope Hailey said that a final way of hurdling growing mistrust within the Church could be respecting those that had different views, and sharing a typical loyalty and obligation to the institution, nevertheless.
Joyce Hill (Leeds) said that the report felt overly “clerical”, without enough attention paid to the laity. If more work was done, could due weight be given to those that make up nearly all of the Church, she asked.
The Revd Christopher Blunt (Chester) said that the report didn’t mention justification or forgiveness from sin when it considered trust in Jesus.
Sam Atkins/Church TimesProfessor Veronica Hope Hailey
Dr Simon Eyre (Chichester) reiterated that not enough attention had been paid to the laity within the study, and questioned whether the sample size was large enough.
Professor Hope Hailey said that lay people had been included, but agreed that more might be done on this. The sample size was small, however it was appropriate for this sort of pilot qualitative study, she argued. She wanted the Synod to present guidance on which areas it desired to be explored in greater depth, with larger samples.
Bishop Seeley clarified that those interviewed were not only “a bunch of my mates” but a gaggle suggested by other bishops, most of whom he had never met before. Issues of forgiveness didn’t emerge through the interviews, he said, but this was only noticed late within the day, and there remained work to be done in further exploring this.
The Revd Dr Ian Paul (Southwell & Nottingham) said that trust within the House of Bishops was low, and asked when the House would address mistrust on its agenda.
The Archdeacon of Liverpool, the Ven. Miranda Threlfall-Holmes (Liverpool), asked whether there was any metric used to measure the extent of trust in an organisation, and, if that’s the case, how the C of E scored as compared to other institutions.
Dr Janette Allotey (Chester) asked whether an independent qualitative researcher might be hired to make sure an absence of bias in sampling.
Alison Coulter (Winchester) said that accountability was needed for trust, but that accountability was often unclear within the Church. Could this be explored in the subsequent phase of research?
Bishop Seeley said that the House did must pursue this query of trust soon, but that, first, the trust group should provide you with some practical proposals which might be considered by the bishops. He said that Professor Hope Hailey was entirely independent of the Church.
Professor Hope Hailey said that it was increasingly routine for organisations to measure trust in themselves, mostly through an worker attitude survey. In her earlier diocesan research, clergy had used the 4 facets of trustworthiness to ask their congregations how they measured up. It could be possible to create a survey on the identical material to attract up qualitative data within the C of E.
Accountability was a core a part of trust, and was often manifested by leaders’ being held to account by bodies reminiscent of the Synod. The indisputable fact that the Synod existed, and yet mistrust continued, meant that it might be profitable to explore this query further. Nothing might be 100-per-cent transparent in any respect times, for everybody, which was why trust was required, she said.
Bishop Seeley said that he had found the work difficult from the outset, because it revealed widespread concerns about breaches of trust across the Church.
“It has been difficult for me as a bishop to read the interviews,” he said. It had challenged his own behaviour, uses of power, and shortcomings in diocesan leadership, he said.
To think about Jesus was to trust him, Bishop Seeley continued, who then called them to like one another, which was an indication of his trust in them. This was the “golden thread” that ran through the research. The “patchy but pervasive mistrust and suspicion across the Church” had contributed to issues around abuse, safeguarding, and Living in Love and Faith (LLF), he said.
Untrustworthy behaviour fed distrust; there needed to be more collegiality and mutual accountability, perhaps in making deanery chapters safer spaces by which to be honest. “How can we rebuild trust to give you the chance to work together for the sake of the gospel?” he concluded.
Peter Adams (St Albans) said that the agenda for the Synod bore witness to the “haemorrhaging of trust” within the Church. He believed that the restoration of trust in any community was costly and time-consuming. “We have gotten to commit 120 per cent to the duty,” he said. A technique of truth and reconciliation might help the C of E to re-establish trust.
Rebecca Hunt (Portsmouth) said that it was “regrettable” that the document spoke of various theological traditions within the Church, provided that the canons and formularies were clear. She said that she had lost trust within the Church, due to a “lack of transparency” within the Living in Love and Faith journey, and accused the bishops of pursuing a “dishonest and unacceptable” technique to implement stand-alone services of blessing for same-sex couples.
Ruth Abernethy (Channel Islands) intervened on some extent of order to suggest that Ms Hunt’s speech was not on the subject of the controversy. This was dismissed.
Ms Hunt continued to say that trust couldn’t be restored without retaining the doctrine on marriage, or a two-thirds majority vote to alter teaching.
Robert Hammond (Chelmsford) said that he welcomed the report, and paid tribute to the work of Professor Hope Hailey. The report, he said, contained theological and academic rigour, and he hoped the Synod would take the work forward.
On Zoom, the Revd Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff (Rochester) picked out a line within the report which says that “the first disposition of the Christian leader . . . is to be one among service.” There was a danger, she suggested, of this attitude’s “contributing to a culture of stress and burnout in our Church”, and the way in which that it played out could find yourself disempowering leaders, particularly women leaders.
Bishop Seeley said that the Church needed change which couldn’t be easily implemented by one other report or easy reforms. “It’s going to require some real intent,” he said.
The Synod took note of the report.
Prudence Dailey (Oxford) then moved an extra motion, which welcomed the acknowledgement of a breakdown of trust, but said that the report dwelt only on the symptoms of broken trust reasonably than the causes. Her motion requested that the working group explore the underlying reasons behind breakdowns of trust between parishes and clergy, between clergy and bishops, and people brought on by the national Church’s handling of the Covid pandemic. She quoted one among the LLF pastoral principles of “taking note of power”, and said that it was vital to discover specific actions which had caused a breakdown of trust.
In response, Bishop Seeley said that he was “ambivalent” and “agnostic” about Ms Dailey’s motion, and that investigations into failures of trust were already happening. He ultimately decided to support the amendment.
Amanda Robbie (Lichfield) supported the motion, and suggested that the impact of the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) had been ignored within the report. Could the bishops reflect on apologise for the CDM?
Gabriel Chiu (Liverpool) backed the motion, referring to Acts 4, by which believers shared all that they owned together because they trusted one another. But this was shredded by the dishonesty and lack of religion of Ananias and Sapphira in the next chapter. There could be similar “false faith” within the Church, he warned, things which could be fatal to the institution. He urged people on the working groups to point out the Church where its false faith lay.
The debate was then adjourned because it had run out of time, and the subsequent morning Mr Hammond, who chairs the Business Committee, said that, because this was a following motion, it couldn’t be rescheduled for this group of sessions, but could be considered for further debate in February 2025.
