A letter within the Church Times from a frontline parish minister deserves to be at the highest of the agenda for the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) because it decides who needs to be the subsequent Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Rev James Dudley-Smith’s list of non-public and spiritual qualifications for the best candidate within the January 10 edition of the paper are value citing in full:
“Someone who has real experience of parish incumbency.
 Someone who knows that the Church of England is its local churches.
 Someone who could be glad to discard deferential titles and mitres.
 Someone who does the labor of following due process, or changing it by due process.
 Someone who doesn’t try to manipulate the Church of England.
 Someone who has not tried to impose a diocesan strategy.
 Someone who will teach the doctrine of Christ because the Church of England has received it.
 Someone in whom I can see Jesus.
 Someone who is just not in a position to make a text mean the alternative of what it plainly means.
 Someone who could be willing to receive the identical stipend as the remaining of us.
 Someone who would pray and work for more followers of Jesus.
 Someone who will do rather more church than politics.
 Someone who is just not omnicompetent — and knows it.
 Someone who has a track record of kindness to family and colleagues.
 I’ll keep praying.”
James serves as Rector of St John’s Church in Yeovil, Somerset, and is the son of the celebrated evangelical hymn author, Timothy Dudley-Smith (1926-2024), a former Bishop of Thetford in Norfolk.Â
In his Church Times letter, he gets his point across with powerful subtlety. The probabilities of a humble Christian, a faithful teacher of the biblical faith and a servant-hearted pastor, somewhat than a power-playing careerist, being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury within the contemporary Church of England are next to zero.
Save the Parish campaigner, Emma Thompson, put it well in her article in The Times newspaper, titled Justin Welby’s successor must halve the ‘upstairs church’, which was published on January 6 – the day he stepped down as Archbishop of Canterbury:
“The overriding necessity is to appoint a godly, unifying, humble person with the leadership skills to get a grip on a top-heavy bureaucracy.
“One difficulty is the small size of the sector, should you limit it to the 42 diocesan bishops and rule out those approaching 70 (clergy retirement age). Historically, episcopal appointments used to alternate between different wings or factions, which avoided narrowing the Church’s appeal and alienating potential supporters.
“However, it’s widely felt that Welby has ‘packed’ the bench of bishops with others who share his managerial kind of churchmanship. Many of the names bandied about as potential successors could be an unbalanced continuation from his wing of the Church.”
As CNC members gather under the chairmanship of Lord (Jonathan) Evans, a former director-general of MI5, to nominate to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer the subsequent Archbishop of Canterbury, they is likely to be advised to switch one in all Dudley-Smith’s points.
He says the best Archbishop of Canterbury shouldn’t be “in a position to make a text mean the alternative of what it plainly means”. It would arguably be higher to state that the candidate needs to be someone who is just not willing to twist the plain meaning of biblical texts.
The Book of Common Prayer’s Order for the Consecration of an archbishop or bishop states that the candidate have to be “ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word”.
Surely with the intention to refute heresy it’s mandatory to have a deep mental understanding of it. So, shouldn’t the best Archbishop of Canterbury be someone who could be intellectually in a position to promote persuasive heresy but spiritually and morally unwilling to accomplish that?
This Prayer Book Collect for an Archbishop at his consecration resonates strongly with the Dudley-Smith list of spiritual qualifications:
“Most merciful Father, we beseech thee to send down upon this thy servant thy heavenly blessing; and so endue him with thy Holy Spirit, that he, preaching thy Word, may not only be earnest to reprove, beseech, and rebuke with all patience and doctrine; but in addition could also be to reminiscent of imagine a healthful example, in word, in conversation, in love, in faith, in chastity, in purity; that, faithfully fulfilling his course, on the latter day he may receive the crown of righteousness laid up by the Lord the righteous Judge, who liveth and reigneth one God with the Father and the Holy Ghost, world with no end in sight. Amen.”
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
