SAFEGUARDING dominates the agenda for the primary three days of the upcoming General Synod session, a five-day meeting starting on Monday 10 February. The business will “help with the journey of improvement that the Church of England is on”, the secretary-general, William Nye, told a press briefing on Thursday.
In response to the Wilkinson (News, 11 December 2023) and Jay (News, 21 February 2024) reports, detailed proposals for a recent structural model of organisations to deliver and scrutinise safeguarding on behalf of the Church of England, published on Thursday, set out two possible models, which shall be put to the vote.
The first would see safeguarding officers currently working in dioceses, cathedrals and the national Church transfer to work for a recent organisation. The second would see diocesan and cathedral officers remain with their current employers but most national staff move to a recent body. In each cases, safeguarding work can be scrutinised by a second external body.
A motion responding to the Makin report (News, 7 November 2024) comes as early as Monday afternoon, with a presentation and debate on the proposed recent structures starting mid-morning on Tuesday and continuing into the afternoon if needed. The Synod may also be asked to approve recent safeguarding codes of practice, including guidance on managing allegations; and legislative business on Tuesday is safeguarding-related, around clergy risk assessments.
The lead bishop for safeguarding, the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, said: “Understandably, there’s considerable interest in our safeguarding work in the mean time, and in fact it’s vital that General Synod owns this work and makes its own views known.
“In the sunshine of the Makin review particularly, it’s vital that we recognise the pain of all victims and survivors living with a legacy of abuse. Such recognition is required within the context of each the widespread past failure inside the Church to reply well to disclosures of abuse, and in some instances of the deliberate cover-up of that abuse.
“We know that victims and survivors have been re-traumatised in recent months as further cases of abuse have been dropped at light. . . We must repent and act for change. I’m sure it should be a frank and difficult debate.”
Living in Love and Faith (LLF) doesn’t come to the Synod until Thursday morning, in the shape of a presentation with questions on the present work and progress. The Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Revd Martyn Snow, who’s leading the LLF implementation process, reiterated on the briefing that no formal decisions had been made.
A key thread of the bishops’ discussions had been around allowing the Synod to come back to the purpose where it could vote on a whole set of proposals “in what we were calling stand-alone but at the moment are calling bespoke services — but doing that along with the theological underpinning to all of that work”, he said. “And, secondly, to arrange the way in which for a transparent decision to be made about whether it is feasible to permit clergy to enter into same-sex civil marriages.”
Concern on the timescale to permit the requisite underpinning theological work meant that proposals would probably must now to come back to a later session of the Synod (News, 21 January) — something that he acknowledged can be “disappointing” to loads of people.
He said: “I’m very conscious from the conversations I’ve had in the previous couple of days that there are people who find themselves frustrated by that. Nevertheless, I do think it’s vital that we do have the requisite theological work such that this decision is something that may very well be owned by the entire Church.”
A PRIVATE member’s motion from the Revd Alex Frost (Blackburn) on Wednesday calls for a national strategy supporting people from a working-class background into ministry (Comment, 26 April 2024).
“I’m hopeful that this may very well be a a very good news, human story opportunity for the Church,” he said. “We just heard of two very vital pieces of labor there, but they’re examples of things which were around for a while, and I’m very keen to present this and and enable it to be moved on quite quickly.
“So, I’m asking for the Church to provide you with a technique inside a yr from the February Synod. It’s clear that there’s a drop in vocations within the Church of England. It’s clear that there’s a really much smaller ratio from working-class backgrounds, similar to myself and the parish that I represent here in Burnley. . . I’m hoping this may very well be an actual type of a positive thing.”
A motion from the Hereford diocesan synod on Friday morning invites the Synod to disperse the income from funds effectively transferred to the Church Commissioners because of this of dioceses taking up the associated fee of clergy pensions in 1997 — a settlement of £2.6 billion — directly and recurrently to dioceses and stipend funds, as part of the present and future Triennium funding agreements.
In doing so, “a future financing system can be achieved which might rebalance the church’s funds to reverse the widespread degradation currently being experienced by our parishes and the dioceses that support them and that’s undermining all our achievement of all of the intended outcomes of our Church’s churches agreed Vision and Strategy,” the background paper says.
It says that the variety of dioceses in deficit is increasing, with 18 in deficit in 2019 and not less than 35 who expected to be in deficit in 2024 (News, 20 June 2024). The financial crisis of dioceses has also been recognised to be a driver of the low numbers of vocations currently coming forward for ordained stipendiary ministry, it says. Vocations have fallen by 40 per-cent since 2019, with fewer than 350 ordinands starting training in 2024 compared with an original aspiration of 650.
On Tuesday, there shall be a take-note debate on possible changes to the voting procedures of the Crown Nominations Commission; a presentation affirming the Racial Justice Agenda; and an update on Sports and Wellbeing ministry.
Wednesday sees the ultimate drafting and final approval of the Clergy Conduct Measure, and Thursday a debate on the continuing work going down to enable the voice of young adults to “feed into the work of the national church”. The National Church Governance measure reaches its revision stage on Thursday. There is a presentation and debate on Thursday evening on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the worldwide prayer initiative Thy Kingdom Come.
Mr Nye acknowledged that, three years into the five-year cycle of a Synod, “business gears up . . . So we now have a really busy agenda indeed. There’s plenty of laws, there’s plenty of the Church’s secondary laws, there are proposals for reform, and a variety of areas of significant business . .
“It’s all serious in a way, although some is at all times joyful, and so much for the members of Synod to have interaction with.” This, he reminded people, would even be an unusual group of sessions, in that only one Archbishop shall be presiding (News, 12 November 2024).
