The Church of England is one step closer to appointing its first female Archbishop of Canterbury now that the Bishop of Norwich, Graham Usher, has ruled himself out.
As a member of the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) for the See of Canterbury, which is as a consequence of have its first meeting in May, Bishop Usher is ineligible for the post. After an election by the House of Bishops, he joins the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, because the second episcopal member of the Canterbury CNC.
Bishop Usher said last week: “Despite speculation in recent months, I even have felt no sense of inner calling to be Archbishop of Canterbury. What has remained constant is God’s continued faithful call to serve the people and parishes of the wonderful diocese of Norwich, in addition to the national and international environmental roles I even have, all of which bring me much joy.”
The road to Canterbury is subsequently now open for the feminine front-runner, the Iranian-born Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani.
Her probabilities of being appointed to Canterbury this autumn got a big boost in January when the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, ruled herself out in a television interview.
In an interview with ITV Meridian after the publication of her memoir, The Girl from Montego Bay, the C of E’s first female black bishop said: “You are definitely not the subsequent Archbishop of Canterbury. Who of their right mind would need to tackle a task like that and specifically how we have now just treated our Archbishop?”
She said she didn’t consider Justin Welby must have resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury after the publication last November of the Makin Review into the John Smyth abuse scandal: “I didn’t want Archbishop Justin to resign. I’m very sad that he has resigned. I feel that if we are usually not careful what we have now done is to scapegoat one individual.”
Bishop Francis-Dehqani became a diocesan bishop in 2021, seven years after the then recent Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, had managed to steer General Synod to conform to women bishops. Like other ambitious female bishops corresponding to the Bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, she is just not among the many first generation of ladies bishops allowed into the House since 2014 and so doesn’t have a way of owing her position to male patronage.
She is a penetrating critic of the ‘Vision and Strategy’ programme which the Archbishops’ Council has been spearheading to attempt to reverse the C of E’s numerical decline through glitzy church growth initiatives.
In her plenary lecture last September on the Church Times Festival of Preaching at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge, she said: “The language of Vision and Strategy risks ignoring the fact of frailty, brokenness, sin – all of which may in fact be redeemed, however it risks missing the blessings in that which is small and vulnerable and marginal. It leaves us relying heavily on our own strength, as a substitute of remembering that all the pieces will depend on our faithfulness and our reliance upon God.”
Breath of fresh air though she is in some ways, it is tough to explain her as a faithful teacher of the normal Christian faith because she supports the revision of the biblical sexual ethic. In successive votes at General Synod since February 2023, she has consistently backed the introduction of services of same-sex blessings in parish churches.
It is an enormous thing for the Church to desert its traditional sexual ethic. Witness the chaos that the abandonment of the Christian sexual ethic has caused in British society for the reason that advent of the permissive society within the Nineteen Sixties. Does the Church actually need to see the broken lives that this moral mayhem has unleashed replicated in its congregations?
If as seems likely the Canterbury CNC does select her, I’m struggling to see how she could faithfully obey this exhortation within the Book of Common Prayer’s Order for the Consecration of an Archbishop or Bishop, because the Bible is handed to the candidate: “Give heed unto reading, exhortation, and doctrine. Think upon the things contained on this Book. Be diligent in them, that the rise coming thereby may be manifest unto all men. Take heed unto thyself, and to doctrine, and be diligent in doing them: for by so doing thou shalt each save thyself and them that hear thee. Be to the flock of Christ a shepherd, not a wolf; feed them, devour them not. Hold up the weak, heal the sick, bind up the broken, bring again the outcasts, seek the lost. Be so merciful, that ye be not too remiss; so minister discipline, that ye forget not mercy: that when the Chief Shepherd shall appear ye may receive the never-fading crown of glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
