A SURVEY to explore trust and trustworthiness inside the Church of England has been cancelled, the episcopal lead for the relevant task group, the Bishop of Peterborough, the Rt Revd Debbie Sellin, has announced.
Last yr, members were told that the Trust Task Group had invited Professor Richard Jackson of the University of Bath to assist to design a survey to “widen the range and number” of individuals feeding into the research on trust, as requested by the Synod. This followed a report that identified a have to “repair and preserve trust within the Church’s organisation and structures” (News, 24 June 2024).
In an update published with the General Synod papers last week, Bishop Sellin announced that the Task Group had “advised to cancel this survey and deal with repair strategies, which the House of Bishops and Archbishops’ Council has accepted . . . The key reason for this alternative is the conclusion that running such a survey is unlikely to inform us anything recent and should do more harm than good — to all of us within the Church of England that we seek to serve. I recognise some may disagree with this reasoning.
“We know we now have an issue here — an issue of distrust that has been highlighted in General Synod again and again. If the survey will foster distrust further, its profit doesn’t seem price the fee.”
By the tip of this yr it is predicted that a full report of the findings of the research to this point, with supporting theology, might be published, “focussed on trust and trustworthiness repair strategies”.
