WITH three years to go until her retirement, the brand new Archbishop of Wales, the Most Revd Cherry Vann, spoke this week concerning the labor ahead to vary the culture within the Church in Wales.
Her appointment follows the retirement of her predecessor, the Rt Revd Andrew John, within the wake of a Visitation at Bangor Cathedral and the announcement of a “cultural audit” of your entire church by the Representative Body (News, 4 July).
As Bishop of Monmouth, she succeeded the Rt Revd Richard Pain, whose long absence and subsequent retirement (News, 17/24 December 2021) was the topic of an inquiry that described events within the diocese as a “tragedy”, wherein careers were “damaged and reputations left ruinous” (News, 6 May 2022).
Speaking to the Church Times on Wednesday, Archbishop Vann said that, within the wake of the inquiry’s publication, not enough had been done to tackle the cultural issues identified. The review, published in 2021, describes “a story of individuals attempting to do the best thing but tying themselves in knots after they fail to revisit poor decisions and avoid risk to the extent that they create more of it”.
While recent events across various dioceses and cathedrals were “unique episodes”, there was “something across the culture within the Church in Wales that has perhaps allowed or enabled them to occur”, Archbishop Vann suggested. These included an absence of transparency, openness, and honesty, an absence of accountability, and “not enough scrutiny or oversight”, she said. “There’s been a fear around raising concerns, and the implications of that for the people concerned.”
Her time in Monmouth had underlined the importance of “being honest concerning the situation that we discover ourselves in”, she said. “It’s about setting a tone: making it very clear what the expectations are when it comes to behaviour and when it comes to doing things properly, having proper governance procedures in place, having proper appointments procedures in place and constructing those levels of trust between myself and the clergy here.
“I used to be very clear, in the event that they didn’t understand what was happening or why I had said what I did, or they didn’t agree with what the diocese was doing, I encouraged them to contact me, and so they did.”
Changing the culture was, she said, “not something that I can do by myself, but I do should lead it and do should set very clear expectations”.
“I even have to model it myself and it’s going to take some time but I feel we’ve got a probability now to do some really good work across the provinces to be certain that all six dioceses are in a superb place.”
Between 2020 and 2023, Monmouth diocese underwent the pastoral reorganisation of 121 parishes into 16 ministry areas. This followed publication of the Harries report in 2012, which concluded that the parish system in place was not sustainable (News, 11 March 2022). Its implementation has been contested (Letters, 18 March 2022). Amid similar moves by Church of England dioceses, a review of the Mission and Pastoral Measurem published by the Church Commissioners in 2021 said: “Anecdotal evidence from Wales suggests a super-parish type model has not worked well, but there’s an absence of hard data.”
This week, Archbishop Vann defended the model as “one of the simplest ways of securing the lifetime of most of our churches . . . and one of the simplest ways of using the resources we have now at the moment”. She spoke of the importance of team-working across churches, clergy, and laity, and of the model being “being bottom-up, not top-down”.
“We may have to shut some churches, that’s inevitable,” she said. “But a minimum of with this model every church gets a eucharist a minimum of once a month, a few of them get twice a month, a few of them get 4 times a month. We encourage laypeople to tackle ministries and to guide worship themselves; so it feels to me rather more just like the body of Christ working together, relatively than a hierarchical model where the clergy do the whole lot and the laity tag along and maybe help or perhaps resist.”
There was still “an extended technique to go” in Monmouth, she said. But “I feel we’re in actually quite a superb place now and persons are beginning to catch the vision and are beginning to recognise that their little church is a component of something greater that isn’t going to gobble them up, that is definitely going to support them in what they’ll do of their communities.” It wasn’t possible for each church to have their very own vicar, she said, “because we don’t have enough vicars”.
She continued: “I’ve made it absolutely clear I’m not about closing churches. I feel churches are absolutely vital of their local communities and stand as a extremely necessary sign and symbol.”
Archbishop Vann’s appointment was heralded within the press as the primary time that a lady and someone in a civil partnership had been appointed Primate within the British Isles.
“I don’t wish to play those things down, because I understand how necessary they’re to women, and other people in civil partnerships and civil marriages, and people who find themselves a part of the LGBT community,” she said. “It is very large, and I do understand that.
“But I’m absolutely clear that that’s not the rationale why I used to be elected to this role. People have seen what I used to be capable of do in Monmouth, and think that’s something that the Church in Wales needs at the moment and that I’ll find a way to guide that change across the province, as I even have done across the diocese. There is more to me than being a lady and a lesbian in a civil partnership.”
Archbishop Vann has been in a relationship with Wendy Diamond for 30 years and in a civil partnership since 2015. Until 2020, she spent 30 years in ministry within the diocese of Manchester.
“I wasn’t courageous enough once I was in England to be out,” she said. “I lived in fear, like a number of gay clergy. . . I used to be petrified of being outed or on the front page of the local newspaper. So, I kept it very quiet and we lived a really private life. I got on with my ministry and Wendy didn’t feature in any respect.
“It was once I got here to Wales and I assumed ‘I can’t go on like this any more. They should know that, if I come to Wales, I’m coming as any individual in a civil partnership.’ I used to be told that will not be a problem, so I went ahead with the nomination and I discovered it, on the entire, to not be a problem.
“I even have felt extraordinarily welcomed for who I’m, and Wendy comes with me; she could be very welcome within the churches that we go to. . .
“I suppose that there are individuals who struggle with it, and I do know that there are some clergy across Wales who find it really difficult to simply accept the indisputable fact that I’m in a civil partnership; but, on the entire, it’s been a totally liberating experience, and I can’t inform you what a difference it has made to Wendy, who not has to pretend that she doesn’t exist, but can just be. We are only who we’re.”
For some people, she said, her being English and unable to talk Welsh was more necessary than her gender or sexuality. She was “very mindful” of being English, she said. “There’s an extended history here. The Welsh feel very ‘done-to’ by the English, feel very marginalised, and so they have needed to fight for his or her identity and their culture and their language. . . I feel that’s partly why they’ll embrace me as being different, as being also a part of a marginalised group. . .
“There’s nothing I can do about being English except to actually honour the Welsh identity, and the Welsh culture and language, as best I can.”
The Church in Wales reported 26,000 worshippers in 2018 before the Covid-19 pandemic. As Bishop of Monmouth, Archbishop Vann warned that many congregations “have few, if any, members under 60: the lifetime of the Church doesn’t look sustainable beyond a decade or so”.
“I feel our hope must be in God,” she said this week. “I’ve said to people here that we will not be here to save lots of the Church in Wales. The Church is God’s Church and we just should not be anxious on God’s behalf because God is sort of able to saving his Church, if that’s what he chooses to do. . .
“It’s very easy to think all of it relies on us and we just should work harder, and we beat ourselves up for not being this, that, or the opposite. It’s counterproductive. We are suppose to be a joyful people and a hopeful people, and that’s what I attempt to model.”
On school visits, she had noticed “extraordinary interest” from young individuals who had had no contact with the Church and who had asked “really deep and probing questions on faith and God and prayer”, she said. “It warms my heart, really; I feel, ‘Well, God is at work.’”
In her own childhood, she had been “deeply spiritual” and “deeply introverted”, and spent a number of time alone in nature, where she had a “really strong sense of God’s presence”, she said. This was also the case in church, where she was “captivated by the drama of the liturgy”, and was “very fortunate to have a splendidly saintly parish priest, who really nurtured my faith”.
She recalled: “Ironically, I realised, or learned, once I was ordained deacon that he was against the ordination of girls; but I never knew that, he never let that on, he was at all times an encourager.”
