NOBODY must have to go away behind who they really are to serve the Church of England, the General Synod heard during a debate on encouraging more working-class vocations to ministry.
The debate on Friday was developed from a non-public member’s motion from the Revd Alex Frost (Blackburn), which was carried overwhelmingly last 12 months (News, 28 February 2025). The latest motion called on the Ministry Development Board to develop a national strategy for working-class vocations.
The debate began with a presentation from the Bishop of Barking, the Rt Revd Lynne Cullens, who gave quite a few examples of the bias and barriers faced by working-class people as they explored a calling to ministry.
Work to lift up leaders who looked just like the communities they served was each a “Kingdom and a missional imperative”, she told the Synod.
In an emotional end to her address, Bishop Cullens told the story of a single mother-of-three who had struggled for years to get through discernment, ordination, and curacy, battling quite a few obstacles, poverty, and ignorance — but who was eventually called to be the Bishop of Barking. The Synod stood to applaud.
Bishop Cullens concluded that the national strategy being drawn up was centred on enabling working-class leaders to thrive at every level of the Church without having to first “leave behind who they’re”.
The Bishop of Chester, the Rt Revd Mark Tanner, also from a working-class background, told members that a consultation had been held last 12 months to listen to what barriers still existed for people from families like his. “We heard those frustrations around discernment, vocations, housing, leadership progression — around a cultural disconnect where you never fully feel you belong.”
He said that there have been signs of hope in improved data collection and a latest advisory group; but the basic need was for more working-class representation in leadership, because “like attracts like.” Ultimately, nobody should should trade their accent or their community to flourish within the Church and be a witness to Christ, a carpenter from Nazareth.
Bishop Tanner closed with a plea to members to not let this work turn out to be enmeshed in culture wars or “playing off one group against one other”. The motion, he said, was about working-class people of each culture and ethnicity.
In a coded reference to the recent debates over Christian nationalism and the far Right, Bishop Tanner said that the Church must “not allow our faith to be recruited as an agent for division”.
During the next debate there was broad support for the motion and strategy. Many members told their very own stories of an uphill struggle in a middle-class- dominated culture.
Fr Frost, whose motion last 12 months had launched this project, told other members to return to their dioceses and demand that they participate within the consultation and national strategy, so that every one voices might be heard: “Working-class Christians outside of this chamber, go and tell your story,” he said.
Several speakers noted the high financial cost of coaching, especially for a candidate who was a parent or working part-time. The Archbishop of Canterbury said that a couple of quarter of UK employees usually worked shifts within the evenings or overnight, and plenty of of theme can be, by default, excluded from theological colleges and courses.
The Revd Chantal Noppen (Durham) spoke of cultural concerns: “embedded snobbery and Orwellian elitism” was rife, pressuring working-class people to try to change themselves to evolve to outmoded expectations of what a priest needs to be, she said.
An identical point was raised by the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, the Ven. Dr Rachel Mann (Manchester), who said that the middle-class members of the Church needs to be educated in how to not be “freaked out like people like me” — that’s, working-class individuals who offered a “disruptive” perspective.
Working-class ministers had been told off for wearing hooded jumpers or trainers, or told to undergo elocution lessons to shed their regional accents, the Revd Claire McArthur (Coventry) said. “I do know that I’m a superb priest. We aren’t an issue to be solved: we’re a present.”
The motion welcomed last 12 months’s consultation, called on the House of Bishops to handle “structural and cultural barriers to the flourishing of working-class ministers”, urged all dioceses and colleges to trace socio-economic data and monitor class representation, and endorsed the work under method to establish a working-class vocations strategy and advisory group.
The motion was carried overwhelmingly on a show of hands. It said:
That this Synod:
a) note the unanimous support given by this Synod in February 2025 to the Private Member’s Motion brought by the Revd Alex Frost calling for a national strategy for working-class vocations and ministry, and recognise that Synod has already agreed to “Commit itself to taking the obligatory steps to lift up a latest generation of lay and ordained leaders from estates and working-class backgrounds in any respect levels within the church” when agreeing to GS 2345 (point 5 within the motion);
b) welcome the consultation work that heard from working-class ministers, each lay and ordained, across the Church of England, acknowledging their voice and that the Church can and must do higher to receive their ministry, each now and in the longer term;
c) call on the House of Bishops to handle structural and cultural barriers to the flourishing of working-class ministers and their ministry in any respect levels, acknowledging the intersections with other underrepresented groups;
d) encourage the national church, dioceses and training institutions to totally adopt the usage of the of the recognised socio-economic background (SEB) data questions as an aid to monitoring progress on class representation;
e) endorse ongoing engagement with working-class ministers and other stakeholders for continuing the strategy development and the creation of a latest advisory group to oversee this, reporting to the Ministry Development Board (MDB).
