The new Archbishop of Canterbury must let go — and trust clergy to do what’s best
This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
The selectors of the Archbishop of Canterbury are settling down to interview the shortlisted candidate at the end of September. As they work their way through the HR-heavy set of Person Specifications and Key Responsibilities, I would like them to hold in their mind the question of chocolate biscuits.
Not just because they’re nice but because they have become a flashpoint in the ongoing struggle by the central authorities in the church to wrest independence of thought and action from the parishes on the ground.
Last month an article came out in the New Statesman laying out the state of the Church of England as it comes to choose a new Archbishop of Canterbury. In it the battle over the way the national church is spending the £11.1 billion left to the church as a permanent endowment to fund poor parishes came to the fore. This endowment has recently been taken by the centre and eked backed to dioceses and parishes by way of grants (providing the desperate recipients dance to the tune of the money-givers).
“Those who control national financing,” wrote Tim Wyatt, a religious affairs correspondent, “have bridled at the calls to hand out millions of pounds with no conditions attaches, as some bishops are now demanding. ‘We can’t just dole out money and everyone just spend it on what they fancy… chocolate biscuits after church,’ scoffed the chair of the Archbishops’ Council, Alison Coulter, who sits on the grant-making committee.”
Now Alison Coulter, who is a very nice lady, meant this – I’m sure – humorously. But many a true word is said in jest and here we have so many of the fights in the CofE boiled down. Or cooked up. Or whatever one does to biscuits.
The first is that there is a genuine belief in the centre that they know best. That the optimal way to run St Mary’s, Snodhampton is understood better in Church House Westminster than in the Snodhampton Rectory. This position was expressed perfectly by the Bishop of Blackburn at General Synod when he said, “I don’t want no-strings subsidy for the diocese of Blackburn because that would encourage torpor and disincentivise missional imagination.”
Never mind buying chocolate biscuits, we now have the vision of the Rector of Snodhampton lying on a sun lounger drinking piña coladas and absolutely refusing to take any act of Divine Worship unless induced by the tantalising prospect of applying for a grant from the all-knowing and all-wise Strategic Mission and Ministry Investment Board.
This is at the heart of everything. Do we actually trust the people and the clergy of our parishes to know how to use their resources well? Do we let them decide how to spend their own money? Do we leave them alone to manage their own volunteers, or their building? Do we trust them to understand the relationships built up in a community over generations. If we do, then we need to make sure that they have enough resources and can get on with the job with as little reference to lanyard-wearing clipboard-wielding managers as possible. Let my people go, as God said.
And if we do let them get on with it, we might find that the answer genuinely might be chocolate biscuits. That is what makes Mrs Coulter’s comments so instructive, because it suggests that the view from Westminster doesn’t take in quite how important sharing coffee and biscuits is on the ground. A good hour of socialising binds together the community that gathers at church and helps bring others in who might never have otherwise darkened the door. It might be coffee and biscuits, or it might be a glass of wine, or forming a football team.
Each community is different and needs different things, and in St Mary’s Snodhampton it might be a £2.40 pack of Fox’s half-coated chocolate cookies
There are thousands of ways little parishes and big parishes and Anglo-Catholics and Charismatics and the stalwart old Highchurchmen and the Middle of the Road churchpeople have found to bring people together and bring people to Christ. Each community is different and needs different things, and in St Mary’s Snodhampton it might be a £2.40 pack of Fox’s half-coated chocolate cookies.
And the torpor the Bishop of Blackburn talks of might not be idleness, or even a lack of incentive to fill out a grant form. It’s quite likely to be depression. 36 per cent of clergy are assessed as having probable or possible clinical depression, which must be set against a national average of 16 per cent. This is a catastrophic figure and should pull everyone in the central church up short. There are many factors in this but giving the impression that we clergy are trusted and valued would go a long way to helping redeem this.
Soon we will have a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Whoever he or she is will have a monumental challenge. But one thing the new Archbishop could do is trust the people and clergy on the ground; let go of the power to control what they do and how they do it; show that they are loved. We need a pastor not a manager, and the kind of pastor who would understand why some parishes really need some love, some coffee, and some decent chocolate biscuits.
