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On February 26th 2025, Modern Church and the Relational Church network held a joint online conversation called ‘Time for Change’. Three contributors, all members of the Modern Church Council, explored one change they would like to see. All three scripts are being published here as Modern Church blogs.
Rethinking Power and Governance in the Church of England
By Angela Sheard
The late Tony Benn, a politician, activist and broadcaster, was known for his belief that those in positions of economic, social and political power should always be asked five questions:
1) What power have you got?
2) Where did you get it from?
3) In whose interests do you use it?
4) To whom are you accountable?
5) How do we get rid of you?
Benn used to ask these questions everywhere he went – and his favourite out of all of them was perhaps number five. He said, “anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system”.
Although this may come as a surprise to some, the Church of England does not function as a democracy. The CofE is often described as ‘episcopally led and synodically governed’. By and large, our ordained leaders are not elected – they are appointed. However, governance in the church is generally done through elected bodies, ranging all the way from General Synod down to the church councils of individual parishes. In any case, I think Tony Benn’s five questions of democracy might be a fruitful starting point from which to interrogate leadership and governance across the church.
The prompt given to us today is ‘one specific way in which I think the CofE needs to change’. I think there is an urgent need for an interrogation of leadership and governance, as I have mentioned already, but I also think we need a radical reset of the way in which power is distributed across the church. My specific suggestion is that we should give more power to lay people at all levels of church governance. Operationally this would perhaps require systems which provide greater accountability for clergy, and which decisively give the responsibility for decision-making to elected bodies in the church. We should not be afraid to explore radical changes here. For example, what if ordained ministers didn’t get a vote at PCC meetings? What if disciplinary decisions were made by elected, trained and commissioned bodies of lay people?
This requires a shift in our understanding of the role of clergy within the church: what power should clergy have, and in whose interests should they use it? Instead of exercising individual oversight over parishes and dioceses (and everything in-between), could their primary role be to empower others to use their gifts and skills in a greater exercise of corporate oversight? Might they use the power given to them to call out inappropriate use of power by individuals in the church, thereby emphasizing the role of the corporate people of God?
As part of this shift we also need to consider how clergy are appointed and held accountable, and whether appropriate mechanisms should exist to remove us from office if necessary. How might the processes of appointing clergy (including bishops) be made more transparent and accountable? Would it help to make clergy employees in a secular sense? Or perhaps we should understand give congregations more power over the appointment of their minister?
I think the Church of England has much to learn in this area from our ecumenical colleagues, who have different approaches to oversight in the church. In my denominational ministry classes at college, I was really struck by the Methodist Church’s emphasis on corporate oversight, and the accountability mechanisms which sought to limit the amount of oversight held by individuals. This is reflected symbolically in the ordination of presbyters and deacons, which is in many ways done by the Conference – a representative, elected body which is the nearest equivalent of a bishop. The president of the Conference is an individual representative of this body – so when they ordain new presbyters they do so as a representative of the conference, in a role that lasts just one year.
Ultimately, much of what I’ve suggested today could be called ‘blue sky thinking’ – lots of work is needed to understand how we can best empower the corporate people of God and enable them to exercise oversight over the church as a whole. Nevertheless, I think this work is an essential response to the multiple failures of safeguarding and other abuses of power that have wounded our common life for so long. Although I started today with the words of Tony Benn rather than a text from Scripture, this work also has fundamental theological underpinnings in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the radical power-sharing arrangements of the early church. I think our task as the church today is to listen for what the Spirit is saying and to witness to this in our world. If we can empower more people to use the gifts they have been given, I believe we will better fulfil our calling as the people of God, and this will be reflected in how we structure our common life.
Angela Sheard will shortly be taking up her post as Anglican Tutor at the Queen’s Theological Foundation, having been curate at St Martin’s in the Fields, London
6 Comments
I think this is an excellent analysis of a very serious problem.
Bishops are a big problem in the Church of England. I come from a non episcopalian background where the local church held the power.
It is often said that diocesan bishops have morphed into chief executives rather than shepherds and this seems to me to be increasingly the case.
I do not think the C of E is likely to get its act together until the local church has more influence and the Bishops less. One way forward is to appoint bishops for a five year period or a maximum of 7 and then return them to parochial ministry. At least that would shake the system up.
From Anthony Woollard
Angela, as you know I endorse pretty much all that you say. I am sorry to have missed the online event, but look forward to your further inputs to the debate, and any practical guidance as to how to “say the unsayable” to clergy who are often all too insecure in their roles (I would not personally deprive them permanently of a vote on PCC, but agree that, like the rest of us, they should be prepared to “declare an interest” and stand back when appropriate). I hope that in your new role at Queens you will be able to inspire those in training with your more modest yet actually far higher vision of their calling.
I think you are right, there should be some kind of CofE national convention each year where ordinary parishioners can have democratic input into decisions the church is making eg on slavery reparations.
It is my long experience, in rural multi-parish benefices, that non-ordained people don’t *want* power. Many, many parishes don’t have churchwardens, or full PCCs, and vanishingly few have representatives on Deanery Synod – a place specifically created to provide representation. Maybe in urban settings, the ‘power’ of the clergy is a problem. Where I am, the problem is the opposite – the laity *want* the clergy to do everything and make all the decisions.
In the world you face tribulation but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. (John 16:33)
A consultation on the nomination of the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury is now getting under way. The words I’ve just quoted from St. John’s gospel seem curiously apposite, not only in regard to the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but to how the priestly vocation is to be thought of.
I think there are two distinct areas that are implicit in these words, those of the Church and those of the world. In one of her books, Maggie Ross, that great contemporary mystic, invites us to reconfigure the word ‘world’, wherever it appears in the gospels, as the ‘system’. On the one hand, there is the Church, as the body of Christ made visible in the outworking of its life in the people it serves, who serve it through worship Sunday by Sunday and often through the sacrificial giving of much of their lives, as is the case with certain clergy. On the other, over and against it, is the Church as ‘system’ or, to be more precise, as ‘organisation’.
So, we would do well to carefully mark the system aspect of the Church’s life while giving consideration to who should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury and to how clergy are appointed and deployed in the Church. As things stand at present, and as we have seen from the latest abuse revelations (there will surely be more forthcoming) its failure to love and serve its people in the way Christ has taught us, through the example of his own life and leadership, is the direct result of its increasingly organisational mindset. Being an effective organisation takes time and effort from the people who run it. As a result of this, the Church is increasingly making its appointments from people chosen for their competence and experience in regard to how systems (the world) work, so that the Church can become more ‘relevant’ and ‘missional’. In other words, so that the Church can become more in tune with the world of today, for which read, a more competent and efficient organisation.
This suggests that the system which the Church of England and the Church in Wales, where I come from, needs to give thought to is what kind of person is needed to lead it, at every level of its life? It will need people who are prepared to step out of that system, metaphorically and perhaps literally. In other words, people who have not have been seduced by status, popularity and power, as these are achieved through spending personal energy on tactically advancing oneself up the Church career ladder. They will not have courted popularity or pandered to the powerful. They will not be so overwhelmed by the system’s managerial politics that, no matter how hard they try, they have little or nothing left to give to the less visible, more sacrificial aspects of the priestly ministry; going the extra mile as listeners, as lovers of justice and learning, as people who simply walk humbly with their God and love their people.
The outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury will almost certainly have tried to be all these things, insofar as his position has allowed him to. He is a good man. But he is also an overworked man, coming from a high-level position in a global industry with all the inbuilt priorities that he will have imbibed on the way. It will not have been easy, or even possible, for him to transition to the sort of ministry I’ve just described. Vitally important things will have escaped his attention. In this respect, the system, which is the institutional Church as we know it, needs to re-think itself and to allow the Holy Spirit to search its mind and heart as it does this re-thinking. So the next Archbishop of Canterbury, and future clerics, might possibly be less experienced in a worldly sense, but more experienced in the matter of bringing about the Kingdom in God’s Church. Perhaps the monastery would be a good place to start looking for such people.
The above comment is from Lorraine Cavanagh