The past triennium (2021-2023) has seen more reports published by Commissions on social/political/ethical issues established by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York than any previous three years of Anglican history. Even if there had been no record breaking, this does seem a remarkable turn of events. Yet how many people within the Church of England, let alone beyond it, are aware of this productive period of engagement by the Archbishops with some of the thorniest social problems facing England, and indeed, the whole of the United Kingdom? The mainstream media do not seem to have been inclined to give the Commissions and their reports much publicity. The Archbishops’ reports are serious and well researched pieces of work, and it may be that specialist agencies and think tanks, and public bodies too, have taken notice and will respond positively, if slowly, to some of the ideas presented. As a means of generating public debate on key issues, however, these Commissions do not seem to have fulfilled the hope placed in them.
The purpose of this article is not to examine these reports in any detail but to reflect on their very existence, and what they (and the level of response) tell us about how the Church of England now engages nationally with social issues, and whether it is significantly different from its practice in most of the decades since the Second World War. Has there been a discernible change in the reception of such work by the UK Government and wider society, let alone within the Church of England herself?
First, it may be helpful to list the Commissions to which I refer, since even readers of Crucible may not be familiar with all of them.
The report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Housing, Coming Home, was published in February 2021.¹ It offers a comprehensive
analysis of the problems in housing, especially in the provision of
genuinely affordable housing, and illustrates how the Church of
England, particularly at parish level, has already contributed to
finding solutions. Its recommendations (more are addressed to the
Church than the Government) build on wide reflection on the issues
themselves and these practical examples of possible solutions.
The Archbishops’ Commission on Social Care published its
report, Care and Support Reimagined: A National Care Covenant
for England, in January 2023. As its title indicates, it called for a
National Care Covenant, setting out the rights and responsibilities
of national and local government, communities, families, and
citizens. Although there are detailed ‘suggested actions’ rather
than recommendations, it is the proposal for the Care Covenant
which stands front and centre in the report. While churches and
communities would be essential contributors to the Covenant, it
would need wider buy-in from Government if it was to be effective.
In April 2023 the Archbishops’ Commission on Families and
Households issued its report, Love Matters. The Commission was
charged to offer ‘practical and deliverable ideas on what enables
families and households to thrive and prosper as the cornerstone of
every community in our society’. Recommendations are addressed
separately to dioceses, the national Church institutions and the
Government. The need for strong links between statutory and
voluntary agencies and the churches (and other faith communities)
is recognised. This report was the subject of a debate in the House
of Lords in December 2023, sponsored and introduced by the
Archbishop of Canterbury.
A fourth Commission with a rather different character is the
Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice which has been
established for a three year period and is charged to report to the
Archbishops every six months with recommendations to help
the Archbishops fulfil their commitments to identify, respond to,
and root out systemic racism in the Church. Its third report was
published in September 2023.
Its reflections and recommendations are focused entirely on
the Church of England, although the place of the Church in wider
society and its capacity to influence, and be influenced by, wider
societal issues and attitudes means that it does not seem an entirely in-house exercise.
There have been many other Commissions established by both
Archbishops in the past 70 years, but most of them have been
on issues concerning the domestic and ecclesiastical life of the
Church of England rather than wider social issues. For example,
there have been Archbishops’ Commissions² on The Ministry of
Healing (1958); Redundant Churches (1960); Christian Doctrine,
and specifically the matter of Subscription and Assent to the 39
Articles (1968); Church and State (1970); Church Music (1992);
Cathedrals (1995); and the Organisation of the Church of England
(1999). Only the Archbishops’ Commission on Rural Areas (1991),
published as Faith in the Countryside, and a counterpart to the
Faith in the City report seems an exception, although the report on
Church and State in 1970 was certainly of wider relevance to society
at large.
It may seem surprising that Archbishops’ Commissions in the
past were far more ecclesiastically focused, given that the Church
of England is frequently criticised nowadays for an obsession with
internal issues, and challenged to engage with the world around
it. Yet, as the response to the recent Archbishops’ Commissions
illustrates, neither the Church of England herself nor wider society
seem to have been energised when the leadership of the Church
does exactly what many demand.
Prior to these recent Commissions, there have been many reports
on social, political and ethical issues from the Church of England in
the past 60 years, but they have not usually been sponsored by the
Archbishops. Take, for example, The Church and the Bomb, a report
published in 1982.³ This came from a working party chaired by the
then Bishop of Salisbury, John Austin Baker, and established by
the Board for Social Responsibility of General Synod. When it was
discussed in the General Synod in February 1983, the debate was
broadcast live on BBC2, such was the level of interest on issues
related to nuclear weapons and Christian conscience. The renewed
vigour in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at the time, and
the protests by women at Greenham Common where cruise missiles
were based, gave this report a timeliness which helped to ensure
extensive media coverage. The quality of the report (reflected in
the fine Synod debate) was widely recognised, and I recall much
discussion about it in the deanery where I served at the time, both at Chapter and Synod, and at parish level too.
The significance of The Church and the Bomb did not depend
upon the authority of the Archbishops for it to be regarded as a
contribution from the Church of England to a keenly contested
national debate. Indeed, the Board for Social Responsibility was
an important body within the national Church, and many of its
reports gained very wide attention. On Dying Well, the BSR report
on euthanasia published in 1975,⁴ and subsequently updated and
still in print, remains, nearly four decades later, a useful guide to
the fundamental arguments on both sides in relation to assisted
dying.
Something to Celebrate, a later BSR report published in 1995⁵
on ‘valuing families in church and society’, generated much more
attention than the recent Archbishops’ Commission on Families
and Households. However, the response to Something to Celebrate
in the media revealed a stance, particularly in the popular press,
which was more critical of the Church of England herself. The
suggestion within the report that cohabiting couples should
no longer be described as ‘living in sin’ was condemned in some
editorials as the Church of England failing to uphold traditional
values. The media storm was such that it obscured wider discussion
of the report’s recommendations and focussed attention on what
was little more than a passing comment. So great was the furore
that it was mentioned in obituaries of Bishop Jim Thompson, the
chair of the working party, when he died in 2003.
This brief reflection on just a few of the Board for Social
Responsibility’s many reports in the four decades of its life
indicates that they were regarded as coming from an official, and
largely well regarded, if sometimes controversial, body within the
Church of England. The Board for Social Responsibility (BSR) had
been established in 1958 as an Advisory Committee of the then
Church Assembly. Its purpose was ‘to promote and co-ordinate the
thought and action of the Church in matters affecting family, social
and industrial life’ and it replaced two earlier central Church bodies
– the Church of England Moral Welfare Council and the Social and
Industrial Council. The Moral Welfare Council had its diocesan
counterparts, involved in adoption and care of unmarried mothers,
including accommodation for the latter. From the 1960s onwards
these homes closed and adoption work decreased, but a network of social engagement remained in the dioceses. Diocesan boards or
councils of social responsibility were created, largely reflecting the
national model. The vast majority of them had salaried advisers,
both ordained and lay, and committees which included many lay
members with considerable professional expertise.
Many diocesan boards for social responsibility identified social
issues of particular significance in their locality and sought both to
engage with public authorities and take practical action. An example
from the Diocese of Truro was the creation of St Petroc’s, a charity
established in 1986, initially to provide housing and support for
single homeless men, who were increasingly numerous in Cornwall
and could find little help. A separate charity, Freshfields, was also
established to provide drug advice and counselling for users and
their families. Freshfields was incorporated into St Petroc’s in 2014.
The work and remit of St Petroc’s have expanded considerably over
the past four decades and it now employs 60 staff and has many
volunteers.
St Petroc’s was typical of the way social responsibility within the
Church of England resulted in the establishment of new charities
working with the homeless, those affected by drugs and alcohol,
the young unemployed, sex workers, those endangered by the
night culture on our streets, and many others in need. The Church
of England produced reports on social issues but also engaged
fruitfully, practically and creatively with many of them. It is
probably true to say that the establishment of many new and small
charities (partly to give them responsibility for their own life and
to avoid grant makers thinking these were evangelistic enterprises)
has led, over time, to a weakening of Church connections in some
of them. However, this pattern of social action by the Church of
England in the dioceses is one which still commends itself.
It may be more difficult to achieve, however, when diocesan
boards and councils of social responsibility have been reshaped,
abolished or re-purposed in many dioceses. The network created
by both by the BSR and similar diocesan bodies, and their staff and
volunteers, enabled a way in which debates and practical action
on major ethical issues entered the bloodstream of the Church of
England more naturally than seems to be the case today.
However, there are other factors at work beyond the realignment
of ecclesiastical structures. The moral authority of all the churches (and not only the Church of England) has been weakened as a
result of so many cases of abuse and the way church leaders sought
to protect their institution’s own reputation rather than care for
the victims. The churches are not seen, particularly by most young
people, as possessing a greater moral or ethical authority than
any other organisation. Rather, they are believed by many to be
places where racism, sexism and a pathological fear of same-sex
relationships still thrive. This cannot be overcome even by the most
pertinent intervention or report on the major issues of our time.
The way in which the Church of England has sought to counter its
decline in both status and numbers with a renewed focus on mission
has also reshaped the structures of its national engagement with
social and ethical issues. This is what lay behind the rather unlikely
way in which the Board for Social Responsibility was incorporated
in 2003 into the new Mission and Public Affairs (MPA) Division of
the Archbishops’ Council. The MPA brought together the former
Board for Social Responsibility with the Mission dimension of the
former Board for Mission and Unity (Unity continued to have a
separate Council), the Committee for Minority Ethnic Concerns
and the Hospital Chaplaincies Council. The breadth of this new
body was ‘mission that have to do with evangelism, the missionary
role of parish congregations, spirituality, theology, world mission,
inter faith relations and rural concerns’.⁶ As it turns out, the MPA
has been particularly good at responding to Government policy
proposals, with pertinent and telling contributions to many
Government consultations. However, the emphasis on mission, as
described above, gave the MPA a different character to the BSR.
The Archbishops’ Council itself, established in 1999, was the
eventual outcome of a recommendation in Working as One Body,
the report of the Archbishops’ Commission on the organisation
of the Church of England.⁷ The fact that it was an Archbishops’
Commission which led to the Archbishops’ Council is instructive
of a period in which there seems to have grown a greater
concentration on the Archbishops themselves as the main focus of
the national leadership of the Church of England. This now seems
something accepted by the Archbishops, as their sponsorship of so
many recent Commissions suggests. There may be a dilution in the
archiepiscopal brand when it is used so frequently. Perhaps there is
also a longing, however unconscious, to attempt to repeat examples of influential archiepiscopal intervention in social, ethical and
political issues in the post-war period.
In 1964 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey,
established a group (chaired by Robert Mortimer, the Bishop of
Exeter) to review the law of England concerning divorce, and to
consider whether any new principles or procedures would enable a
divorce law to operate ‘(1) more justly and with greater assistance
to the stability of marriage and the happiness of all concerned
including children than at present; and (2) in such a way as to do
nothing to undermine the approach of couples to marriage as a
lifelong covenant’.⁸
The report, Putting Asunder, was published in 1966 and
proposed that the breakdown of a marriage should be the sole
ground of divorce rather than matrimonial offence. This proposal
was eventually embodied in the 1969 Divorce Law Reform Act.
Intriguingly, the Archbishop had thought that on publication the
report would be appropriate for debate in the Church Assembly. It
was the Lord Chancellor at the time (Lord Gardiner) who referred
the report to the Law Commission, and suggested to the Archbishop
that it merited a debate in the House of Lords.
It is the modesty of the Archbishop’s initiative – setting up a
group rather than a Commission – and the way he wanted initially to
convince the Church Assembly of the value of the proposals, which
is so striking. The report contains a good deal of prophetic material
since much of what it suggests prefigures the work of contemporary
family courts. In 1966 the Church of England conducted over
half of all marriages in England, so few claimed the Church had
no authority to make the recommendations it did in relation to
divorce. What is intriguing is that the Archbishop chose to abstain
when voting took place on the passing of the 1969 Divorce Reform
Act since he thought, as did other bishops, that insufficient time
was being allowed for couples to seek reconciliation. Nevertheless,
there is a wide recognition among scholars of the period that the
Archbishop’s group did a great deal to change the law of England in
a dramatic way.
Next year will see the 40th anniversary of the publication of
Faith in the City.⁹ Upon its publication in 1985 this report (from a
Commission established by the Archbishop of Canterbury alone)
dominated the headlines for days, and had a lasting impact. The way some Government ministers criticised the report aided its
profile, and deepened a widespread sense that the leadership of
the Church of England opposed the Conservative Government.
Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister for six years, and was
by then a world leader with an authoritative reputation. She had
seen off General Galtieri in the Falklands, and the miners at home.
The Labour leadership caused her few worries. But the Archbishop
of Canterbury Robert Runcie (a fellow member with Margaret
Thatcher of the Oxford University Conservative Association at one
time) was a more elusive opponent, especially after the fuss over
the sermon Archbishop Runcie preached in the service at St Paul’s
Cathedral following the Falklands War. That was a largely press
infected controversy, but nonetheless caused irritation in Downing
Street.
The Archbishop’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas was
partly a response to riots in deprived areas of London (Brixton)
and Liverpool (Toxteth) in 1981. Chaired by Sir Richard O’Brien,
the former chair of the Manpower Services Commission, the
Commission benefitted from wide expertise among its members.
It toured the country, with Commissioners listening to local voices
in churches and the wider community. As well as recommendations
to the Government, there were even more recommendations
addressed to the Church of England herself, including a proposal
which led to the establishment of the Church Urban Fund. Its
endowment was achieved not as a result of using historic resources
but through a co-ordinated appeal involving every diocese in the
country. As an example of inter-diocesan financial and social
cooperation it could not have been more telling.
When Margaret Thatcher won a third successive General
Election in June 1987, her first public acknowledgement of victory
came as she hung out of a window at Conservative Central Office,
Smith Square. She said to the waiting party workers and the media
below, ‘we must do something about those inner cities, because we
want them too next time’. It was an implicit acknowledgement of
the impact Faith in the City (and the wider political discourse) had
on her, and also that inner city constituencies had failed to respond
positively to her government.
The Church of England had maintained its presence in inner city
parishes, even if many of them struggled, and this gave it some authority to speak about the issues found there. Faith in the City
gave these parishes a fresh profile, and drew a new generation
of clergy keen to serve within them, not least because the
establishment of the Church Urban Fund (launched in 1988) led to
the dioceses raising over £18million in three years to resource a wide
range of inner city projects. The Archbishop and the wider Church
were persistent in both drawing attention to the continuing needs
of the inner cities and doing something practical (which involved
the whole Church) to help. It was evident that the 1985 report was
not just a passing foray into an acknowledged pressing social issue
but part of a longer-term commitment both by the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the wider Church of England. Perhaps, by contrast,
there are now too many Commissions and reports to allow this level
of sustained focus? The Archbishops may feel it necessary to sponsor
them for lack of a contemporary equivalent of the Board for Social
Responsibility. The downside is that, strangely, such sponsorship
does not necessarily feed the work into the bloodstream of the
Church of England herself through its synodical structures which,
for all their faults, do operate at national, diocesan and deanery
levels. It means the Commissions rely upon the authority of the
Archbishops at a time when the esteem for the Church of England
and her leadership appears to have diminished, not because of any
fault of the Archbishops themselves, but as a consequence of a
constant drip feed of abuse scandals and other problems. In terms
of ethical leadership, even the revelation in the sub-postmasters’
scandal that the Chief Executive of the Post Office was an ordained
priest in the Church of England adds to the distrust of the Church,
and further reduces respect for its moral authority.
All this may explain why, at local level, Christians within the
Church of England (frequently working with other churches) have
given much more of their time and effort to practical ministry,
fire-fighting the deficiencies of care in their communities rather
than engaging in national debates. It is no accident that churches
have been so prominent in establishing foodbanks. While the very
existence of foodbanks points to a society in which poverty and
hunger are growing, much of this work has been done without
lecturing the Government or its agencies on their deficiencies.
Equally, the work of street pastors has drawn many Christians
into contact with vulnerable people late at night on our streets. It is their desire to help neighbours in need which frequently ranks
higher in their motivation than pointing out to the authorities
that they are doing too little to counter the dangers that are so
prevalent in the small hours.
There are other examples but these will suffice. What local
churches have done by these means is to earn respect by their
actions and engagement. They have found a voice in their localities
and are frequently appreciated by their communities, MPs and
councillors, for their compassionate ministry. The Church of
England may be less heeded nationally in social/political/ethical
areas but it retains much more authority in many local communities
than even its clergy and lay leaders sometimes think. Some of the
most inspiring case studies in Coming Home, the report of the
Archbishops’ Commission on Housing, were very local, e.g. St Silas,
Blackburn; St Bride’s, Trafford; Keswick Churches Together. They
were not the consequence of national policies or recommendations
but the result of imaginative clergy and lay people being alert to
local need and seeking to serve their localities and make them
better places in which to live and flourish. This is probably the
only way for the Church as a whole to recover its moral and ethical
authority. Although the Church of England and the Archbishops
seem attracted at present to national initiatives in social and ethical
issues as well as in encouraging mission and renewal, it is likely to
be local initiatives which prove the more prophetic, innovative and
lasting. It will take time for renewal to be experienced this way and
for the Church to earn fresh authority, but there are no short cuts.