Anglicanism in the UK is facing a “severe crisis,” demonstrated by the unprecedented resignations, or calls for the resignations, of all four church leaders in England, Scotland, and Wales, writes Martyn Percy in the Journal of Anglican Studies (online in August). The cases of Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of Wales, Andy John, and Primus of Scotland, Mark Strange (and the Primate of the Church of Ireland has also recently faced calls for his resignation), all involve serious breaches of trust, often related to their handling of abuse cases and financial misdeeds, creating the appearance of hypocrisy, cover-ups, and the failure to protect church members. But there are other developments threatening the unity and future of these churches aside from the conduct of church leaders and the positions they take on controversial issues like those related to gender and sexuality. For starters, there are the declining rates of churchgoing, aging congregations, and soaring costs of church upkeep, with little hope of relief on the horizon. Instances of stability and even growth are more common among Pentecostal and Catholic churches. It is estimated that 16,000 Anglican churches have closed in the last decade alone, with rural parishes feeling the brunt of this decline.
Percy adds that the UK’s Anglican polity has deteriorated markedly in the 21st century in similar ways to the breakdown in the country’s political party system. Just as the once-broad coalitions under the Labor and Conservative parties are now seeing fragmentation, the older movements of evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, and members of the broad (liberal) church in Anglicanism are “divided on gender, sexuality, spirituality and the merits (or otherwise) of separatism.” Likewise, the voting system, whether ecclesiastical or secular, is experiencing polarization and populist discontent. Percy writes that elections to Synod and the selection of bishops are determined by “minority party interests in a system that would be more suited to proportional representation…” The Church of England, at least, also increasingly “resorted to using the UK’s muddled laws on free speech to try and silence malcontents.” Percy charges that “the ambiguity of UK laws on free speech is being exploited by the hierarchy of the Church of England, who are seeking to use the police to coerce victims of abuse and injustice into silence, in order to prevent dissent, debate and complaint about their manifestly inadequate safeguarding processes.” All of these issues are adding up to a profound identity crisis in Anglicanism, as reflected in how the churches of Wales, England, and Scotland no longer enjoy liturgical coherence or theological unity. Percy concludes that reforming the Anglican polity will require finding some means of securing processes of binding arbitration that would commit the parties to conflict resolution.
(Journal of Anglican Studies, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-anglican-studies)
