Churchgoing in England is in free fall. Churches are gradually collapsing, with no funds to repair them. To save money, hard-pressed priests are being asked to serve more and more churches. Indeed, the whole ecclesiastical edifice is being shaken as more revelations appear daily about the Archbishop of Canterbury and his failure to keep his house in order over the Smyth affair. Some senior bishops, such as Newcastle, are calling for Justin Welby, the man at the top, to go.

Meanwhile, is the Church of England administration doing? Commissioning report after report about deep-seated racist structures: or as some might put it, fiddling while Canterbury burns. The latest such document, commissioned by the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice from an organisation called the Institute for Educational and Social Equity, appeared last week. 

The writers of the report interviewed more than 100 priests and lay people within the Church. They say that those from abroad, or do not speak English as a mother tongue, or who are working class or UKME/GMH (UK Minority Ethnic or Global Majority Heritage, or in plain English non-white), find it more difficult to get jobs in the church or to rise in it. These people, they add, have to “navigate complex interpersonal and institutional structures that discriminate against them,” and see the reason for this as inbuilt prejudice and racism and a lack of those like them in senior positions. 

Their prescription is, essentially, that the Church needs to import a vast anti-racist HR bureaucracy, and then give it plenty of power and lots to do. Every organisation, from archdioceses to humble parishes must have formal anti-racism plans; in addition there must be a Communications and Engagement Plan to amplify their delivery (they’ve lost me there, but never mind). We need reams of EDI data collected and analysed; appointment processes documented to the last iota in a sea of paper at every stage; racial targets for employment within the church; and mandatory racial quotas on all appointing bodies. Ideas of who ought to be ordained must be be rewritten so as better to to accommodate those not educated here or do not have English as a first language; the theological colleges must be decolonised and those teaching in them embrace anti-racism, anti-racist pedagogy, and inclusive language; senior clergy must be trained in such things as whiteness awareness, allyship and decolonisation. The convoluted management-speak goes on. Oh, and every one of the 42 diocesan bishops must have their very own Racial Justice Lead credentialled to at least a Level 7 Certificate in EDI (a qualification handily available for only £2,459 plus VAT from — you guessed it! — the Institute for Racial and Social Equity).

… the Church of England needs this scheme like a fish needs an ecclesiastical bicycle

Let’s start with the easy bit: the Church of England needs this scheme like a fish needs an ecclesiastical bicycle. It does not have the money or resources to turn Lambeth Palace, or whatever less iconic headquarters is chosen, into a grand HR department worthy of some multinational conglomerate, which is essentially what is being suggested. And even if it did, such a top-down scheme would be entirely inconsistent with the ecclesiastical tradition of decentralisation, with most administration taking place within individual dioceses. 

Nor, for that matter, do the recommendations make any sense in the light of the purpose of the Church, which is through its clergy to feed the sheep entrusted to its care. As anyone knows who has sat on a panel appointing an incumbent — one of the most vital jobs in the Anglican communion — a priest who will not get on with his flock, or who is likely to set them on edge because of his idiosyncrasies, will not do. True, it may not be his fault that English is not his mother tongue, that he does not understand the nuances of English life, or that he comes from a culture whose exuberant spirituality may not suit worshippers in a clutch of bourgeois commuter villages in deepest Wiltshire. But that is beside the point. Ministering to people’s spiritual welfare is not like services such as plumbing, law or accountancy, where by and large a person’s background should not matter, provided he is competent. Worshippers, for better or worse, vary in their needs; if a priest cannot connect with his congregation, for whatever reason, neither he nor the Church that appointed him is fulfilling their function. In so far as the thinking behind the report is that considerations of racial equity between applicants should trump this, and that the worshippers who make up the Church should be told to like it or lump it in the interests of diversity and inclusion, it simply fails to see what a church is for.

And this leads on to a further problem: why did the Church appoint this organisation in the first place? It is, as the ecclesiastical functionaries who engaged it presumably knew perfectly well, a generic EDI consultancy that makes its money serving all kinds of organisations (“EDI is our business!”, its website proudly proclaims) with a speciality in identity-politics-based anti-racist programmes. The aggressively secularist recommendations it produced were hardly unpredictable. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the managerialists who now run the Church of England didn’t really care, and were happy to see its mission subsumed in, and subordinated to, contemporary secular political doctrines such as racial equity. 

Not that this is a new problem. Edward Norman, in his Reith Lectures of 1978, warned about the dangers of the “political Christ.” He had his answer in the words of our Lord in John 18:36: “My Kingdom is not of this world.” Ecclesiastical apparatchiks raring even now to take forward the work of the Racial Justice Commission to an ever higher plane and make the Church of England more and more just another corporation committed to EDI and every other modish nostrum would do well to ponder this.