The threat to the Church of England comes from within
Believe it or not, the
That said, the nature of the Church of England's travails in 2025 is fundamentally different. It is now threatened most from within. A maelstrom of scandal, a Pandora's box of failures and a rotten managerialist culture has rocked the ship.
More departures are likely. All of it obscures and threatens the genuinely good work done by the ordinary people of God on the ground in parishes.
What is worryingly different in the crisis of today from that of the mid 17th century is the Church's leadership itself. Then
By contrast, our current bishops are not serving souls. They are theologically unimpressive, devoid of political nous and pastorally moribund. Worst of all is the visceral contempt in which they seem to hold the ordinary people of God. It is everywhere: from reports which brand them racist, via mission plans which wish them away in favour of imaginary new and trendier converts to the denouement of thinking they can be hoodwinked over abuse scandals.
There are exceptions- I marked the anniversary of Charles's death by hearing perhaps the best sermon I have ever heard preached by a retired
Indeed the quality of the bench is so bad that it threatens the Church itself. There are Jacobins- of left and right- who use this latest scandal to argue for its destruction. Everywhere this has happened before- France, Russia and even in the awfulness of Puritan England itself- attacks on the Church have been precursors to restrictive and evil regimes.
Despite history's worrying precedent there are those who are beginning to accept arguments for the Church's disestablishment. The paucity of the Bishop's bench is no longer just a matter for internal ecclesiastical grumbling but becoming a matter of the Church's survival.
Now, some would say 'so what'? There are those who are happy to accept the dominion of an Italian church over an English one, still others who reject crown and mitre entirely. But those are not solutions acceptable to many consciences in the heart of the nation, nor are they of any real constructive help to the British state, whose problem this is as well. After all, the liberties and constitutional stability which we have enjoyed in this country is inherently linked to the union of Church and State.
More pressingly perhaps, the Church's enslavement to management speak and corrupted appointment structures is not unique: every national institution is suffering similarly. The solution is not to throw the baby out with the bath water: we do not need 'no bishops' but better ones. The current set need to go.
At the end of Taylor's sermon he reminded the newly consecrated bishops that while the earthly church of the past had failed to discipline them, the truth would out. He wrote: 'When the early church deposed a Bishop from his office, they ever concealed his crime, and made no record of it: yet remember this, that God does, and will call us to a strict and severe account.'
I ask the bishops of today- do they believe this? Do they believe that part of the creed which they will have recited so many times, that He shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead? If so why do they persist in placing the Church which He gave to them in such grave peril? Why do they so dishonour the ordinary people of God?
To quote Taylor again, 'The time will quickly come, in which God shall say unto thee in the words of the Prophet, Where is the Flock that was given thee, thy beautiful Flock? what wilt thou say when he shall
visit thee?'
And if they do not believe this of Him, then what are they doing seeking to lead that beautiful flock at all?
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