The sort of leaders the Church needs

There is a saying among politicians that only Nixon could go to China. In other words, changes of policy are best executed by someone who has upheld the status quo. Only a prominent anti-communist could make the trip to Maoist China without arousing allegations of a sellout by the Right.

Rowan Williams did not have this room to manoeuvre in dealing with homosexuality. When he became Archbishop of Canterbury evangelicals were suspicious because of his well-known liberal views. As Andrew Goddard makes clear in his new book, Rowan Williams: His Legacy, it was even difficult for him to encourage official theological reflection by the Church on the issue of sexuality and the debate was left to pressure groups.

Reading Goddard’s account it is impossible not to conclude that the Archbishop made some bad mistakes. He was wrong to let Richard Harries and Tony Sadler persuade him to agree to Jeffrey John’s appointment to Reading but once he had made the decision he should have stuck by it when John had given assurances that he was celibate and would not challenge the Church’s teaching.

Williams was right to argue that as Archbishop of Canterbury he had to uphold the official position of the Anglican Communion but his critics have a point when they say, as Peter Selby remarked to Goddard, that if Williams believed what he wrote in The Body’s Grace he must have thought this position was right for the Church.

In Goddard’s account Williams comes across as passive and lacking in political skills. This lack of political skills was also shown in his failure, until late in the day, to push for the acceptance of the Anglican Covenant or to persuade the General Synod to get behind amend- ments that would probably have secured the passage of legislation for women bishops.

Judgements on Rowan Williams’ time at Lambeth are influenced by how people assess his leadership style. For his admirers, like Tom Wright, this amounted to a Christlike attempt to make sure everyone was heard and no one felt browbeaten; for critics, like Giles Goddard, his vulnerable leadership style was unhealthy in that was too much focussed on the suffering caused by disagreement and division.

Chris Rowland finds clues about the Archbishop’s approach to leadership in an article he wrote on William Blake in which he discussed the poet’s distinction between contraries and negations. There is a sense, Rowland suggests, in which the Archbishop has been trying to keep opposites together, acting in belief that ‘you need to keep both poles in play and lead it to God at the last judgement.’

All this goes very well with an apophatic emphasis in theology but it can be frustrating in a leader who appears unwilling to point a way forward. But as Goddard shows, in what is often a very positive assessment, when it came to mission and evangelism Williams did offer a clear lead. Here he was like Nixon going to China, arousing the suspicions of theologians on his own Catholic wing of the church like John Milbank, by his embrace of Fresh Expressions.

As Goddard also argues, Williams demonstrated by his own example of dialogue and conversation, by his readiness to accompany people on their journeys of faith, a style of evangelism that is appropriate for the present age.

In the long run I believe Rowan Williams will be judged to have

Is Richard Dawkins no

longer a threat to the

Church? been a great Archbishop of Canterbury. Whatever his shortcomings in political skills and as a leader the Anglican Communion was still in existence when he retired and the Church of England was still just about holding together. If he failed to take the sexuality debate much further, he was in other ways an Archbishop for the times.

He went to Lambeth just as the New Atheist attack was gathering strength and if Richard Dawkins is now seen as no threat to the Church that is in no small way due to the Archbishop’s credibility among people who do not count themselves as believers. If the Church can produce someone like that, people have concluded, militant atheism is too crude and too undiscriminating in trying to write religious faith off altogether.

Issues of culture and style of the kind addressed by Fresh Expressions matter but ultimately most people stay away from church because they do not believe. The Church needs leaders who can commend the gospel in a sensitive and convincing way to new generations of seekers. Few bishops have this skill. Some are good communicators but lack theological depth. There were times when Rowan Williams struggled to communicate but hardly anyone doubted he had something important to say. What is significant is that the Church England had to look outside its ranks to find him.

There is now no diocesan bishop who has served as a Professor of Theology in a university. Appointments secretaries put their emphasis on what they imagine to be appropriate management skills and dioceses look for bishops of conventional views who will not rock the boat. The fact that a new Archbishop has been chosen who spent only a year as a diocesan may be a tribute to his abilities or it may be a judgement on the system and the bishops it has produced.