After Welby: what’s next for the Church of England?

It’s taken him more than a decade, but Justin Welby has finally united the Church of England. The petition calling for him to resign over the findings of the Makin Review into the serial abuser John Smyth was set up by three clergymen who would normally disagree: Dr Ian Paul, Robert Thompson and Marcus Walker, the spirit animals of the C of E’s evangelical, liberal and High Church wings. ‘Over any other issue Ian Paul and Robert Thompson would practically be suggesting pistols at dawn across the Synod chamber,’ says one member of the General Synod. Yet they were united in their anger against the Archbishop of Canterbury and in their conviction that he needed to resign.

Smyth, an evangelical who ran Christian holiday camps, severely beat more than 100 boys in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Makin Review, which was published last Thursday, found Welby and other senior figures in the Church had, from 2013, known about the allegations against Smyth (who died in 2018) and had missed opportunities to bring him to justice.