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. It stated that Welby had a ‘personal and moral responsibility’ to pursue the matter further, but that he and other senior Church figures had shown a ‘distinct lack of curiosity’ in the allegations. Welby initially said he would stay on, following the advice of ‘senior colleagues’, yet in the end he saw that his position was untenable.

It’s often said that Welby is more of a politician than a theologian, so it’s grimly fitting that his downfall felt as though it belonged to the Palace of Westminster rather than Lambeth. Many people in the Church I spoke to about his initial refusal to resign compared it with Boris Johnson’s behaviour over Chris Pincher. ‘He wanted to stay to put things right,’ says Jayne Ozanne, a founding member of the Archbishops’ Council and the author of Just Love.