Can the Church of England be saved?

"Illustration by Owen Gent"

Whoever the next archbishop of Canterbury will be, they face a legacy of scandal, doctrinal division and dwindling congregations.

By Tim Wyatt

THE NEW STATESMAN

August 29, 2025

For nine long months the Church of England has been, in the words of Matthew 9:36, “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd”. In a deliberately quiet ceremony at Lambeth Palace in January, the 105th archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, laid down his crozier, the historic bishop’s staff modelled on a shepherd’s crook. Ever since, the marble throne of St Augustine in Canterbury Cathedral has lain vacant and the national Church, overshadowed by an abuse scandal, left leaderless.

The Church is at one of its lowest ever ebbs, somehow both fractious and listless. Seemingly never-ending abuse scandals, most notably the John Smyth affair that toppled Welby, have sapped morale and undermined the Church’s moral authority. Proposals to outsource its safeguarding to an independent body have only been partly approved by its governing body, the General Synod. Nearly two years after it introduced blessings for same-sex couples, the Church of England (CofE) remains riven by infighting and division over sexuality. The conservative and liberal wings that have long sat side by side, albeit uneasily, in this “broad church” have become more embittered and entrenched. And beneath it all sounds the drumbeat of decline: fewer worshippers, fewer vicars, closing churches, less money.

Linda Woodhead, a leading sociologist of religion, told me the over-riding impression among ordinary Britons towards the Church today is one of utter indifference. The average citizen, particularly those aged under 50, has had almost no contact with the Church. The percentage of the population that attends a Church of England service each week stands at just over 1 per cent. “The new archbishop of Canterbury is facing the most unchurched population ever,” she said. With falling CofE attendance, growth in other Christian denominations such as Pentecostalism and increasing multiculturalism more broadly, many are questioning whether the centuries-old ties between England and its established Church can now justifiably be upheld.

But others in the Church push back on this narrative of decay. Again and again you hear the idea that there are two Churches of England. There is the national Church: the squabbling Synod, the leaderless House of Bishops, the civil service at Church House in Westminster, busy with their strategies. And there is the local church: the village parson, the building where you were baptised and your parents got married, the local CofE primary school.

If the first is ignored or reviled, might the latter still retain some national affection, even offer a sense of community elsewhere lost from public life, despite its crumbling edges? The Bishop of Kirkstall, Arun Arora, who in a previous life was the Church’s director of communications, suggested that for all the “dislocation” at a national level, those who interact with the CofE in their daily life “generally come away from it with a positive appreciation”. Alison Coulter, a Synod member who also chairs the Church’s executive committee, the Archbishops’ Council, told me many feel more warmly towards their local vicar and church than towards the “faceless” national Church.

Can the CofE find popular appeal once more under a new archbishop of Canterbury? Does it even want to? These are questions that, for decades, the Church has tried and failed to answer. Will this time be any different?

However diminished the CofE may be, it retains the trappings of privilege and some vestige of political power. It remains the nation’s established church. Before he was brought low by the Smyth scandal, Welby crowned King Charles III before a global audience of millions, a year after he buried Queen Elizabeth II. Twenty-five of Welby’s colleagues still sit in the House of Lords. And yet the bishops no longer garner the attention they once did. The Bishop of London, Sarah Mullally – once the NHS’s chief nursing officer – has pledged to lead opposition to the assisted dying bill, but otherwise the Church plays less and less part in national politics.

For some, including Marcus Walker, reverend of London’s St Bartholomew the Great, this is a blessing. Walker’s congregation, which has included figures such as Michael Gove and Tom Holland, grit their teeth when bishops wade into politics, most notably attacking the Rwanda scheme as un-Christian. “When the Church is doing the job of a soft-left think tank, nobody’s going to pay attention to it,” Walker told me. Instead of struggling for relevance, he suggested, the CofE should lean in to its 2,000 years of tradition and mystery and focus on spiritual insight.

The question of which way the new archbishop should face divides the Church. Should they turn inwards to resolve its manifold problems, whatever the optics? Or focus on being pastor to the nation once more, rising above the Sturm und Drang of party politics to offer spiritual succour to Britain? There is a sense that neither would truly satisfy the restless members of the Church. The well-connected Old Etonian and former oil executive Welby enjoyed hobnobbing in Westminster, but he was also criticised for his efforts to remould the Church and often attacked for being excessively “managerial”. There is a palpable hunger for someone who could re-energise the languid institution and grab the nation’s attention once more.

Helen King, a Synod member and prominent pro-LGBT activist in the Church, said the weakening ties between England and its national Church could be rebuilt if the next archbishop got the “imagination of the nation”. “If you have someone who’s just very stale and boring, coming out with the platitudes and management-speak of the Church of England, that’s not going to excite anyone.” Arora told me Welby’s successor must find fresh conviction in the Church’s message, regardless of how it lands in 21st-century Britain. “Of course, whatever an archbishop of Canterbury says, there will be dissenters, internal and external. But what that can’t do is damage their confidence in the gospel, their confidence in the Church.”

The Bishop of Lancaster, Jill Duff, told me that she wanted an archbishop who was committed to the Church’s vocation – its “cure of souls” – but not at the expense of curing its many internal ills. It was no accident that St Paul included among his list of the spiritual gifts in one New Testament epistle that of administration. Gruelling governance meetings behind the scenes and the “hard yards” of sorting out dysfunctional bureaucracy are just as necessary as lofty national ambitions, she argued.

For Walker, the Church should be less focused on drawing in new congregants, and more focused on the congregants that already exist. It would also be nice to have an archbishop who liked the CofE, he said, instead of a “constant sneering at the kind of people who do go to church and a desperate desire to bring in the kind of people who don’t” – a jab at Welby’s enthusiasm for starting new, trendy types of church aimed at apathetic younger generations, such as a Chinese takeaway turned church in Rochdale. Above all, Walker longs for a head of the Church who would have “positive stories to tell about the enormous excitement that is Christ”, rather than spending their reign “delving into constant feuds about sex and sexuality”.

Such feuds have absorbed almost all the CofE’s energy since January 2023, when the bishops proposed services of blessing for gay couples for the first time. Although the doctrine on marriage would remain unchanged (it believes marriage is between a man and a woman), conservatives were outraged and have fought a furious and partly successful rearguard action to block the reforms. A series of bishops tasked with resolving the impasse have resigned in frustration at the refusal of both conservatives and liberals to find a compromise. The project staggers on towards what is supposed to be its denouement at a Synod gathering next February (the bishops are still figuring out what provision will be offered to recalcitrant conservatives and whether gay vicars will be allowed to marry outside the Church), but few expect this to draw a line under the saga. Most liberals are glum, expecting they will have to bank their meagre victories and move on. One pro-blessings bishop said he had reluctantly concluded “the progressives have lost”, and yet the atmosphere among conservatives is also one of defeat.

Nobody expects the next archbishop to make a significant difference to the intractable conflict. Duff, one of the most outspoken conservative bishops, was phlegmatic. Quoting a 19th-century bishop of New Zealand, she said if the Church cracked on with its main job of preaching the gospel, “just as a running water purifies itself of silt, so will error be purified”. Welby sought to settle the question once and for all, but dealing with division was “part of the job” Duff argued, and not something his successor should delude themselves into thinking they can resolve quickly: “Hoping it will go away is just unrealistic.” Without the two-thirds majority either side needs to decisively rewrite church teaching and settle the matter, the Church continues to stumble.

The permacrisis over sexuality is not simply distracting the Church from its other pressing problems, it’s also wearing down clergy and volunteers not signed up as partisans on either side. The image presented to outsiders is one of intractable and baffling division, even homophobic. “We come across as very obsessed with sex in a bad way, and unable to make a decision,” King said. “People don’t really see what the Church of England’s problem is.” If the Church was once considered too moralising by young people, today Gen Z is more likely to view it as actively immoral in its reluctance to unambiguously affirm LGBT relationships. Woodhead and others have argued no national church can survive in the long-term if its moral compass strays too far from that of the people it is supposed to serve.

Another, less publicised conflict lurks at the heart of the CofE. Its historical endowment fund has grown substantially, nurtured by a team of canny investors at its London HQ, to more than £11bn. But while the centre appears flush, regional dioceses are running at ever greater deficits. Most of the money used to pay for grassroots ministry still comes from parishioners’ donations, but as congregations dwindle, collection plates empty. There is growing anger from the “real” Church – the local parishes and bishops – many of whom are demanding the national Church transfer its billions to prop up local budgets. At present, money is handed out in tightly controlled grants, which bishops can only spend on new kinds of ministry (separate from the ancient parish network), not to subsidise declining rural churches. This is the legacy of Welby’s focus on innovation and new styles of church.

An energetic pressure group called Save the Parish, spearheaded by Walker, has been aggressively resisting the retrenchment imposed by the centre. But most bishops reject this dichotomy and insist the CofE can both invest in innovative ministry and support the parish. Those who control national financing have bridled at the calls to hand out millions of pounds with no conditions attached, as some bishops are now demanding. “We can’t just dole out money and everyone just spend it on what they fancy… chocolate biscuits after church,” scoffed the chair of the Archbishops’ Council, Alison Coulter, who sits on the grant-making committee. The Bishop of Lancaster told me her diocese had benefited from national grants, but neither clever strategy nor cash, she said, would save the CofE. That task remained God’s alone.

Behind the to and fro over money lies an unpalatable truth. For all its investing, strategy-building and experiments with new styles of worship, the Church has still not figured out how to reverse declining attendance and engagement. Should it continue to innovate and hope it eventually lands on the right course, or should it fall back on its centuries-old parish network and the familiarity of services and liturgies? Some of the contenders to succeed Welby have hinted they would like to tilt the scales towards traditional ministry, while others appear as continuity candidates.

The Church is keen to point to four years in a row of modest increases in attendance, although this is compared to the nadir of the pandemic, during which churchgoing fell by almost 60 per cent after places of worship closed their doors for the first time since the reign of King John. Barely one in 100 Englishmen and women went to an Anglican church last Sunday. Decades of stretching fewer and fewer clergy over more and more parishes has left parts of rural England almost vicar-less, alienating occasional worshippers, who no longer see a presence at the village fête or know who to approach about a christening.

Woodhead told me the shrinking Church ties in with a general sense that everything in Britain is rubbish these days. “Everything’s a bit crap, so no surprise really the archbishop’s a bit useless and had to be sacked, and no one wants to go any more, and there’s no local vicar.” The Church’s struggles are wearily familiar to many other British institutions: struggles to recruit talent, a lack of trust among the public it supposedly serves, ever-growing regulatory burdens, and relentless cost-cutting in the face of anaemic (or non-existent) growth.

Woodhead said she will judge the seriousness of the new archbishop by whether they’re honest about “managing decline”, or whether they persist in arguing revival is possible. For the pragmatists, the future of the CofE is not to be found in resolving the impasse over same-sex blessings, or unleashing its endowment, but in accepting a new, diminished role in the nation. As has happened in some Nordic countries, a national church can survive almost total secularisation, Woodhead argued, if it abandons the insistence that its members commit to full-fat, born-again Christianity. Why should the Church care what its adherents believe about the Bible or God, as long as they see the Church as their own and turn up for weddings? Unsurprisingly, this argument finds few friends among clergy and bishops. As nominal and fair-weather Christians have dropped away in recent decades, the CofE has only become more serious about faith, not less. The prospect of watering down Anglicanism on the chance this might appeal to an indifferent public holds little attraction.

Still, in many of my conversations about the future of the beleaguered Church, hope remained. Duff insisted she still finds an openness to her message among non-believers, rattling off anecdotes about sharing the gospel on trains and in shops with curious people. King said she remained optimistic, given the reserves of “passion and commitment” that remained even in a humbled CofE, but that the Church’s survival would depend on the choice of the new archbishop. “I think there’s already a death spiral, and I think this is the one where we can reverse the death spiral, if we get it right.”

The appointment, due to be announced in the coming weeks, falls at a pivotal moment for the Church of England. The next archbishop of Canterbury will set the course for the Church at a singularly precarious moment. Should it modernise to stay in touch with modern social mores, or double down on traditional values? Innovate new kinds of church, or focus on the ancient parish system? Centralise money at the centre, or entrust resources to local leadership? Focus on fixing internal strife, or prioritise reintroducing the national Church to an England that has almost forgotten it? Pulled in these different directions, the Church is in need of a leader with a clear sense of where it’s headed.

Make the right choice, and there may still be a way back for the Church, albeit to a smaller and humbler version of what it once was. But choose the wrong shepherd, and the flock may be lost for good.

Tim Wyatt’s newsletter “The Critical Friend” is on Substack