The Disastrous Reign of Justin Welby. His Decisions Destroyed the Church of England.

Five leaders weigh in on Welby’s tenure. Not one has a good word to say about him.

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

April 10, 2025

It’s hard not to imagine Justin Welby’s day of judgement before the Lord of the universe being much worse than it already is.

He imagined himself a latter-day William Temple, but as Archbishop of Canterbury he flipped and flopped, floundering inside the walls of Lambeth Palace on the Bank of the Thames River, anything but secure; judged now for his incompetence, bad decisions leading to his resignation over something he had little control over.

He thought he could run the church out of a management handbook that he had learned while an oilman later reinforced by Bishop Ian Cundy whose management playbook he took with him to Lambeth Palace. It was a disastrous decision and cost him and the church. Sadly, it can never be undone.

Welby has been a living nightmare for the Church of England since he became a bishop. He nearly bankrupted the Diocese of Durham during his eight months there, before financially and theologically bankrupting the Church of England.

It is becoming apparent just how powerful the upper-class protestant underworld has been in the Church of England, grooming and promoting arrogant and utterly incompetent wealthy young men to form a hidden society of senior leaders, controlling the narrative, and in Welby’s case, everything.

“He is the most complete example of a control freak I have ever encountered. I do not think that he has any capacity for self-doubt. He appears to have resigned in order to ‘take one for the team’ – which has so far survived largely intact, with attention focused on Welby,” said a noted observer.

However, as a retired member of the clergy rather than Archbishop of Canterbury, he has lost all of the protection from challenges which his office gave him, and he is now in precisely the same position as George Carey, subject to canon law, and likely at some point to be barred from officiating by his successor.

The Church of England currently has three retired Archbishops barred from officiating – Hope, Sentamu and Carey – and Welby will likely be the fourth. Only Rowan remains and he is now back in Wales, and subject to the jurisdiction of the Church in Wales.

George Pitcher, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest who knows Justin Welby, said Welby’s recent BBC interview was a very bad idea. What was he thinking?

“Perhaps the former Archbishop of Canterbury intended to convey remorse and accountability in his conversation with Laura Kuenssberg. But that’s not how it’s been received,” observed Pitcher.

If Welby still has advisers, what were they and he thinking? The very first question anyone should have asked him as he considered going on the BBC is: What do you want to get out of this? We can only speculate what his answer that might have been. He looked defeated.

A journalist friend who knows him a bit said he looked “deflated”, like he’d been punctured, slightly slouched in his seat, slack-paunched, only making eye contact with Kuenssberg when he had to. However much he repeated that it was all his fault, the impression given, intentionally or not, was “poor me”. Once again, he comes over as the victim, rather than focusing exclusively on those countless victims of Smyth.

Why reappear? No one has demanded his public presence again. He could have slipped quietly into the obscurity of retirement. By his own admission, he had already made a truly dreadful valedictory speech in the House of Lords, in which he joked about the situation in which so many people had suffered through his professional neglect.

Angela Tilby, writing in The Church Times, said, following the BBC interview, that it showed the tragedy of Welby.

“I found it impossible not to be moved as he sat still like a prisoner, or at least a penitent, as, for nearly 40 minutes, Ms. Kuenssberg politely but firmly hammered in the nails, and, again and again, he expressed profound sorrow at the safeguarding failures that led to his resignation last November.”

“There has been much tragedy in Bishop Welby’s life: an unhappy childhood, the death of his own child in infancy, and a depressive tendency that runs through the family. Towards the end of the interview, he expressed a longing for the obscurity of private life.

“It left me wondering whether the greatest tragedy of his life was to have been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. It was, after all, an unlikely appointment. He had only recently become Bishop of Durham; he was a late ordinand, having previously worked in the oil industry, and he was initially turned down for ordination.”

“For all his well-earned reputation as a reconciler, he never really had the bandwidth to cope with the demands of those who had promoted him and expected him to toe the line. But then this was the central dilemma of his episcopate. He is a product of the Iwerne camps, with their repressed homo-eroticism and, in some quarters, disregard for the wider Church of England. It was his misfortune to have come from the same stable as the serial abuser Smyth.”

Tim Wyatt, writing for The New Statesman focused on the Smyth affair and Welby’s initial lackluster response, had this to say; “If the former archbishop of Canterbury hoped his self-abnegation on the BBC might salvage what was left of his reputation, he was wrong.”

The scale of the safeguarding problem was why he failed to adequately respond to the case that would ultimately bring his tenure to an end 11 years later. Welby resigned, becoming the first ever head of the Church to step down in disgrace.

Gavin Ashenden writing for the Catholic Herald said of the BBC interview that there was a kind of quantum element to it: contradictory streams of thought within a single conversation. At one and the same time, there was an air of self-pity and victimhood running under the surface as an implicit sub-motif; while at the same time the questions and answers on the surface displayed an ineptitude and incoherence that were more likely to result in serious criticism than sympathy.

“It seems odd for someone who was responsible for running a multi-billion-pound organization to claim that he lacked the resources to manage the daily business that came to his office. It was not a question of lacking resources, so what was lacking?

Rebecca Chapman, a member of the Church of England’s General Synod, writing in the Spectator, thought she might have the key to Welby’s early difficulties in managing his daily business. She suggested that his unhelpful and possibly overly egocentric global travel plans had dominated his daily schedule.

She wrote of her astonishment that “much of the diary juggle seemed to be his own making as he kicked off a self-imposed plan to visit every single primate of the Anglican Communion over the next 18 months”.

One of the strangest elements in the interview was the lack of any spiritual, theological or moral perspective that you might expect a senior Church leader to offer when presented with the complex relationship between post-Christian society and the Christian state Church. Welby spoke more as a frustrated managerial executive than as a retired bishop offering help to interpret the opposing values of two conflicting worldviews.

But Welby’s biggest failure was, that as an Evangelical with Charismatic leanings, he had worked briefly at Holy Trinity, Brompton, that he failed to deliver for evangelicals. The ever-powerful Evangelical networks chose him as their man, trusting him to promote their particular vision of mission and growth, which he did, as far as he could, setting the Church on a path of rewarding church-planting and innovation over traditional parish ministry.

In his years as Archbishop, he gradually outgrew his initial supporters. As his archiepiscopate went on, he upset the Evangelical lobbies and a substantial part of the Anglican Communion over gay relationships, greatly overestimating his ability to bring them on board. Many of the Global South provinces separated themselves from him and will not acknowledge the leadership of the Church of England.

A deep influencer on Welby was Bishop Ian Cundy. Dr. Marianne Leeds (she must remain anonymous) gave the background on Welby that perhaps explains all.

“Welby did not read Theology at Cambridge. He studied Law in year 1, and modern history in years 2 and 3. He graduated with a second-class degree in Modern History in 1978. He went from Cambridge to a job in the City and from there to work in the oil industry.

Sometime later he was drawn into Alpha, which was and is very much an upper-class phenomenon, a theology-lite social circle, and from there he decided to seek ordination. He went to train at Cranmer Hall, Durham, in 1989, and studied theology there for two years, graduating with an MA in 1991.

While he was there, he came very firmly under the influence of the college principal, another evangelical public schoolboy named Ian Cundy, who saw himself as some kind of management guru, which clearly appealed to the former oil executive Justin Welby. Evangelical theology and gospel ministry gave way to delusions of a management revolution in the Church of England, and Welby went to Coventry Diocese (where the bishop was another Old Etonian) to be a curate at first, then Vicar of a parish while spending much of his time at Coventry Cathedral promoting its Reconciliation Ministry, based on the bombing of Coventry Cathedral during the war.

It is clear that he retained very close links with Cundy, who became Bishop first of Lewes in Sussex, and then Bishop of Peterborough, where he set out to implement his management plans for the Church of England, which he called “Setting God’s People Free” – free from clergy, parishes and church life as people know it in England. He also produced a version for the House of Bishops and set about persuading his colleagues to adopt it elsewhere.

Perhaps the most enthusiastic adopter was his disciple from Durham, who was suddenly and astonishingly catapulted into office as ABC, despite lacking any significant experience as a bishop, or any higher qualification in theology – but with a plan to revolutionize the Church of England with his own management strategy. Ian Cundy died in 2009, but his mantle had been literally handed on to Welby, who inherited his cope and miter and other robes and wore them throughout his time in office.

Welby was a close associate of several ordained city figures, including the now disgraced Paula Vennells, a part time minister in charge of the Post Office. They came up with a plan to reinvent the House of Bishops by creating a talent stream of clergy candidates who displayed management rather than theological prowess, to be appointed as bishops, including senior people from other professions who it was thought could switch from a secular role to being a bishop, such as Sarah Mullally, now Bishop of London, former Chief Nursing Officer for England.

At the same time, he remained clearly under the influence of Cundy, and eventually a proposal called Vision & Strategy was presented by Welby and the current ABY to the General Synod, not for approval but as a fait accompli, in which the historic parish system would be left to wither on the vine, with its resources progressively transferred to high profile HTB/Alpha style plants around the country.

Significant amounts of money which should have been funding the parish ministry across the country were handed over to unicorn projects, many of which spent the money but failed to flourish once it was gone forever. The impact on the dioceses and parishes of the Church of England has been disastrous, with many churches having to close their doors, or share one priest among many churches.

The combination of Welby’s manager-bishops (few if any competent at management, and even fewer having actually read theology) together with the Cundy program for the demolition of parish ministry has been a long nightmare for the Church of England, and one which will continue long into his enforced retirement, with many of those he appointed still actively setting the Church free of clergy, places of worship and of basic theology.

Welby will be remembered for his disastrous handling of the largest safeguarding failure in the Church of England’s history, set out in the Makin Report. But his attempt to remake the Church of England in the image of his former college principal has been the greatest failure of his time in a great office for which he was always ill-equipped from the beginning.

As Ashenden observed, Plain Bishop Welby, in his blue open-necked shirt, has carried the can not only for safeguarding errors, but for the whole theology that has been used to mold the C of E into its image and is now exposed as theologically and morally bankrupt.

END