Justin Welby: the hard-nosed realist holding together the Church of England

Justin Welby: the hard-nosed realist holding together the Church of England

The archbishop of Canterbury has had successes over female bishops and payday lenders, and is now trying to steer the church away from telling people how to behave

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• The Guardian, Friday 18 April 2014

Justin Welby: 'The church is not a place where good people go. It’s a place where bad people go to meet God. It’s a refuge for sinners.' Photograph: Heathcliff O'Malley/Rex

Justin Welby now looks like the best archbishop of Canterbury the Church of England could possibly have, but when he was appointed he was almost unknown, and had only been a diocesan bishop for nine months. What got him the job – after he had made the shortlist – was that he was the only candidate who did not deny or flinch from the internal research suggesting that the church would dwindle, on existing trends, from about one million committed members to 150,000 by 2050.
His first year in the job has been marked by tremendous energy and rather more physical and moral courage than is expected of an archbishop, but there is a tremendous sense of urgency underlying this display.
He has already had two notable successes, and one of them will last. He has led the church past the General Synod's traumatic failure to approve female bishops in 2012, so that it seems certain that some will be appointed next year; and in the summer he managed to get the whole country talking about loan sharks and thinking of the Church of England as an organisation more concerned with the evils of payday lending than of sex.
He denounced payday lenders as evil in the House of Lords. Within a day the Financial Times discovered that the church itself had an indirect investment in Wonga through a fund in which its pension fund invests. Welby was furious when he discovered this but in public, on the Today programme, simply and disarmingly admitted it was a mistake. The whole thing was an improvisation that did him a great deal of good. His bold statement that the church could instead invest in credit unions that would "compete Wonga out of existence" was never really tested. What got through was the unmistakable sincerity of his rage and pity for the victims of such lenders and his determination to do more than seems possible, even if it's much less than is needed.
He has not been able to heal the international schism over homosexuality, which has, if anything, grown worse in the last year. The archbishop of Nigeria, Nicholas Okoh, who was an enthusiastic backer of a law that makes it punishable with a jail sentence even to talk about gay marriage, said recently: "Women are not scarce, men are not scarce and God has made adequate arrangement for human sexuality, so anybody who is developing any extra sexual instinct or desire, I think such a person should attend to himself because there is something wrong."

Link to video: Justin Welby: Wonga investment should not have happened

'An executive type'

Only a tiny minority of members of the Church of England would say things like that, although some would only regret Okoh's lack of ambiguity. Welby might have been one of them 15 years ago but he has changed since then, and he understands that the country has changed too. He will not be able to hold on to the Nigerians, or the Church of Uganda, another enthusiastic backer of homophobic laws. But he is making strenuous efforts to hold together as much as possible of the remains of the Anglican Communion, although there is no longer any pretence that this is a coherent body with discipline and doctrines of its own. One of Welby's closest advisers dismissed that idea as "a Roman Catholic fantasy".
That's only one of the sacred cows he has been slaughtering. In many respects, he has behaved like a business executive, with, in private, a remarkably hard-nosed realism no matter how uplifting he has been in public. "He's definitely an executive type," says one senior colleague. "He thinks in those terms. He operates in those terms. He's willing to make quite big moves."
The most obvious example of this dynamism was his recovery from the synod's fiasco over female bishops in 2012, when legislation that would have made it possible to choose women as bishops was blocked by a rump of conservative evangelical lay people, elected through an arcane system of committees that ensured they were wholly unrepresentative. Welby's reaction was threefold. First, he co-opted a number of senior women on to the committees previously reserved for bishops, so that they had access to real power. He pushed the synod into drastically shortening its timetable for legislation, so the mistaken vote could be undone in two years instead of five. And he set up a process of reconciliation and informal face-to-face negotiations between supporters and opponents.
None of this might have worked without the shock and revulsion felt in the wider church – and in parliament – at the failure of the earlier legislation. But this reaction would not on its own have shaken the defences of the conservatives, who were still resisting last summer. Only the personal and institutional pressure that Welby applied had that effect, and by February this year the opponents had accepted a much worse deal than they had earlier rejected, yet seemed happier about it. This was not entirely because accepting inevitable defeat meant they could continue to wrangle about gay clergy for the foreseeable future.
When first chosen, it seemed the most notable thing about Welby was that he had been a successful businessman: a man who understood money and could chastise bankers in their own language. But looking back after his first year, the most notable thing is less his civilian job than his formation in the peculiarly English upper-class Christianity of Eton, Cambridge and Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB). These are the places where Christianity is still part of the culture in a way that just isn't true elsewhere.
Welby's background was a startling mixture of privilege and insecurity. On his mother's side he was descended from five generations of colonial administrators. She had been a secretary to Winston Churchill; among her close relatives were Lord Portal, who ran the RAF, and RA Butler. His stepfather was a distinguished theologian. But his father, who soon divorced his mother, had only appeared to be an Englishman called Gavin Welby. In fact – unknown to his English family – he was born in a Jewish-German immigrant family called Weiler, made his first fortune bootlegging in New York during prohibition, and died an alcoholic who had left the last two years of Welby's school fees at Eton unpaid.
Welby delivers his Christmas Day sermon at Canterbury cathedral last year. Photograph: Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images Gavin Welby was a figure of enormous charm and energy, but entirely unreliable and mysterious even to those closest to him. At Eton Welby was not among the fashionable boys. He was much later described by his housemaster with wonderful condescension as "a model boy, though quite undistinguished". He was not a Christian then: he had had the conventional upper-class socialisation of tedious hymns and meaningless sermons, which normally functions as a vaccine against religious fervour. But at Cambridge he was converted by an extraordinary group of earnest upper-class evangelicals, who now, 30 years later, have taken over the Church of England.
The group that later became the core of the HTB movement was, from the outside, quite ludicrously posh. Five of them, for example, were called Nicky and four of those had been to Eton. They came out of a culture of clean-living, rugger-playing manliness that seemed little changed since the first world war – in one sermon preached at HTB in this century, the subject of oral sex was dismissed with the words "Chuck it, men!" In fact, though, this had been a deliberate anachronism planted in the 1950s and operating through summer camps that recruited through the public-school network.
And just as their tradition was a little bit phoney, so was their place at the heart of the establishment. Three of the core group (Nicky Gumbel, who more or less invented the Alpha course, Ken Costa, who became a fantastically rich banker, and Welby himself) were partly Jewish, though Welby did not then know his father's real identity. They had the self-assurance to appear absurd, with their earnestness and the tracts they handed out, but not, perhaps, the self-assurance to suppose they deserved all their privilege.
Enthusiastic Christianity was certainly not in the mainstream at Eton. The ungenial contempt of more secular Etonians is nicely captured by an entry in Alan Clark's diaries about Michael Alison, a Tory politician who was also a churchwarden at HTB: "Saintly but useless. You need someone with guile, patience, an easy, fluent manner of concealing the truth but drawing it from others in that job. It is extraordinary how from time to time one does get people who have been through Brigade school, taken their commission and served, seen all human depravity as only one can at Eton … and yet go all naive and Godwatch."
In fact, the form of Christianity to which Welby was converted as an undergraduate did emphasise the worthlessness of unredeemed humanity. It wasn't really naive at all. "Guile, patience, and an easy, fluent manner" distinguish Etonian Christians as much as Etonian pagans. It's just that the Christians want to tell you the truth as well.

Christian rebels

For a man with a well-deserved reputation for honesty and straight dealing, Welby has said some staggeringly untrue things – most famously when he told Giles Fraser that he was "one of the thicker bishops in the Church of England". He has an unforced relish in things of the mind – he loves the efflorescence of Nigerian English for its own sake – but he is not an intellectual. He doesn't build systems – he looks for what works.
Welby during a two-day visit to South Sudan. Photograph: Carl De Souza/AFP/Getty Images But self-deprecation of that sort doesn't count as dishonesty when no one (at least no one in the club) is meant to take it seriously, and it is in any case flattering to all the other bishops.
The young Cambridge Christians, so outwardly conventional, were in one respect rebels against everything they had been taught. They embraced wholeheartedly the charismatic revival – talking in tongues, miraculous healing, fainting in the spirit, and even prophecies – all things anathema to the older Calvinist tradition that was then dominant among Cambridge evangelicals. Their teacher in this was a bear-like Californian, John Wimber, who had been the drummer for the Righteous Brothers, and founded the immensely successful Vineyard group of charismatic churches. Quite a number of people brought up in the emotional straitjackets of the English upper classes found blessed relief in the permission the Holy Spirit gave them to weep or laugh and gibber and faint in public. In the mid-1990s, when the movement's influence on HTB was at its height, I visited a Chelsea church run by Nicky Lee, one of the men who converted Welby at Cambridge, and when the Holy Spirit started knocking people down, I'd hear the distinct rattle of pearls when the young women fainted to the floor.
This current of life-giving absurdity electrified them and gave those earnest young prigs the means to change over the years, even after they had become successful. The Holy Spirit gave them permission to be weird, and to navigate the collapse of traditional Christianity, which left an earlier generation of evangelicals stranded in reactionary nostalgia.
Asked what he had learned since his conversion, Welby said: "The longer you go on, the more I realise the infinite and amazing and wonderful diversity of human beings and what they do. Grace is at the heart of Christian faith and not law. The church isn't principally about rules. It's about a relationship with Jesus Christ, and he shapes people's behaviour. The street pastors, helping people at 3am on a Saturday morning who are drunk out of their minds, are not going to give them a lecture about drink. They're just going to help them to get home. The church is not a place where good people go. It's a place where bad people go to meet God. It's a refuge for sinners."
When Welby left Cambridge he dithered for a bit and then found a job working for a French oil company, Elf Aquitaine. More importantly, he married Caroline Eaton, a classics student at Cambridge, whose sister was for a while the vicar's secretary at HTB: the networks remained incredibly tight. In their summer holidays the couple went Bible smuggling together behind the iron curtain. Caroline Welby still accompanies him on some foreign trips, most recently a harrowing journey through the war zones of South Sudan and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. On that trip, as he later told the synod, they walked through a Sudanese town where 3,000 people had recently been killed. The bodies of 22 people from the cathedral staff – murdered and, if women, raped as well – were waiting for the archbishop to bury them in a mass grave. Yet he keeps going back. He doesn't flinch.

From oil man to vicar

This life is an enormous distance from the future he had when he was an oil man in Paris – though that is where his visits to Nigeria started. The newly married couple lived in France for five years. Their first child, Johanna, was born there. When she was seven months old he was promoted to a job in London, but on the journey in the car with Caroline they crashed. Johanna was thrown clear in her carrycot and died in hospital three days later. The Welbys went on to have five more children but the experience of bereavement stayed with them. Welby's unofficial and very evangelical biographer claims that Caroline Welby's immediate reaction after the crash was that "maybe somehow she was at fault for not praying hard enough before the journey".
This shows the way in which God appeared to the young people of HTB as a permanent presence and companion, with opinions on everything – an omnipotence somewhere between a father and a nanny. Later, visiting a Vineyard church in California, they came to a more balanced view. It is a very notable feature of Welby's Christianity that much of it has been formed outside the Church of England, both in the charismatic evangelical Vineyard network, and later through contacts with Roman Catholics: he has invited a Catholic community to live and pray full-time in Lambeth Palace.

Link to video: Justin Welby 'astonished' by archbishop of Canterbury appointment After a year in London working for Elf Aquitaine, Welby was headhunted by Enterprise Oil, a company formed to exploit the privatisation of British Gas's North Sea assets. In the five years he worked there as treasurer, it grew to be one of the 30 largest companies on the stock exchange. By that stage, his salary was more than £100,000 a year. He threw it all in to become a vicar, and not even a fashionable one.
He trained in Durham, rather than one of the Oxbridge seminaries, then spent 15 years serving the Coventry diocese. His energy, intelligence and experience marked him out for promotion even in an organisation as sclerotic and short-sighted as the Church of England can be. Coventry cathedral, because of its destruction by the Luftwaffe in the second world war, has specialised in teaching and practising reconciliation, and Welby was drawn into this work early on. He travelled almost everywhere where Christians were killing or being killed – he has made 70 visits to the dangerous regions of Nigeria, and in 2003 made an overland dash to Baghdad from Jordan in company with Andrew White, another HTB figure who became the Anglican vicar of Baghdad. Several times he texted Caroline because he thought he might imminently be killed.

Realism

From Coventry he moved to become the dean of Liverpool cathedral, a building emblematic of the Church of England's troubles: it stands gigantic, architecturally remarkable, largely empty and almost broke in an indifferent and rather hostile city. He sorted the finances within the first three years. Cathedral attendance went up, as attendance in almost all cathedrals has done in the past 10 years. He had the bells play John Lennon's anti-theist song Imagine as part of an arts festival, which shocked some people but helped to restore the sense that the cathedral was connected to the city's imagination.
When he was promoted to be bishop of Durham, one of the church's most senior posts, few were surprised. But his approach was astonishingly effective and free of pretension. At the time he said: "The longer I go on with this, the more I realise that the Church of England is not an organisation in any recognisable sense. Because bishops are dressed up in funny clothes, with funny hats and special sticks, it's assumed that if they say to a bunch of parish clergy: 'Do something,' they will do it. But that's not how it works and never has been."
Within months he had circulated a document in the diocese saying that without realism about finances the whole thing would collapse within 15 years. He urged, and put through, a reform of the funding system in which parishes were allowed to decide for themselves what they could afford to pay the central authorities, instead of being assessed. On the other hand, they would be expected to pay what they had honestly promised. Currently, 40% of them do not.
This kind of realism has carried through to his time in Canterbury. He works there in small groups of no more than six or seven, which debate decisions thoroughly before they are taken. He quickly culled the old guard at Lambeth and appointed an eclectic team, including, Jo Bailey Wells as his chaplain, who had been working with her husband in the US for eight years when chosen. He is by nature impetuous says one well-placed observer, and this way of working is a deliberate check on his temperament. But once decisions are taken, they are driven through effectively. One of these groups is planning a huge cull of ecclesiastical regulations. The aim is to make it much easier to plant new churches, reopen old ones, and close down those that can no longer be sustained. "That sort of thing needs to change very dramatically," he says.
He really does believe in the possibility of church growth, even though he is realistic about the fact of decline and the danger, on present trends, of complete collapse. Asked about the thesis that religion is now a toxic brand, especially to the young, he says: "A lot depends on how you ask the question. We've got a lot of churches with loads of young people, but I half accept the premise … there is an element of toxicity in the brand with some people. What's absolutely essential is to demonstrate and talk about the love and goodness of Christ and how he reaches out to people, rather than telling people how to behave."
The trouble is that most of his church still supposes that telling people how to behave is the best part of Christianity and telling other Christians how to behave is quite the most enjoyable part. The schism over homosexuality looks impossible to heal. HTB used to be implacably opposed, as it once was opposed to divorce, but now has moved to a position of pained silence. Welby himself was profoundly shocked by the reaction to his opposition to gay marriage in the House of Lords. Now he says that the fight is over: "The church has reacted by fully accepting that it's the law, and should react on Saturday by continuing to demonstrate, in word and action, the love of Christ for every human being."
But in Africa the movement has been sharply the other way. People around the archbishop are horrified by reports that two suspected gay men have been burned alive by mobs in Uganda who were celebrating the passage of an anti-gay law enthusiastically supported by the Ugandan Anglican church. But there is no pressure that he can apply that does not risk being dismissed as neocolonial interference.
The African opponents of gay people have coalesced into an alternative version of the Anglican Communion, called Gafcon. This has close connections with parts of the HTB movement that are planning to split from the Church of England formally if it moves towards open recognition of gay relationships. Welby himself spoke to the Gafcon primates before their most recent meeting, but did not attend it. He assured them of his admiration for their courage and that he had listened carefully to their view on sexuality.
In its studied absence of guile, this was reminiscent of De Gaulle telling the Algerian settlers that he had heard them – which they, to their cost, misunderstood as saying he had joined their side. Welby has not joined either side in the debate quite yet. Some clergy will undoubtedly marry their same-sex partners, despite the orders from bishops – among them Welby – that they refrain from doing so. But the discipline in those cases will be a matter for the individual bishops. The archbishop has positioned himself a little above the fray. This is characteristically diplomatic and realistic, as no one knows whether there are in fact legal ways to punish vicars who marry legally.
But it is also part of his belief that Christians ought to be able to "disagree well together".
The job of archbishop of Canterbury is of course impossible. Welby sleeps six hours a night (if that), he travels relentlessly, and his diary is crammed: for this article he could talk for 10 minutes on the telephone, booked 10 days in advance. No one I spoke to who had worked with him did not trust him, but no one felt they knew him, either. He is in the establishment now, but not on its side, despite his privileged background – or perhaps because of it. His commitment to the poor and to the victims of loan sharking made a huge impression in Durham. But perhaps he is not so very far from his roots after all.
This mild man is oddly reminiscent of General Conyers, a character created by the rather more conventional Etonian Anthony Powell: "He was a man who gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he would stop at nothing. If he decided to kill you, he would kill you; if he thought it sufficient to knock you down, he would knock you down: if a mere reprimand was all required, he would confine himself to a reprimand. In addition to this, he patently maintained a good-humoured, well-mannered awareness of the inherent failings of human nature: the ultimate futility of all human effort."
Except, of course, that archbishops do not nowadays kill anyone, and Welby is sure that human effort is not in fact ultimately futile, because God notices and pities it.
• This article was amended on 18 April 2014. The earlier version said Justin Welby's first parish was a working-class suburb of Coventry, and that he remained based in the city for 10 years. His first parish was within the Coventry diocese, but in Nuneaton.