Chair of the York Crown Nominations Commission: 25 April 2019
Prime Minister appoints Joëlle Warren, MBE, DL as Chair of the York Crown Nominations Commission.
Published 25 April 2019
From: Prime Minister’s Office, 10 Downing Street and The Rt Hon Theresa May MP
The Prime Minister has appointed Joëlle Warren, MBE, DL as Chair of the York Crown Nominations Commission.
Joëlle Warren serves as Her Majesty’s Vice Lord-Lieutenant for Cheshire, Chair of Cheshire Community Foundation, and served 10 years on the Board of Manchester Metropolitan University, latterly as Vice Chair. She began her business career in banking before founding the executive search firm, Warren Partners, in 1999. She is a Member of the North West Business Leadership Team and the CBI’s Enterprise Forum. Joëlle is actively involved in her local church and in wider work for the Church of England nationally.
Joëlle was appointed MBE in January 2016 for her Services to Business.
The Crown Nominations Commission was established by the Church of England’s General Synod in February 1977. Its function is to nominate new Diocesan Bishops for appointment by The Queen. In the case of appointments to the Archbishoprics of Canterbury and York, the Commission is chaired by an independent person who is a communicant member of the Church of England and not ordained. For the appointment of the Archbishop of York it is a requirement that the Chair should be resident in the Northern Province.
Sentamu retires in June 2020. Does this mean that his successor will be announced before he retires?
She ran an executive search firm so seems well qualified
How so? The CNC is supposed to rely upon discernment not recruitment experience.
And that’s my objection to this appointment. The announcement is replete with secular experience but says nothing at all about how the strength of her gift of discernment was tested, nor indeed whether she has the gift at all.
I don’t know, if she ran a search firm and her clients were quite satisfied, maybe she was very discerning.
One of the legs of the three-legged stool of Anglicanism is Reason.
Who is to say that God can’t work through this woman’s reasoning abilities? Especially, as Helen King points out, if she is about the values of the “organization” — in the case, the Church of England.
Could it be that compiling the list of candidates is akin to recruitment, whereas selecting a nominee involves the gift of discernment?
Yes, new ++York should be known well before Sentamu retires (similar with Hereford now) and, I am told, also enthroned in time for Lambeth.
I wonder why they can’t adopt this kind of timescale for all diocesan vacancies. I’ve been in several dioceses now during vacancies in see and in all cases I felt there was rather a drift, with existing staff carrying unnecessarily heavy loads, key decisions put off, etc. And in almost all other walks of life there would be some kind of handover, which in the church we don’t seem to have.
The Methodists seem to have a good system whereby all ministers seeking a move do so in the dead month of August. This methodical system removes the need for long stipend-saving interregnums
I suspect it looks better from the outside than from the inside. I wonder (for example) how they manage things like parsonage improvements if the removal van is waiting outside with the new folks’ furniture as soon as the last minister left. When I came here they needed to extend the study and replace the falling-to-bits kitchen, all major works which would severely have disrupted my getting started on things, the parsonage being a workplace as well as a living space (this said to head off the inevitable cry of ‘We homeowners have to fit round such works!’). There may… Read more »
The Methodists, I suspect, would not have allowed the kitchen to fall to bits in the first place.
But with a short, or no, interregnum, unfavourable comparisons are bound to be made between the new incumbent and the old. With a long interregnum people get so used to being without a vicar that the comparison made is whether or not the new vicar is better than nothing.
Actually education suffers just as badly – head teachers leave and replacements take months to get in place, often leaving a chain of people “acting up” and amplifying the Peter Principle.
And indeed in all parish vacancies.
The York CNC will meet between September and December 2019 and seeks to make a nomination before Christmas. The dates for meetings are still being finalised. The Vacancy-in-See Committee has met for the first time and will conduct elections of the six diocesan representatives to the CNC at its meeting in June. These and other details can be found on the Church of England website.
She goes to Christ Church Alsager (as does one of my friends from university who feels at home there) and has walked the Camino.
I don’t see the need for any of the ‘she works in secular recruitment, not in the sort of discernment needed here’ concern. Even a cursory search shows that Joëlle Warren has been a Bishop’s Selection Advisor (isn’t that about discernment?) and her approach is all about the values of the organisation, https://www.managers.org.uk/insights/news/2017/august/in-recruitment-if-you-dont-ask-you-dont-get?sc_trk=follow%20hit,%7B86CB756B-AB02-44E6-995A-305C69252B29%7D,recruitment
The joke with all this is not so much who will chair the York CNC, but that it is happening now, rather than six months ago – or earlier. +Sentamu (only one ‘plus’ by the way, archbishops are not twice consecrated!) made a great song and dance about staying to ‘complete the work [he had] begun’ – although we were never told what that was – but has now agreed to chair a major commission into oil pollution in Nigeria. Is this the work he was referring to? If it is, it is hard to see how this benefits the… Read more »