A post on the Church of England website announces that the candidate selected for nomination to the See of Durham has withdrawn. There is a longer statement on the Durham diocesan website.
Update on Durham Crown Nominations Commission
17/02/2025
The Crown Nominations Commission (CNC) for Durham met and nominated a candidate for the See of Durham, with interviews taking place in November 2024. However, the candidate has decided to withdraw from the nomination.
Having decided in November not to nominate a reserve candidate, the CNC has agreed to reconvene later in the year to continue the process of discernment.
A further update on the timescale for the Durham CNC will be offered in due course.
The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, said: “I want to thank The Bishop of Jarrow, Sarah Clark, for her ongoing service as acting Bishop of Durham, and everyone in the Diocese who is undertaking additional responsibilities during the vacancy. I will be praying for them, and please pray for the CNC as they reconvene to seek God’s discernment for the next Bishop of Durham, and for everyone served by the Church in the Diocese.”
This is slightly to the side of this news, but can anyone tell me why dioceses don’t just pick their own bishops (notwithstanding historical intertwining with the state)? Parishes pick their own priests, after all, and it seems like a much more sensible approach then getting the crown involved.
Parishes don’t pick their own priests. That responsibility lies with the patron of the benefice. Or, if presentation is suspended, with the bishop.
Although the parish representatives need to agree.
Yes indeed. And similarly if they are unanimous the diocesan representatives on the CNC can block an episcopal candidate.
To be entirely accurate, the parish reps need not to object to the point that they refuse to consent. It’s not always the same as agreeing.
The church both nationally and locally is represented on the CNC. Diocesans share in the leadership.of the church nationally e.g. by chairing the National Society and Board of Education, the Ministry Division or the Faith and Order Committee. They serve as Church Commissioners and (for the moment at least) sit in the Lords.
There may be considerations such as having a balance of experience and churchpersonship among the Diocesans which influence the discernment process.
I wonder if in future CNCs come up with two names to avoid a repetition.
It’s only in the last few years that they haven’t been required to come up with two names, isn’t it? Both names must receive the support of at least two-thirds of the CNC membership, i.e. 10 out of 14 votes, a threshold unchanged by last week’s General Synod meeting.
If CNCs (witness Carlisle, Ely) are finding it hard to even reach that threshold for one candidate then it’s a problem squared to do so for two. Perhaps that is why Durham did not do so. We don’t know!
Yes, General Synod took ages to amend the standing orders to catch up with the changed constitutional convention whereby the Church need only send one name to Downing Street. So for some years the CNC still had to get two candidates over the line (66% percent of whole commission – 10/14 as you say). Failure to find a second candidate was fatal to the whole process. Thought to have scuppered the Hereford CNC, but which was retrieved quickly. Following the changes to the standing orders, the question for each commission is therefore whether to nominate a reserve (same 10/14 majority… Read more »
Surely there is a large enough pool of Evangelicals to fill this post succeeding all the previous Evangelical bishops who have overseen decline in this diocese.
There will be calls for an O’Donovan 2.0 CNC review, to include a full review of the entire process, but I am not convinced it is top of the agenda at present. The Church of England is stuffed with bishops, and mercifully each of Carlisle, Ely, and now Durham has a very capable suffragan in charge. A move to a diocesan election process would align the Church of England with a number of other provinces, but it would not be a silver bullet for reform. Such a process would be more public (which would be good) but would also be more… Read more »
Has this happened often before? A withdrawal before an announcement? I can’t remember such a situation, but I don’t follow these things obsessively. Wrong to draw any conclusion – maybe a health issue could be the reason. But hard not to speculate that the difficulties about diocesan appointments might be broader than CNCs ‘failing to discern’ and needing rule changes. Maybe one suitable, agreed, acceptable candidate has just decided CofE episcopate simply isn’t worth the candle right now. If so (and it’s a big, perhaps irresponsible if), how many more may have so decided even before any CNC?
Perhaps the candidate was the Bishop of Liverpool, moving to a more senior appointment, and in view of what has happened there it was decided to leave a period of time before announcing the withdrawal of the Durham candidate.
Assuming the candidate was already a bishop perhaps the CNC took the view that they would not need a second candidate.
I can think of six Bishops of Durham in my lifetime who were not ‘already a bishop’, in chronological order Michael Ramsey, Ian Ramsey (no relation), John Habgood, David Jenkins, Nicholas Wright and Justin Welby.
Nicholas Wright? I think you mean Tom Wright!
It is Nicholas Thomas, and I took it wrongly that he used his first name. The same issue has affected me for a lifetime. I am John Clifford Jones, and (a decision made by my parents, obviously) was always called Clifford. When I was admitted to Australian citizenship the civic official on handing me the certificate said ‘Congratulations, John’. Once when I was interviewed for an academic post the chair of the selection committee said ‘Our next candidate is Dr John Jones’. I decided we might as well get things straight from the beginning and explained that I was known… Read more »
N.T. Wright!
I did wonder the same thing, Philip. Although not an intellectual heavyweight, as have been several past Bishops of Durham, he was a credible candidate academically and certainly fitted the bill politically for current national priorities in other ways, including having a powerful friend at court in ++York.
It does appear strange that the interviews for Durham took place on 25/26 November and the announcement of the withdrawal was only made on Monday 17th February. Under normal circumstances all the checks etc would have taken place, with Downing Street making an announcement late January/early February. Bearing in mind the support Stephen Cottrell has given to the Bishop of Liverpool over the years I wonder if he might have been the nomination for Durham and in the light of his retirement in early December the nomination could not go ahead. The announcement made this week was delayed both to… Read more »
It does appear strange that the interviews for Durham took place on 25/26 November and the announcement of the withdrawal was only made on Monday 17th February. Under normal circumstances all the checks etc would have taken place, with Downing Street making an announcement late January/early February. Bearing in mind the support Stephen Cottrell has given to the Bishop of Liverpool over the years I wonder if he might have been the nomination for Durham and in the light of his retirement in early December the nomination could not go ahead. The announcement made this week was delayed both to… Read more »
Even if the Church of England Dioceses were able to elect their own Bishops without going through the CNC, it would not solve the problem as we have seen in recent years in the Scottish Episcopal Church in recent years in both the Dioceses of Aberdeen and Orkney and Glasgow and Galloway where in both occasions both these respective dioceses failed to elect Bishops, so therefore the matter was taken out of their hands by the College of Bishops who on both respective occasions did the electing of Bishops. Jonathan
Since then Scottish Dioceses have made appointments without such anguish, ie Brechin, St Andrews Dunkeld and subsequently made changes to the procedures before Argyll 2024 and Glasgow 2025. The Bishops weep over the continuing Aberdeen situation.
I understood that most other Anglican provinces elect their bishops don’t they? I was involved in two electoral synods in a diocese in New Zealand and was happy with the process and outcome each time. Electoral synods consisted of clergy under 70 with bishop’s licence, and two lay reps from each parish. Met together over a weekend without the candidates present and proceeded through rounds of voting until one candidate emerged with a clear majority. Would be pleased to see this in the C of E. I felt there was plenty of buy in from the parishes and chaplaincies and… Read more »
I think there needs to be a moratorium on bishop appointments firstly because of the situations in Ely and Carlisle. Secondly Although we will never know why the candidate withdrew it would be good to see if there is a theme.
Carlisle and Ely CNC panels unable to agree enough, according to the rules, to appoint a Dicoesan Bishop. One Archbishop resigned. Now the CNC chosen candidate for Durham has decided to withdraw from the nomination. Maybe its not a trend yet, but it feels like we’re on the edge of the unfortunate coincidences explanation?
Interesting, let’s see how things continue. It feels to me that things are creaking somewhat.
This is getting ridiculous. A job which for most of the last 1000 years was one of the best jobs in the world and now there’s not one taker?!
Indeed. We are now a very long way from the days when it was quipped of William Van Mildert, the last bishop exercising palatine rights: “That pious soul Van Mildert, Much with his money bags bewildered!” https://etheses.dur.ac.uk/6840/2/6840_4145-vol2.PDF and also https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/last-of-the-prince-bishops/9EED8B2C885289B4EE43D6F6103607A9 Moreover, who would want to be a bishop of a see which was already in straits (Welby’s reform to ‘giving’ during his brief tenure having amounted to a temporary dead cat bounce), which is now as modestly endowed as it was once scandalously so, which has lost a quarter of its attendance over the last decade, and whose rump attendance… Read more »
Who would want to be a diocesan bishop in the Church of England? Is any see an attractive prospect?
Exactly! In the case of Durham the house sold off for example and in exchange for a lifetime of walking on eggshells, and since it was probably easier to get to the House of Lords in a coach and four than it is on LNER, and woe betide anyone who thought they might fly from Newcastle….
A bit too early to draw any conclusions as Welby at least tried to think long term, so the benefits of his tenure have yet to fully play out. His strategy was to bring younger people into the church, which in my experience over the last 10 years has worked and is working. If the resources now switch back to support poorly attended (as opposed to simply poor) parishes then this suggest a move back to the 1980-2010 long term trend of an increasingly elderly church slowly dying out, with nothing to show for the increased ‘investment’.
I was referring specifically to Welby’s short tenure at Durham in 2011-13, when he asked parishes to donate what they could in order to rehabilitate diocesan finances. This led to a brief revival of the DBF’s fortunes. In terms of Welby’s agenda as archbishop, my experience or attending services (which now covers about two fifths of all parishes in England) is that even if there has been some modest growth in a few places it has been offset to a vast extent by failures elsewhere. However, you raise the most fundamental point of all, which is what the Church of… Read more »
The stated intention is to re-evangelise England. Closing churches is a sign of failure or even defeat.
“If the resources now switch back to support poorly attended (as opposed to simply poor) parishes then this suggest a move back to the 1980-2010 long term trend of an increasingly elderly church slowly dying out, with nothing to show for the increased ‘investment’.” The generation born in the years following the war were and are in too many cases indifferent to what happens next, so long as it works for them. Hence the death of clubs, societies and charities: rather than engage in succession planning and considering what might attract and retain younger members, the boomers clung to the… Read more »
THANK YOU! This message should be put up in Christmas tree lights. It also underscores the pitiful failure of all the churches and many other forms of social endeavour during the 1980s and 1990s (when both Sunday schools and youth groups practically vanished in many parishes). At that time there were considerably more stipendiary clergy than there are now: what does that say about the wisdom of increasing the numbers of stipendiares on the presumption that it will somehow succeed in reversing the freefall (that is a rhetorical question)? What your comment also illustrates is the argument made by many… Read more »
Demographers works in terms of the “TFR”, or Total Fertility Rate. It’s often characterised as the number of children the average women will have in their life, but it’s actually a more complex measure: it’s the integral of the percentage of women of that age who had a child this year, taken over all ages. It can be best described as “the number of children a woman would have were she to behave in each year of her life as women of that age behave today”. The reason the birthrate rose so sharply after the war is that TFR approached… Read more »
Thank you so much for that! That is fascinating, although I note that many informed writers were making claims for the pending extinction of the middle class a century ago – notably the Eugenics Society (which was then still respectable), and that included Anglican eugenicists like W. R. Inge. Many of these same writers railed against advancing socialism which would result in the middle class having ever smaller families whilst the ‘inferior’ working classes would wax demographically, ensuring the decline of the stock (and, in Inge’s view, the decline of Anglicanism). However, one of the paradoxes of the rake’s progress… Read more »
It’s amazing how educational TA is!
“If the Church of England is the indigenous middle class at prayer, and if the middle class is cannibalising itself financially, then the likely fate of the Church seems clear” My daughters are in their late twenties. One is a regular attendee and active participant (night shelter, music, etc) at her local church. The other intermittently attends hers. Although both higher-rate tax payers, they are single and living in rented accommodation, with all the instability that implies. At the same age we had owned a house for some years and were planning children. And there, ladies and gentlemen, is Nigel… Read more »
What you describe seems to me at least to be the demise of Christendom and modernism. What I think happened 30 years ago is that the Toronto blessing, which drew many people of whatever generation and background together into a church planting movement which is growing and thriving, One of the purposes of the Toronto blessing was to shake people out of their traditional view of church and stereotypes, such as those you describe.
Thinking at least of Carlisle and Ely I don’t believe there was a shortage of takers – the Great and Good powerbrokers of the institution, in the name of ‘discernment’ failed to hear the same message from on high and decided to leave the dioceses unfilled Maybe something about Power and Control as a different thread has been discussing in relation to safeguarding- though in these cases it seems more like ‘computer says no’….? I have suggested before that a solution would be to confirm the acting bishop after an agreed period of time rather than effectively exclude them because… Read more »
Power and control are part and parcel of the leadership of any organisation otherwise very little gets done. The question particularly in terms of safeguarding is one of oversight and how clergy, bishops and archbishops are held accountable for their actions or inaction, also including why they fail to attract young people into the church.
That’s one way of looking at it I suppose.At the moment in the church it seems to me that so many factions are trying to wrest or hold on to the levers power and control very little does get done, except in an ever decreasingly circular type direction.
That’s what happens where there is a leadership vacuum unfortunately.
Nolo episcopari, indeed!
If the candidate is not already a Bishop, it’s actually quite refreshing to hear of one who says it and actually means it!! Though I have no doubt it’s disappointing and frustrating for those of the Diocese of Durham for whom having a Diocesan Bishop in place is a matter of interest/relevance (which probably rules out around 99% of local lay members of churches!).
An utter fiasco. The CNC rules should be changed so that the appointment process begins 12 months before the retirement of the current bishop.
And in cases like this where the suffragan is going to be acting diocesan for a prolonged period why not give her the job permanently? Can’t the CNC have a call on Zoom to agree that?
There is the issue of vocation here. Not all suffragans are either called or equipped to be diocesans. That doesn’t make them any less – its just where their gifts and talents lie.
If a suffragan has been acting diocesan, presumably s/he was called to that role. And if they have been reasonably effective as acting diocesan, they were also ‘equipped’ for it.
However, I think it would be unwise for acting diocesans automatically to become diocesans, because they may indeed prove to have been not equipped for the job.
That would mean the outgoing bishop would have to give over 12 months’ notice of intention to retire.
“That would mean the outgoing bishop would have to give over 12 months’ notice of intention to retire.”
That is hardly unusual in senior management roles in other contexts.
The Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich did just that, giving formal notice in February 2024 that he would retire on 28 February 2025. In consequence, the diocesan vacancy in see committee was able to meet over the late spring and early summer of 2024, completing it’s work by late August. The CNC is scheduled to meet to short list candidates on 4 March, just four days after +Martin retires.
The Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich didn’t really have a choice as he was 70 in February last year. The normal retirement age for clergy.
Who’d want to be a Bishop nowadays? Some maybe, but for the right reasons?
What are the right reasons?
This all raises important questions not just about the appointment process for Bishops but about what Bishops are for and therefore what kind of people might serve in such a role. As some Catholic dioceses in the USA have demonstrated diocese can flourish for years without a Diocesan Bishop. Indeed the Scandinavian see now filled by the remarkable Bishop Eric Varden had been vacant for a decade before his appointment. In reflecting on my own experience, I have worked closely with 10 diocesan Bishops. They all brought a variety of important gifts to the role but the big divide in… Read more »
That’s interesting.
I wonder if in provinces where they elect their own bishops there is a tendency to appoint effective pastoral leaders known to the community, and trusted by the priests and laity who form the electoral college.
Whereas in the C of E the CNC system gives more value to other attributes, more relevant to national leadership, whatever that means.
Interesting reflection. I’d go further and say that, in my experience of working closely with senior staff, there’s another distinction between those whose parochial experience is recent and those who have held a different (or more senior) office than Incumbent before episcopal preferment. In one largely urban Diocese I know well (not the one in which I currently serve) all 3 Bishops have much parochial experience, one very recent. But none has experience of being Incumbent of a multi-parish benefice, or a substantial team ministry, of closing churches, revitalising local churches out of decline, or of leading small communities without… Read more »
Of course, this may well have happened before. In previous times, the system was even more opaque, and there may well have been people who had been nominated and then withdrawn before going through the Prime Minister/Windsor loop, and we wouldn’t even have known about it. It’s only in recent years that the dates of the CNC have been made public.Greater openness inevitably breeds greater speculation.
Which might, Mirabile dictu, be a tentative argument in favour of discretion? Once a can of worms is opened, someone will want to explore it to the bottom. Openness is presumably intended to cultivate trust, but where trust is strong, paradoxically, discrete processes are relatively unquestioned. Greater openness might simply give greater territory upon which to apply suspicion. No solution here, the ship has sailed, except to call for a deepening repentance, and turning in faith to the faithful one whose grace can make us trustworthy.
I am sure that on occasions when the OHMS envelope from Downing Street hit the mat at the front door the recipient said ‘not on my life’ and/or ‘there are other reasons why I will not/cannot accept.’ Towards the end of the old process, the Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretary would pick up the phone first! Candidates are now asked at interview whether, if nominated, they would accept the See. But whatever led the successful Durham candidate to reply in the affirmative in November, something clearly changed before the announcement was made. The principal reasons might include: (i) recent revelation of… Read more »
or (iv) they fancy their chances for Canterbury
I can’t imagine anyone actually wants to be Canterbury. It doesn’t exactly sound a lot of fun. My feeling is whoever becomes the next ABC will accept from a sense of duty and calling.
Well, in the current febrile environment all speculative ideas are possible but (a) the Durham CNC met for its final meeting after ++Cantuar resigned; and (b) my own view is that the Durham successful candidate was not a current diocesan bishop, whereas the new Canterbury will be.
Or (v), a skeleton in the wardrobe they fear might topple out one day
(ii) and (iii) can overlap. If a candidate remembers a safeguarding incident in the dim and distant past which they could have handled better (which I suspect applies to a fair number of clergy with the wisdom.of hindsight), they may not relish being the subject of the next Channel 4 News expose.
I think all of us who are or have been bishops live with that shadow looming over us. In the current climate, there are many alleged incidents being reported, and causing huge workload to the NST (as they have to investigate them). I have had two NST investigations in the past six months into allegations about things I was said not to have done. In one case, I had to produce the documentary evidence that I had in fact reported to Police and Social Services correctly and that they had investigated. In the other, I had to prove that the… Read more »
Thank you for this honest and revealing post. One of my fears about the seemingly unstoppable burgeoning of safeguarding tasks and responsibilities is that it will deter good people from stepping up to become – PSOs, Vicars, Bishops …. The more things one has to do and show one has done make it more and more likely that something will get missed. More things to give oneself sleepless nights over. More things to raise the stress levels to the point where you’re not doing safeguarding any more because you’re on sick leave, or you’ve packed it in. At some point… Read more »
If the candidates are asked that question, then the name should be announced as soon as the CNC have decided. All the subsequent steps are symbolically relevant, but are formalities. Any serious checks should be conducted before the interviews, in order to assure the CNC that every candidate they are interviewing will be able to be appointed. The announcement can simply state that “the CNC have resolved to recommend X for appointment.”
An interesting idea, but that makes the nomination conditional, as you suggest, and as a Crown appointment the convention (maybe it’s just politeness!) is that Downing Street makes the announcement on behalf of the King.
The Crown Nominations Commission will meet ‘later in the year’ to consider the process again. Since this is a situation of their own making by not having a reserve nomination would it
be reasonable to expect them to show a greater degree of urgency?
And in connected news…
https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2025/02/church-of-england-bishop-calls-for-disestablishment
The PM would be irrelevant…
Interesting. In my misguided and rude youth, I sat next to the then dean of Norwich at a dinner hosted in my college chaplain’s rooms, and he turned and asked me for my views on what should be done with cathedrals. I responded by saying they should all be turned into cultural museums. He turned back and ignored me the rest of the evening. I was maybe over influenced by my previous year in Kenya, where the cathedral was entirely irrelevant. The main question is what a disestablished church looks like. Issues such as seats in House of lords and… Read more »
I’m not wishing for it… slightly “amused” that the Bishop seems to be concerned about failure of “hierarchy ” , disconnected from one’s average Parish as a reason to be disestablished.
Feels a bit like “we’ve failed ” but everyone must take responsibility.
There is a lot of nonsense talked for and against disestablishment, The CoE was not ‘created by Henry VII so he could marry his mistresses.’. The protestant martyrs were not burnt because of their support for the monarchy. The voice of bishops in the HoL is very mute. The occasions of coronation etc. do not justify establishment. Christianity thrives in many parts of the world without the help of cathedrals and ornate structures and organisations, and indeed within England also. The only thing worth preserving, IMHO, is the idea that everybody has a local church with a priest who has… Read more »
That for me is what is important about establishment.
Any resident of the parish can be buried in the churchyard if it is not closed.
A parish priest must baptise the child of any residents of the parish who bring him or her for baptism, delaying only for proper preparation.
Subject to certain exceptions, any resident of the parish can be married in the parish church.
Any resident of the parish whose name is on the electoral register can vote for the churchwarden.
The Church of England is not a sect which can pick and choose whom it ministers to.
Those are great images, and possibly comforting, but I fear detached from much of what many perceive as the church being about, either those in the fold or outside it. Twenty years on I still wonder what on earth possessed the vicar of my sister’s parish church to refuse a church funeral because she was honestly agnostic. So we sat in silence at the crem and listened to Handel, played live, which was unobjectionable in itself but also left me (still churchgoing tho I do wonder why) and others, feeling spurned or unkindly excluded. I’m not sure why I’m remotely… Read more »
“Subject to certain exceptions, any resident of the parish can be married in the parish church.”
To coin a phrase beloved of the young people, those “certain exceptions” are certainly doing a lot of heavy lifting.
This sounds to me like the CofE being a religious equivalent of the NHS. Anyone up for explaining the congruity of this kind of polity with the vision of the ekklesia found in the NT?
I might be up for it if you explained what ‘polity’ and ‘ekklesia’ meant.
I think polity might be something to do with politics, and ekklesia with the church?
Yes, an NHS for the soul, but without the queues and waiting lists?
Polity – structure, organisation, rules. Ekklesia – those ‘called out’ from the world by God to be his people. i.e. a community somehow distinct from those around them, due to their incorporation through faith and baptism into Christ. My contention would be that there are significant theological problems around obligations to confer baptism and Christian pastoral offices to people simply on the basis of their geographical residence. In a C16 polity of Christendom culture (sorry, using that word again), such rules might make sense. In our post-Christian, neo-pagan context, they feel at least worthy of critique, if not revision or… Read more »
Thanks. I have a distaste for those who choose a church in which to marry depending on how the photographs would look. I would expect any priest to have a significant pre marriage discussion with the couple, more than just choosing hymns, and provide marriage advice from experience. I can see the difficulties. As an organist at many weddings, I wish I could have been paid 1% of what the couple spent on the wedding and honeymoon. Vicars would appreciate 1% also (no more than organists, because organists often have to learn pieces the couple have chosen, which takes time).… Read more »
I’d generally agree with all that.
As that great prophet, Robert Warren, once said “The Church of England – a minority communiyu with a majority complex
As an ex-denizen of the Church in Wales I’d say yes – disestablishment. Helen-Ann Hartley has said that the Church had “forfeited its right” to be the established church but when, one might ask, did it ever have such a “right” in any moral sense?
I’m not phased if it happened. Mind you I’m approaching 75 rapidly and was ordained in 1977.. “active retired”. So not much will cause change for me! I certainty don’t think establishment is a right and I’m unconvinced of its benefits. One might be concerned, not about the CofE, but about what might be put into its place. Bishops, sometimes at least, have been good voices in the HofLords. I don’t think a disestablished church would affect most parishes… and maybe free them up to work with other denominations. But then I don’t think the CofE is an eternal institution.… Read more »
I have never thought of ‘Establishment’ as a right – something the church can claim for itself. I think the Bishop’s statement is very misleading from that point of view. Rather, it is a way of serving the nation.
If the nation wants it. The power to disestablish is held by Parliament, who could decide to invest time and effort to unpick the varied threads of establishment if they wanted to. But attacking the sanctity of life seems to be a more pressing use of their time currently.
If your reference to the “sanctity of life” is to the debate about assisted dying, does your view of life’s sanctity extend to making it obligatory for doctors to offer any life prolonging treatment available, and on patients to consent to it?
On appointments of bishops, the prime minister is already irrelevant, by their own choice. As stated above, their role (and of course that of the monarch) are symbolic and ceremonial.
The secrecy of this leads to much speculation and gossip. It is being said the person (and the name of a diocesan is mentioned) accepted then Canterbury became vacant so they thought they may pull out a bigger plum …
No mention here of the impact on +Sarah, and scant mention in the CofE press release. If she is doing the job “out of duty” to fill a temporary gap, that gap just got massively longer; if she is doing the job because she wants it, she now knows that not only did the CNC choose someone else, she wasn’t even considered a suitable reserve. (The only other circumstance is that she was offered the position but turned it down based on doing it temporarily.). It’s really unfair on her yet I am hearing nothing about that and no sense… Read more »
Remember that no one can explicitly apply for an episcopal vacancy. The members of the CNC itself are the only ones who may put people on the list. I think it’s already been pointed out that these days anyone suggested for the long list is informed and can decline to allow their name to go forward. It is unusual for a suffragan in the diocese to become the diocesan bishop. From 2008 only 3 such appointments have been made out of 63 vacancies (including the three recent failed processes): that’s less than 5%. The three are Philip North from Burnley… Read more »
That’s as may be, but expecting a suffragan to hold the fort for months seems unfair, doubly so if the CNC doesn’t appoint.
Until fairly recently, a suffragan bishop was offered no support at all when they found themselves holding a diocese in vacancy. That has changed. mentoring and coaching is now available as well as past support.
I am unaware of whether a suffragan who has been made an acting diocesan receives a financial ‘higher duties allowance’ or something of the sort. That is so in many career structures.
They do. Another recent change.
Interesting that in discussion of why anyone would want to be a bishop/ arch-bishop there is no mention of ambition. Is that because CofE clergy (& their spouses) are too holy to be in any way driven by ambition?
Also more than a little disturbed that the references to birth rate all put it down to the woman – ‘handmaid’s tale’ & women as birthing machines!
I picked up a purple biretta on eBay about 20 years ago. First bid too.