Peter Standford’s Recommendations: What the Church of England Needs

Source

Having had a ringside seat at the events of the past two decades, and more broadly as a fellow traveller (albeit at one pew removed as a Catholic), who sees so much that is good and needed about our national church as its goes about its daily, non-headline-making parish life, here are a few suggestions – more 10 conversation-starters than 10 commandments – assembled with the help of Anglican friends.

1. Stop obsessing about sex and gender

2. Pick on a subject that matters

Over in Catholicism, Pope Francis has achieved miracles in his first year in post at the head of a church arguably even more sex- and gender-obsessed by focusing remorselessly on what has become his mantra: “a poor church for the poor”. With its parish churches in the heart of every deprived and marginalised community, the Church of England is just as well equipped to make the same claim.

3. Break that link with the state

4. Beef up the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury

5. Treat the Anglican Communion as a religious equivalent of the Commonwealth

Postcolonial Britain has rebuilt its relationship with its former colonies within the loose but (generally) cordial structures of the Commonwealth. The Church of England should copy this model with the various branches of the Anglican Communion that, mostly, have their roots in our colonial past, and give up all trying and failing to sing from the same hymn sheet. It will free up the domestic church to be what it wants to be without looking fearfully over its shoulder as to how any reform will play with Anglicans in Nigeria, New Zealand or North America.

6. Offload the property empire

7. Get out of state schools

8. Get some better PR (i)

9. Get some better PR (ii)

10. Get some better PR (iii)

Canonise Desmond Tutu. Anglicans don’t go in for saint-making in the same way as their Orthodox or Catholic cousins, but surely an exception could be made in the case of the South African Laureate. He’s so well loved and respected, yet many of his secular fans forget that he is an Anglican.