WITH three years to go until her retirement, the new Archbishop of Wales, the Most Revd Cherry Vann, spoke this week about the hard work ahead to change the culture in the Church in Wales.
Her appointment follows the retirement of her predecessor, the Rt Revd Andrew John, in the wake of a Visitation at Bangor Cathedral and the announcement of a “cultural audit” of the entire church by the Representative Body (News, 4 July).
As Bishop of Monmouth, she succeeded the Rt Revd Richard Pain, whose long absence and subsequent retirement (News, 17/24 December 2021) was the subject of an inquiry that described events in the diocese as a “tragedy”, in which careers were “damaged and reputations left ruinous” (News, 6 May 2022).
Speaking to the Church Times on Wednesday, Archbishop Vann said that, in the wake of the inquiry’s publication, not enough had been done to tackle the cultural issues identified. The review, published in 2021, describes “a story of people attempting to do the right thing but tying themselves in knots when they fail to revisit poor decisions and avoid risk to the extent that they create more of it”.
While recent events across various dioceses and cathedrals were “unique episodes”, there was “something around the culture in the Church in Wales that has perhaps allowed or enabled them to happen”, Archbishop Vann suggested. These included a lack of transparency, openness, and honesty, a lack of accountability, and “not enough scrutiny or oversight”, she said. “There’s been a fear around raising concerns, and the implications of that for the people concerned.”
Her time in Monmouth had underlined the importance of “being honest about the situation that we find ourselves in”, she said. “It’s about setting a tone: making it very clear what the expectations are in terms of behaviour and in terms of doing things properly, having proper governance procedures in place, having proper appointments procedures in place and building those levels of trust between myself and the clergy here.
“I was very clear, if they didn’t understand what was going on or why I had said what I did, or they didn’t agree with what the diocese was doing, I encouraged them to contact me, and they did.”
Changing the culture was, she said, “not something that I can do on my own, but I do have to lead it and do have to set very clear expectations”.
“I have to model it myself and it’s going to take a while but I think we’ve got a chance now to do some really good work across the provinces to ensure that all six dioceses are in a good place.”
Between 2020 and 2023, Monmouth diocese underwent the pastoral reorganisation of 121 parishes into 16 ministry areas. This followed publication of the Harries report in 2012, which concluded that the parish system in place was no longer sustainable (News, 11 March 2022). Its implementation has been contested (Letters, 18 March 2022). Amid similar moves by Church of England dioceses, a review of the Mission and Pastoral Measurem published by the Church Commissioners in 2021 said: “Anecdotal evidence from Wales suggests a super-parish type model has not worked well, but there is an absence of hard data.”
This week, Archbishop Vann defended the model as “the best way of securing the life of most of our churches . . . and the best way of using the resources we have at this time”. She spoke of the importance of team-working across churches, clergy, and laity, and of the model being “being bottom-up, not top-down”.
“We will have to close some churches, that’s inevitable,” she said. “But at least with this model every church gets a eucharist at least once a month, some of them get twice a month, some of them get four times a month. We encourage laypeople to take on ministries and to lead worship themselves; so it feels to me much more like the body of Christ working together, rather than a hierarchical model where the clergy do everything and the laity tag along and perhaps help or perhaps resist.”
There was still “a long way to go” in Monmouth, she said. But “I feel we are in actually quite a good place now and people are starting to catch the vision and are starting to recognise that their little church is part of something bigger that isn’t going to gobble them up, that is actually going to support them in what they can do in their communities.” It wasn’t possible for every church to have their own vicar, she said, “because we don’t have enough vicars”.
She continued: “I’ve made it absolutely clear I’m not about closing churches. I think churches are absolutely vital in their local communities and stand as a really important sign and symbol.”
Archbishop Vann’s appointment was heralded in the press as the first time that a woman and someone in a civil partnership had been appointed Primate in the British Isles.
“I don’t want to play those things down, because I know how important they are to women, and people in civil partnerships and civil marriages, and people who are part of the LGBT community,” she said. “It is massive, and I do understand that.
“But I am absolutely clear that that’s not the reason why I was elected to this role. People have seen what I was able to do in Monmouth, and think that is something that the Church in Wales needs at this time and that I may be able to lead that change across the province, as I have done across the diocese. There is more to me than being a woman and a lesbian in a civil partnership.”
Archbishop Vann has been in a relationship with Wendy Diamond for 30 years and in a civil partnership since 2015. Until 2020, she spent 30 years in ministry in the diocese of Manchester.
“I wasn’t courageous enough when I was in England to be out,” she said. “I lived in fear, like a lot of gay clergy. . . I was fearful of being outed or on the front page of the local newspaper. So, I kept it very quiet and we lived a very private life. I got on with my ministry and Wendy didn’t feature at all.
“It was when I came to Wales and I thought ‘I can’t go on like this any more. They have to know that, if I come to Wales, I am coming as somebody in a civil partnership.’ I was told that is not an issue, so I went ahead with the nomination and I found it, on the whole, not to be an issue.
“I have felt extraordinarily welcomed for who I am, and Wendy comes with me; she is very welcome in the churches that we go to. . .
“I guess that there are people who struggle with it, and I know that there are some clergy across Wales who find it really difficult to accept the fact that I am in a civil partnership; but, on the whole, it’s been a completely liberating experience, and I can’t tell you what a difference it has made to Wendy, who no longer has to pretend that she doesn’t exist, but can just be. We are just who we are.”
For some people, she said, her being English and unable to speak Welsh was more important than her gender or sexuality. She was “very mindful” of being English, she said. “There’s a long history here. The Welsh feel very ‘done-to’ by the English, feel very marginalised, and they have had to fight for their identity and their culture and their language. . . I think that’s partly why they can embrace me as being different, as being also part of a marginalised group. . .
“There’s nothing I can do about being English except to really honour the Welsh identity, and the Welsh culture and language, as best I can.”
The Church in Wales reported 26,000 worshippers in 2018 before the Covid-19 pandemic. As Bishop of Monmouth, Archbishop Vann warned that many congregations “have few, if any, members under 60: the life of the Church doesn’t look sustainable beyond a decade or so”.
“I think our hope has to be in God,” she said this week. “I’ve said to people here that we are not here to save the Church in Wales. The Church is God’s Church and we just have to not be anxious on God’s behalf because God is quite capable of saving his Church, if that is what he chooses to do. . .
“It’s very easy to think it all depends on us and we just have to work harder, and we beat ourselves up for not being this, that, or the other. It’s counterproductive. We are suppose to be a joyful people and a hopeful people, and that’s what I try and model.”
On school visits, she had noticed “extraordinary interest” from young people who had had no contact with the Church and who had asked “really deep and probing questions about faith and God and prayer”, she said. “It warms my heart, really; I think, ‘Well, God is at work.’”
In her own childhood, she had been “deeply spiritual” and “deeply introverted”, and spent a lot of time alone in nature, where she had a “really strong sense of God’s presence”, she said. This was also the case in church, where she was “captivated by the drama of the liturgy”, and was “very fortunate to have a wonderfully saintly parish priest, who really nurtured my faith”.
She recalled: “Ironically, I realised, or learned, when I was ordained deacon that he was opposed to the ordination of women; but I never knew that, he never let that on, he was always an encourager.”
