On November 12, Archbishop Justin Welby announced that he would resign his office, noting that he “must take personal and institutional responsibility” for the church’s failures in handling the abuses of John Smyth. He thus became the first Primate of All England to resign for scandal in 14 centuries.
The Makin Report, released five days earlier, details only a portion of the sadistic deeds inflicted by Smyth, who it claims to have been “the most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church of England.” For decades, senior leaders within Church of England evangelicalism knew about the danger Smyth posed to young men, and far too little was done to hold him accountable and bring him to justice.
Serious mistakes were made by many people — church officials as well as police and people in various administrative roles — in handling the Smyth case after a formal complaint was filed in 2013. The case was complex, involving actions occurring on different continents, by a perpetrator who was sometimes an Anglican and sometimes not, who made use of connections within and outside the church to gain access to the gratification he desired. As a result, the maxim that “safeguarding is everybody’s business” was often minimized or ignored, and Smyth, an intelligent and forceful man, took every advantage he could.
Despite Welby’s deep associations with the upper-class conservative evangelical movement in which Smyth once held power, the Makin Report doesn’t give evidence that he was protecting the abuser or trying to keep the information under wraps. But he may have been dishonest about his prior knowledge, and given his position, he could have done more to bring Smyth to justice and to prevent him from doing further harm. Welby’s care for Smyth’s victims, some of whom he knew, was clearly deficient, and may have been dominated by a calculating spirit at odds with Christ’s call to attend first to “the least of these.”
The Church of England’s handling of John Smyth’s abuse was a systemic failure. Others are certainly more guilty than Archbishop Welby, but as the most powerful person within the system, he bears special responsibility.
In the end, he had little choice — resignation became inevitable. The chorus demanding it was remarkably unified, rising from across the normally fractious Church of England.
This wasn’t just because the Smyth case was appalling or because the church needed to prove once and for all that it takes safeguarding seriously. The archbishop simply had no friends left. During a tumultuous 11-year tenure, he had lost his notorious temper too many times, scolding subordinates for failures he overlooked in himself, refusing to let others have their say, ignoring precedent and canons when they got in the way of his agenda.
This was a managerial failure by the man who was intent on stage managing everything, a leadership disaster by one who presented himself first as a leader — not a shepherd or a saint or a teacher.
A former oil executive, Justin Welby has long traded on being a fix-it man, capable of getting out from behind the damask screen of the episcopacy to get the job done. In a way that contrasts starkly with his immediate predecessor, he has insisted on an aligned staff, clear priorities, and slick, polished presentations. He also has put himself at the center of every crisis, shaping things by the force of his personality.
This approach has sometimes worked well. He began his ministry with a focus on reconciliation, drawing on his deep connections in Africa and making a personal visit to every Anglican primate that resulted in the 2016 Primates’ Meeting, the most widely supported and successful gathering of its kind in recent memory. Discipline was imposed, real commitments to unity were made.
The prayer campaign Thy Kingdom Come and the Community of Saint Anselm emerged from his passion for spiritual renewal and the gifts of the monastic life. His sincere commitment to evangelism led to a significant expansion in church planting. His friendship with Pope Francis has strengthened ecumenical engagement and led to the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission’s inspiring joint pilgrimages of bishops to Canterbury and Rome.
Less successfully, he sought to form the Church of England’s episcopate after his own image by introducing an invitation-only leadership training program. This meant the bishops shifted as he did — from a cadre dominated by moderate evangelicals with business degrees to the current band increasingly united around identity politics and ready to take the plunge on same-sex marriage. Many gifted clergy and people in the pews were left on the sidelines shaking their heads.
Welby’s downfall is surely most driven by his mishandling of Living in Love and Faith, which also closely tracked his personal evolution on same-sex blessings. First, a cautious, complex report, with lots of information-gathering. Then, a pell-mell rush to the finish, breaking promises, ignoring canonical process, hiding legal guidance, and riding roughshod over every barrier General Synod aimed to lay down. His accounts of his changed views rarely landed well with progressives or conservatives, and he was far less careful than his predecessor in distinguishing his personal opinions from the church’s faith he promised to uphold.
His greatest failure was at the 2022 Lambeth Conference, perhaps the last of them. After a mammoth and costly effort to gather thousands of bishops, he laid on a 12-day leadership conference, largely refusing to let his fellow bishops argue or to make meaningful decisions, at least not about the issues that really trouble our unity.
His decision to squash the Global South Anglicans’ patient and respectful request for a referendum on the Lambeth Conference’s Resolution 1.10 — the only significant Communion-wide doctrinal text to emerge from the Global South — was a travesty. It alienated many leaders who were ready to be his friends, and who may never respond to another Archbishop of Canterbury’s invitation. As one Indigenous bishop said informally during the conference, “It was just like at the boarding schools. They say, ‘Sit down, shut up, and we’ll tell you what to do.’”
This was hardly the impression that Welby, clearly agonized about his colonial ancestry, wanted to give. But he could not bear to relinquish control at such a high-stakes moment. He could not sit back and listen to what his fellow bishops felt they needed to say to each other, and he never seemed to understand why they found that demeaning. In this, as in many instances, Welby seemed unaware of or simply ignored the deep ecclesiological work of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission and of The Virginia Report and its successors, muting a catholic ecclesiology in favor of his own charisma.
It was telling that Welby’s failures as a leader of the Communion figured so little in his downfall. A stern rebuke from the GAFCON primates for a recent podcast interview didn’t move the needle. He simply didn’t need to care.
This was a very English resignation. John Smyth almost certainly abused Anglicans in three countries, but only the Church of England’s guilt was examined. The petition calling for Welby’s resignation that gained over 14,000 signatures was written by three priests of the Church of England — on different sides in General Synod, to be sure — but in response to a very English safeguarding scandal, publicized in a Channel 4 documentary, steeped in the mother church’s class divisions and churchmanship battles. He took “institutional responsibility” for his church’s safeguarding failures.
It’s not known if Welby consulted with any Anglicans outside the Church of England in making his decision to step down. The Church of England effectively fired Anglicans’ spiritual head, and couldn’t be bothered to check in about it.
The Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith, and Order has been working on a set of proposals that would effectively de-emphasize the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role within the Communion. Archbishop Welby had already mooted the relinquishing of his role as an Instrument of Communion in his address to the Anglican Consultative Council in 2023, in part to give the Church of England more leeway to act unilaterally on same-sex blessings. The primates were more cautious when consulted about it last April, not yet ready for different models that would detach the role of convening the Communion from its ancient moorings.
The manner of Archbishop Welby’s departure may be the clinching bit of evidence that such a change is really necessary. The Church of England and the Anglican Communion will both clearly need a different kind of shepherd in the coming years — one who can say more convincingly, “[I] preach not [myself], but Christ crucified” (2 Cor. 4:5).
