The Rt. Rev. Cherry Vann, Bishop of Monmouth, was elected July 30 as the first woman to serve as Archbishop of Wales. Vann, who is in a civil partnership with Wendy Diamond, is also the first lesbian to serve as primate of one of the Anglican Communion’s member churches.
Vann, a native of Leicestershire in England, was one of the first women to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. She has served as Bishop of Monmouth in Southeastern Wales since 2020, and will continue in that role alongside her ministry as primate of the Church in Wales.
The election follows the June decision of Archbishop Andrew John to “retire with immediate effect” after the publication of a review highlighting problems with financial mismanagement, safeguarding issues, and a culture of drunkenness and sexual promiscuity at Bangor Cathedral, which was under his oversight. There was no suggestion that John acted inappropriately.
Vann was elected by a two-thirds majority of the Church in Wales’ Electoral College, which met at St. Pierre Church and Hotel in Chepstow.
“The first thing I shall need to do is to ensure that the issues which have been raised in the last six months are properly addressed and that I work to bring healing and reconciliation, and to build a really good level of trust across the Church and the communities the Church serves,” she said.
Vann has experience in rebuilding trust in her diocese, as she became bishop after the troubled departure of the Rt. Rev. Richard Pain, whose five-and-a-half year ministry was described as “a tragedy” by a 2021 formal inquiry.
Pain’s anger during a program of mission audits in the diocese caused great tension among senior staff, and he ended up taking an extended leave of absence before retiring early in 2019. Pain was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 2023, and he now serves as a priest in the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham.
A working group continued the inquiry’s work by making a series of recommendations about the Church in Wales’ senior leadership culture. Vann welcomed the findings and spoke in recent months of a major culture shift among the bench of bishops, which she said was “very different from the one I joined four years ago. … We have set aside time to pray together, study Scripture, and share openly and honestly with one another. … We have learned to challenge each other appropriately.”
The contentious mission audit that had begun during Pain’s ministry was completed under Vann’s leadership in 2023. Monmouth’s ancient parish system was dismantled and replaced with 16 “ministry areas,” each led by a team of lay and ordained ministers, including at least two stipendiary priests.
Vann warned at the time that many of Monmouth’s congregations “have few if any members under 60: the life of the Church doesn’t look sustainable beyond a decade or so.” In January 2024, however, the diocese received a £3 million grant from the Church in Wales’ Evangelism Fund to create four new church plants aimed at people under 40.
Vann trained as a pianist, violinist, and music teacher at the Royal College of Music before preparing for the ministry at Wescott House, Cambridge. She was ordained as a deacon in the Diocese of Manchester in 1989, and then as a priest in 1994, the first year that the Church of England permitted the ordination of women.
She served in several parish posts in the Diocese of Manchester and was chaplain to the Bolton Institute of Higher Education and part of the diocesan ministry to the deaf. She was appointed Archdeacon of Rochdale in 2008 and served in this senior role until her election as Bishop of Monmouth. She was also conductor of the Bolton Chamber Orchestra for more than two decades.
Since 2021, Vann has been a patron of the Open Table Network, a charity that supports an ecumenical network of communities across England and Wales for LGBT people, their families, friends, and supporters.
Open Table describes Vann as “the first lesbian bishop in the Church in Wales” and adds that she was connected to Open Table gatherings in Manchester and Liverpool while serving in the Church of England. She helped develop that community in Derby. The Church in Wales has permitted its clergy to be in same-sex civil partnerships since 2005.
The Church in Wales’ governing body permitted the blessing of same-sex civil marriages and partnerships for a five-year period in 2021. It will begin reviewing the decision soon, and could act in the spring to extend the practice or to vote on allowing same-sex marriages.
The Very Rev. Ian Black, Dean of Newport Cathedral, the see of the Diocese of Monmouth, welcomed Vann’s appointment, saying that she was “the right person for this moment in the Church in Wales’ life.”
“She has the skills and vision that we need to restore trust following some very public failings,” he added.
“She has a deep faith, which is also open to those who take a different view to her, and this has impressed those people enormously.”
Vann will be eventually enthroned as archbishop at Newport Cathedral.
Following Edward I’s conquest of Wales in 1277, the country’s four ancient dioceses (Bangor, Llandaff, St. Asaph, and St. Davids) were incorporated into the Province of Canterbury. Anglicanism was the established religion in Wales until 1920, when the Welsh dioceses were separated from the Church of England, and formed into an independent and disestablished church. Since 1923, the church has consisted of six dioceses and a regularly meeting synod, the Governing Body.
The church’s membership has declined significantly in the past 50 years, from 91,247 in 1996 to 42,441, or 1.4 percent of the total population of Wales, by 2018. Though it is among the smallest Anglican provinces (about the same size as the Diocese of Massachusetts), it claims to be Wales’ largest Christian denomination. It has 923 parishes, which operate 1,413 places of worship, many of them dating from the early Middle Ages.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
