Updated Saturday, Monday and Wednesday
Both the Church Times and Law & Religion UK have been looking at items on the agenda for the forthcoming meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod.
Church Times
Law & Religion UK
Updates
Colin Coward
Law & Religion UK
The Telegraph
Church Times
this Synod will surely be engulfed by the fury over the destruction of the ISB.
Always supposing it ever gets started if a ‘no confidence in the chair’ (is this the term used?) is proposed.
How many General Synod members does it take to wrest control of synod’s agenda from the Business Committee? Do they need to be in every House? Getting people in the House of Bishops to speak up might be a little bit tricky…
Impossible. Omertà rules
It is a myth that the Business Committee “controls” the agenda. It “settles” the agenda, i.e. it decides on the order of business, whether an item of business that comes to it through the main routes can be fitted into this Synod or would be better held off until the next one, whether to put in extra evening sessions to try and get through more business, etc. Business Committee does not commission items, but selects from the “bids” for time on the agenda. These can come from the NCIs, the legislative programme, from Diocesan Synod Motions, from Private Members Motions… Read more »
Not wanting to be a conspiracy theorist, but the scrapping of the ISB could be a convenient ‘dead cat’ to divert attention, energy and angst away from other things. For example, the approval of a major new set of prayers (PLF) as an appendix to another paper, rather than as a standalone item of business.
David, there is no motion before the General Synod at York to approve any LLF prayers – revised or otherwise. Rather, because the three working groups set up following the February group of sessions of Synod have not had time to complete their work, proposed approval of the prayers and other documents has been postponed to the ‘contingency’ group of sessions of the Synod scheduled for 13-15 November 2023. Indeed, discussion by Synod members of the ‘update’ paper GS 2303 is to be at what is, in effect, an informal session (SOs won’t apply, so it won’t be recorded nor… Read more »
I oppose the new prayers, to be clear. The conservative view is “that ship has sailed”. There will be resistance but that is for another day.
The destruction of the ISB has had the extraordinary effect of uniting every single one of us against our “leaders”.
There is no conspiracy. Just boundless arrogance and disdain.
Possibly one of the least of current concerns, we recently discussed on TA the anomaly that Martyn Percy was the subject of a CDM brought to the Bishop of Oxford and, in turn, by him delegated to the Bishop of Birmingham, legal doubts about both being expressed. Assuming that the recommendations of Dominic Grieve in the Christ Church Governance Review are followed, the Dean of Christ Church (not the Bishop of Oxford) will continue to be the Ordinary of Christ Church Cathedral. That equates to the position of diocesan bishop in every other C of E cathedral. The draft CCM,… Read more »
Would it be better to add a more general case that “The President of Tribunals may take over any CDM if s/he believes it would be in the interests of justice to do so”?
A very short answer in place of the over-long one which I started drafting. See Section 16 of the draft proposed CCM (replacing the CDM) – scroll down to page 9 in the text:
https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2023-06/gs-2311-clergy-conduct-measure-1.pdf
I hope it will be apparent that the President of Tribunals is already firmly in charge of the process. This, it seems to me, is the appropriate place to make a specific insertion about the Dean of Christ Church.
Second reply: I missed making the obvious point that your suggestion would not provide for the specific case of the Dean of Christ Church. The whole object is to avoid a repeat of what happened in the CDM against Martyn Percy which effectively disregarded the Dean’s role of Ordinary of the Cathedral. For that role, the Archbishop of Canterbury is the obvious and proper destination for a complaint under the new Measure. This is also achieved by a minimal amendment of the draft CCM.
Rowland, I agree that there remain doubts about the procedural legitimacy of the delegation by the Bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, to the then Bishop of Birmingham, David Urquhart, of his functions under the CDM 2003 in relation to the complaint brought against the then Dean of Christ Church, Martyn Percy, by Canon Graham Ward – a complaint that was ‘kicked into touch’ by Dame Sarah Asplin’s section 17 decision of 28 May 2021. (Bishop Croft’s initial purported delegation of a later complaint against a different member of the Christ Church clergy to a suffragan bishop in another diocese has… Read more »
I’m entirely happy to withdraw from this topic, but some final observations. I entirely agree that the CDM of Martyn Percy was dealt with under Section 42 (2) on the basis that he was a member of the clergy ‘serving in a cathedral church’ and that, other things being equal, by section 43 (2) geographically jurisdiction fell to the Bishop of Oxford. It was, apparently, William Nye who pronounced at the time that clergy in non-peculiar churches were susceptible to the CDM, and that statement cannot be challenged. However the possibility exists that the CDM had not been drafted to… Read more »
An obvious error. I intended, of course, to quote William Nye referring to Ch Ch as a ‘non-royal peculiar’. Paradoxically, in the Ch Ch Governance Review Dominic Grieve refers to Ch Ch as ‘a Peculiar Royal’, a term I have never encountered. Where does that leave matters?