Dr Runcie's successor

ROBERT Runcie's decision to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury has been followed, all too predictably, by a superficial evaluation in many quarters of his primacy of the Anglican communion — concentrating on his relationship with Mrs Thatcher rather more than his relationship with God and the church — and by the production of a list of names of potential successors without a thought to the qualities necessary for the new leader.
Yet if a serious examination were made of Dr Runcie's leadership of the worldwide Anglican communion (indeed it seems largely ignored with familiar British introspection that he does lead not just the Chuch of England but a worldwide grouping of Anglican churches), then rather more profound pointers would emerge as to the kind of man needed to step into his shoes in nine months time than bookmakers' odds.
Dr Runcie has been a diligent, worthy and often courageous leader of the Anglican communion at a time of extreme strain for that body. On a national level he has guided the church into a role as a focus of stability and traditional values at a time when society was undergoing a revolution in its attitudes towards group and individual responsibility and the abandonment of concensus. In the international field he has attempted to find a way forward on the thorny question of women priests while maintaining ecumenical progress, and successfully piloted his communion through the 1988 Lambeth Conference without any major splits. As Bishop Mervyn Stockwood remarks in another part of the paper, the Anglican communion has faced such potential divisions before, and come through the crisis.
However, if the Anglican communion is to cope effectively with the international strains caused by differing practice over women priests in different provinces, surely fundamental questions need to be asked about the worldwide role of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Is it incompatible for the head of an international grouping, some of whose members ordain women and some of whom don't, to also hold the post of primate of a national church that does not? Would not a more practical solution be to split the domestic and the worldwide functions of the Archbishop of Canterbury, creating in the process a kind of general secretary of the international communion, able to hold together the disparate parts of the Anglican church?
And what qualities are necessary of the man or men who hold either or both posts? What should be the basis for believing bishops in the third millennium? These are questions that are rather more vital than simply producing a line up of faces asking which will be most acceptable to Mrs Thatcher.
That brings us on to a central misconception in much of the talk about the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury — the Prime Minister's role. Simply put, Mrs Thatcher chooses between two names which are given to her. She can reverse the order of the names as she is thought to have done in one case in 1981, or even reject them both. The latter is without precedent, and the former unlikely today, such was the furore that greeted the PM's actions in 1981. Although she takes her role, on behalf of the Queen, in naming Anglican bishops seriously, close observers report that she sees herself as principally a bureaucrat in the process rather than as the decision maker. These decisions are made by the Crown Appointments' Commission, which includes representatives of synod and of the bishops. Hence it is the Church of England itself that is doing the choosing of the two names — not the Prime Minister.
Furthermore all the talk of "liberal", "conservative" and "left-wing" candidates that has accompanied discussion of the Prime Minister's role seems to refer only to their alleged political preferences rather than their theological bent. While bishops are clearly political — if only by nature, in the Anglican case, of their seats in the House of Lords and their national role in the established church — they must not be pigeonholed into ideological slots.
It is only by starting with such, essentially preliminary, considerations that an informed and ultimately fruitful debate can be undertaken in the next nine months as to what sort of Archbishop of Canterbury we want to lead his communion into the third millennium. The bookmakers' running order must take second place to serious reflection on the role of the churches in the twenty first century.