BEFORE meeting this week for our interview, the last time I saw Barry Morgan was when we sat together in the Quire of St Paul’s at the confirmation of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury. Full of interesting insights into the new man and the Church in Wales, he still seemed the boyish bishop I remembered from years back when he was my father’s hierarch in the Bangor diocese.
Just months after Williams’s confirmation, elevated into the primacy vacated by Williams and even in the dimmed lighting of Le Monde, Cardiff’s seafood restaurant, it was as if his appearance had caught up suddenly with his 56 years. But that’s what being a primate in the Anglican Communion does to a man these days.
As Bishop of Llandaff and Archbishop of Wales, Morgan is one of the 38 primates from around the world who will meet at an extraordinary October meeting in London, called to see if some kind of unity can be salvaged from the devastation wreaked on the Anglican Church by arguments over gay sex, gay bishops and gay blessings. The only people these disputes have served is journalists, giving us lots of stories to keep us busy over the summer. Yet even we take no real pleasure in witnessing the Anglican Church on the verge of disintegration.
In keeping with his fellow moderates, Archbishop Morgan is dismayed that sex concerns are in danger of becoming a defining issue.
“People seem to have forgotten somehow that we are a broad church, a comprehensive church, and that there ought not to be one issue that defines what makes you or does not make you an Anglican or a Christian,” he says.
Central to the matter, he believes, is the nature of authority. Provinces have to find a way to be sensitive to the needs of the wider Church without surrendering their own integrity. He thinks the timing of the two controversial decisions in Canada and America, to authorise same-sex blessings in New Westminster and to elect an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire, was “unfortunate” but dismisses the theory, prevalent in some evangelical circles, that these events, plus the thwarted appointment of Jeffrey John to Reading, were part of some liberal conspiracy to deracinate the Church from the biblical soil that gave it life.
“When I listen to the American and Canadian primates (it is clear that) they are struggling to be open to development in their own Church and to the repercussions they might have in the communion.”
In October, the primates must allow their separate provinces to have space, and must resist the temptation to question each other’s integrity, he says. “Either we have the kind of arrangement that we have got or else we become like the Roman Catholic Church where everything is decided by the Curia and I do not want to belong to a Church like that.
“We are so hung up about this one particular issue that we seem to have forgotten a central gospel insight about bearing one another’s burdens, about caring for one another, about putting ourselves in the shoes of other people.”
In fact, Wales’s new archbishop is of the classic Anglican breed that many would be forgiven for thinking had died out after Lambeth ’98. In this age of biblical certainty, it is reassuring to meet a bishop who can still answer questions with a Runciesque reply. Was there a particular moment when he felt called to be a priest, I asked him.
“Yes and no,” he says.
Archbishop Morgan was brought up in a conventional churchgoing family in the mining village of Gwaun-cae-Gurwen, 13 miles from Swansea, 50 miles from where Jeffrey John was growing up and not a great distance from where Rowan Williams was doing the same. Morgan was raised speaking Welsh and learnt English when he went to school at the age of five. The family went to chapel on Sunday mornings and church in the evening.
He decided as a boy that he was more at home in the church, which was three miles away, and was confirmed. His family says he always wanted to be ordained; he says he always wanted to be a double-decker bus conductor.
His secular ambitions, now heading towards law like his sister, lasted until the second year of university in London, when he began to worship at Christ the King in Gower Street and found himself finally unable to escape his calling. He was reeled in skilfully by the chaplain, now Bishop Michael Marshall. “He was wise enough not to be pushy,” says Morgan. “He was quite experienced in dealing with people who perhaps he felt might end up in the ordained ministry but if he were to suggest it they would run a mile in the opposite direction.” He does recall one moment. One morning, he went to the 8 o’clock at Christ the King to think things through and as he sat in the church afterwards, knew that this was what he was called to do.
Today, he becomes agitated when we talk of how the 1998 Lambeth Conference is remembered for its traditional stance on sexuality. At Lambeth he was a member of the mission and ministry group, which came up with several resolutions of its own, including a request that every province give 0.07 per cent of its annual income to international aid. This resolution has been all but forgotten today. He joined his group because, in Wales, he felt these areas were his priorities. The average Sunday attendance in Wales is 44,290, served by 713 parish clergy in 1,500 churches.
Against the will of its own hierarchy, the Church in Wales was disestablished in 1920 and almost completely disendowed, but a fundraising campaign immediately afterwards left it with net assets now worth £210.5 million. Today, the Church in Wales can finance its ministry more easily than its wealthier sister over the border. Many dioceses in England receive nothing from central funds to pay clergy stipends, and parishes will soon be paying all clergy pensions as well. In Wales, the central structure meets the full cost of all clergy pensions and 36 per cent of the cost of diocesan and parochial stipends.
No wonder that in England there is increasing talk of disestablishment. “I do not think it is for me to recommend dis-establishment,” says Morgan. “It is for the Church of England to discover it.”
The problems he faces locally centre upon redundant churches, nearly all listed buildings, and the dependency on the ordained ministry. The church’s representative body meets again next month and is working its way through a ministry and renewal review. Archbishop Morgan wants to develop the ministry of “all God’s people”. It seems certain that he will do it.
Wales has produced so many of the Anglican Church’s contemporary agents of change. In disestablishment, it has been a model of how change, even when undergone unwillingly, can bring renewed life and stability.
Perhaps if the equivocal “yes and no” wisdom of Anglican leaders such as Archbishop Morgan can be listened to and understood by the primates in October, there will be hope yet for the Anglican Communion.
