The Most Rev and Right Hon Stephen Cottrell sports trendy-vicar stubble. Judging by recent photos, it’s a new look for the man installed last year as Archbishop of York. The fleece that fits tightly over his priestly shirt and dog collar makes him look more like a cyclist seeking lockdown exercise than one of the favourites to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
Yet Cottrell’s move to the See of York, effectively No 2 to Justin Welby, feels like a breakthrough in terms of exploding Trollopian vestiges of the C of E’s stuffy image. After all, how many bishops have spoken on Russell Brand’s popular, if cod philosophic, podcast on spirituality?
The 62-year-old was brought up in a modest home in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, and attended a state school. Though he’s not unaware of the dignity of his latest office, there’s a chirpy cockney trying to get out. Originally a graduate of media studies from what was then Central London Polytechnic, he was ordained in 1985. With a rubbery, mobile face beneath his rounded bald pate, he smiles easily and looks unwearied by 36 years of clericalism (17 as a bishop). Unlike many of his colleagues, he seems unfazed by the thorniest questions about the controversies of his church (where do you start?). His supporters argue that his down-to-earth, matey persona is precisely what the church needs right now. On his appointment to York last July, Welby described Cottrell as a “superb communicator”.
It’s as well then that he has become the pivot for tackling the church’s suboptimal record on racism. This month, the anti-racism task force that he and Welby have set up will report on what the Anglican Church is going to do about it. While the church has been proactive in appointing women to Anglican bishoprics, including Sarah Mullally as Bishop of London (No 3 in the hierarchy) in 2018, it has a poor record of appointing diocesan bishops from ethnic-minority backgrounds.
Guli Francis-Dehqani, who has just taken up the post of Bishop of Chelmsford, is the only diocesan bishop from an ethnic-minority background (she is of Iranian heritage). Woyin Karowei Dorgu, Bishop of Woolwich, and Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Bishop of Dover (both suffragan bishops), are the only black prelates to have been appointed in the past five years despite the high numbers of people from West Indian and African backgrounds attending Anglican services, particularly in urban areas.
At general synod in February 2020, Welby apologised for the church’s historical “institutional racism”. After the resurgence of Black Lives Matter last year, the church has also apologised for its “shameful” historical links to slavery and has pledged to review the “white privilege” of its iconography and monuments. Cottrell strokes his stubble. “For the last seven or eight years I’ve been the Church of England bishop on the committee for minority ethnic Anglican concerns. It matters deeply to me. As Bishop of Chelmsford [2010-20] I appointed three people from ethnic minorities to senior positions, one bishop and two archdeacons. We must look like the people we serve.
“In the past,” he continues in a strident voice with a hint of “estuary” in his vowels, “there has been overt racism in the church as in other parts of English public life. In recent years it’s been more what you would call unconscious bias but that’s still something that has to be confronted and dealt with.”
He promises swift action. “Bishops have power of appointment. We should look at ourselves and ask why have we failed to use that power. There are so many really excellent black and ethnic minority clergy in the Church of England. Certainly, for me that’s a personal priority.”
Cottrell, who describes himself as an Anglo-Catholic evangelist, has the sort of approachable manner that makes you want to believe him. He was buying a coffee in Paddington station one day when the barista asked him apropos of nothing why he became a priest. To her mind religious people were either insincere hobbyists wanting a “get out of hell free card” or tortured obsessives who scared her off.
Speaking vaguely about love, Cottrell did not have time to talk her through his spiritual journey from being drawn into Christianity as a 12-year-old at his sister’s Girl Guide church parade, attending a service that felt like he was receiving “fresh water from a spring” and then watching the film Jesus of Nazareth, which “changed my life”.
The encounter got him thinking about what people’s perceptions are these days when they see a man of the cloth in a public place. In the age of advancing secularism, dwindling congregations and eroding objective morality (my truth is as good as yours), not to mention the baggage of child abuse scandals, accusations of financial impropriety and soul searching about how to integrate the LGBT+ community, Cottrell might have been forgiven for feeling pleasantly surprised to be asked such an unloaded question.
The result was his new book, Dear England, a considered answer to the young woman’s question, that he hopes non-believers will read. He claims it is a question that people are asking more and more. “At a time of Covid when we are all thinking about our mortality more than we usually do, for me it isn’t surprising that people are more open to that than maybe was the case two years ago. It’s amazing how many children believe in God and how many people who don’t believe in God pray. There’s a kind of longing which is unformed — that’s who this book is speaking to.”
He asks people to “suspend your disbelief and enter into a thought world where God is real and just see what you make of it”.
“This is a different way of looking at the world and it’s very beautiful. It’s good for you and good for the world. Once you present it like that my experience of ministry is that people are interested as long as you are prepared to listen as well as to speak.”
The book is published at a time of crisis for the church and religious observance in general. Polls have suggested that when lockdown ends church attendance could drop by as much as 20 per cent, because people for whom the weekly trudge to church was a matter of duty have broken the habit. The church fears that the latest UK census will show a significant drop in affiliation to Christianity from the 70 per cent of respondents who said that they were at least nominally Christian in 2011.
Cottrell points to the fact that “How we do church” — still evidently one of the C of E’s favourite expressions despite having been thoroughly sent up in series such as Rev — has changed for good because of a revolution in online worship. “It’s easy to be sniffy and condescending about the church online, but I look along the screen and see people of all ages, families sitting together, dogs, and people having a cup of coffee, which you can’t do in church. It’s very beautiful.
“I was preaching in York Minister earlier this year and more than 9,000 people participated in that service online,” he says. “Many churches are telling us that they have more people participating in their online services than attended their physical services.”
There will be financial implications from the pandemic and Cottrell admits that the church is looking at “rationalisation” including cutting clergy numbers. “We’ve taken a big financial hit, but the point I would make is that this is not a central decision because the Church of England is not a single structure. It’s 42 independent dioceses and each parish is an independent financial and charitable institution. Those decisions do not belong centrally and I’m quite proud of that.” Pause. “What that group is saying is that there is a lot of what you might call back-office functions. We think we can be more efficient and effective and probably save some money as well.”
Pressed on what is happening in his own vast diocese of York, he said that a year-long consultation process was continuing but there were no large-scale plans to cut numbers at the moment. “We’ve had to dip into our reserves . . . There is some cutting of clergy numbers in some places, but even then it’s not making people redundant.”
When it comes to the church’s embrace of LGBT+ groups, an issue that has threatened to tear the global Anglican Communion apart, the breakaway conservative Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon-UK) is already welcoming those who cannot accept theological reform on sexuality, identity and transgenderism. At some point in the future the general synod is expected to vote on whether to allow gay people to marry in church.
Cottrell was appointed Bishop of Reading in 2004 when Jeffrey John withdrew his candidacy after his public admission that he was in a same-sex relationship. Cottrell had supported John’s appointment.
“Most local churches are incredibly welcoming to all people and it tends to be the national policy level where we’re not agreed with each other. We’ve got two choices. We can split, which would be a tragedy, or we can explore a way of living together with conscientious disagreement. In a world with so much division and violence, showing that we can live together with so much disagreement would be a great message.”
Cottrell is married with three grown-up children. He writes poetry and is clearly a deep thinker who has been outspoken in his opposition to the renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons programme. He talks of being inspired by one of his predecessors as Archbishop of York, William Temple, an architect of the thinking that led to the modern welfare state after the Second World War. Cottrell would like to think that the church will once again be an agent for change after the pandemic. If he succeeds Welby in the top job, he will have a chance to stake that claim, but he might have to lose the stubble.
