As The World Turns...

 

 It seems exceedingly strange that someone with a prior background in the oil industry and commerce who later reconsidered his career trajectory and decided for the Anglican priesthood as a challenge to his destiny, would be able to clamber the exalted ladder leading to the heavens so swiftly.  From parish priest to the dean of Liverpool.

And a seat in the House of Lords, where he has taken to task the "sins of British banks. On the other hand, his previous experience in the world of high finance has enabled him to view social and economic systems through a lens of experience, rendering his observations and conclusions with the clout of resolute clarity and sagacious reasoning.

He appears humbly unconvinced of his own level of acute intelligence.  Yet he was schooled at Eton and Cambridge, the creme de la creme of British high establishment academia.  The most ivory of ivory towers.  Despite which he refers to himself as "one of the thicker bishops in the Church", which might lead one to imagine the Anglican Church thickly brilliant.

Bishop Justin Welby, preparing to be invested in the theologically-elevated post that the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams is vacating, will be inheriting a few of the more problematical head-scratchers of social engineering and acceptance that has plagued all religious institutions of late.  The ordination of women and the consecration of same-sex marriage.

Both of which the Archbishop-elect has openly mused on, leaving the distinct impression that he is prepared to deal with them, where his predecessor was not.  The schism in the Anglican Church that has already created great fissures in its traditional followers, with those clinging to convention preferring to strike out on their own in high dudgeon, may be set to increase.

Although Bishop Welby has had long experience in Africa with his tenure there and his good relations with the Anglican clergy in that part of the world that enjoys a far greater communion than the West at the present time, that too may be altered as the more traditional forces in Africa cling to the culture of a male-dominated church hierarchy and a disinclination to view gay and lesbians as anything but offensively gender-confused.

The paradox on Bishop Welby stating, however obliquely, that it is in his near agenda to examine both issues - of the ordination of female bishops and his wish to carefully examine his own thinking on same-sex marriage - is that he represents the more conservative, traditional branch of the Church and its interpretation of the Bible.

How the compromise with his personal values and allegiance to the sacred scriptures and their interpretation, and his diplomatic stick-handling of the more orthodox branches of the African communion will play out will be of immense interest to those concerned with the future of this important Protestant denomination, still the official religion of Britain.