I was on Street Pastor duty last night. It was a late one, and my bedtime reading as I wound down in the early hours with some camomile tea was the raft of papers released yesterday ahead of the main information dump for July Synod – I know, that sounds sad, but when else am I going to get on top of them? That was when I found out that my blog post earlier this week was premature, at least in part. I mentioned there the February 2024 Synod Questions 167, on trust and the House of Bishops, and 66 and 67, where we heard of ‘a task and finish group … to explore how the work of the House of Bishops could be more transparent’.

Well, there’s now a result from the various questions that have been posed by me and by others.

GS Misc 1387 is the interim report of the House of Bishops Transparency Group, and references not just those Questions, but two others from February Synod: 173-174. Both of these were asked by people at the more conservative end of the C of E spectrum. One was focused on what the questioner called the ‘misuse of standing orders to keep meetings of the House of Bishops, a house of this publicly accountable Synod, a secret’ while the other asked for the House’s voting figures to be made public. It’s always fun to find areas where those of us who disagree on other things are on the same side. Like Questions 66-67, 173-174 reflect concerns that there is some legal advice on the Living in Love and Faith agenda which is being kept hidden from the rest of us; that view, which typically comes from conservatives, has been expressed in Synod and also at meetings of the House of Laity. My own view on this is that the legal advice you get depends largely on which lawyer you ask. But I’d missed the point that, in his written response to Questions 173-174, the Archbishop of York gave the Terms of Reference of this small group and its membership – rightly involving Andrew Atherstone, whose piece on the House of Bishops I referenced in my earlier blog post. The first ToR concerned improving ‘in particular transparency of the way the House works’. Yes!

There’s a question which this raises for me: February 2024 generated a total of 225 questions taking up 95 pages of text, and that of course is not including the information given in the various supplementary questions, which is found on the YouTube recordings and then in the full transcript. With so much information, how is anyone supposed to join up the dots, read between the lines, and work out what is going on? I find Questions increasingly unhelpful: yet they are the one place where anyone can try to find answers.

I asked in my last blog post whether the Standing Orders of the House of Bishops should be amended so that meeting in private – their usual practice – was given as the norm. And this isn’t just my thought; it’s what is now proposed in GS Misc 1387. As the cover note states, ‘The House will continue to meet without public attendance and will amend its standing orders to be honest that it is doing so, removing the fiction of public participation in Standing Order 13.’ Nice language, that: ‘removing the fiction’. Good to clarify that.

As for publishing full minutes, something else which concerns me, the first recommendation is that these should be made available after the following meeting formally approves them. That could be quite a delay, because officially the House of Bishops only meets in May and December, although there seem to be zoom meetings in between those. The second recommendation is that formal legal advice or advice from the Faith and Order Commission (and other such advice) which goes to the House of Bishops should be issued to General Synod. But, other than the legal advice, ‘Papers to the House of Bishops should continue not to be published’. Both of these recommendations will come into play for an experimental period.

The interim report makes a case for confidentiality – obviously – where personal information is being shared. It also suggests that ‘being vulnerable and having honest private conversations, where [leadership teams] can be present and curious with each other’ is a Good Thing. That makes me wonder about how difficult it is to be honest with each other in the Church of England at the moment. It’s one thing to say that we respect our different theological convictions, but it’s quite another to say what you believe or who you are when you know you are going to attract criticism; and when you are the one without the power, and the person to whom you are speaking has all the power.

There’s also an excellent point made in this report about the risks of ‘key decisions happen[ing] outside the formal processes’. In the Living in Love and Faith process, there are sometimes mentions of meetings that were not announced, and I often wonder just where decisions really are made.

The House of Bishops meetings will generate minutes, not a transcript. There is much detail given in the report about the principles used in writing these Minutes, including the number of pages of Minutes for four meetings dated as 15-17 May, 30 Oct-1 Nov, 9 Oct 2023 and 29 Nov 2023. I am rather confused about that, and about how it relates to the stated norm of meeting in May and December, but assume those are the two normal meetings and two bonus zooms. But the answer to February 2024 Synod’s Question 175 gave a total of nine House of Bishops meetings in 2023. So maybe that statement that ‘The House of Bishops meets in May and December outside of General Synod’ needs updating to clarify just when they meet.

Up until now, we’ve often relied on press releases published by Comms immediately after each meeting. These are so devoid of content that, when they are posted on sites like Thinking Anglicans, they attract no comments whatsoever. The interim report notes that these press releases ‘tend to be bland and factual’. I approve of the honesty of this assessment; that ‘b’ word has been widely used of these short statements. I also liked the very detailed list of the types of paper which go to the House, and the remark that the House may want ‘to have a particularly difficult wrangle over an issue where it wants space to be honest and vulnerable’.

As for the admission of the public, the conclusion is not to do this, but to be honest about that. In considering the possibility, the report goes into welcome detail about the logistics; should meetings all be on Zoom and available to all, but how would that work in the different venues used and would it end up with all meetings having to be in London, which is clearly not the right way to proceed? If there is a physical meeting, how would tickets be allocated, where would people sit, what security would have to be put in place? Would the solution be to allow in some members of the press?

I was interested in the comment that ‘The House of Bishops seeks to be consultative and conversational – that is, not relying on set-piece debates where the result is often pre-determined, but enabling more informal conversations in which bishops are free to share ideas in a safe environment and often to change their minds from the beginning of the meeting to the end.’ What is the contrast being made here? What is the unheard ‘unlike…’? Because I would be very disturbed to be told that Synod has set-piece debates with a pre-determined result, and that nobody there has ever changed their mind!

One other anomaly is addressed – acting diocesan bishops (where a diocese is in vacancy – something which currently applies to one in seven dioceses) attend, may speak, but have not been allowed to vote either at the House of Bishops or at Synod, but changes to legislation will be proposed to allow them to do this. Another good move. Overall, this makes GS Misc 1387 an encouraging document; so long as these changes really are put into place, and so long as they ‘stick’ rather than being abandoned entirely after a trial period. And, in the process of reading the reflections of the working group, we learn a little more about how the House of Bishops functions; one new thing I learned from this interim report is that the Secretary General ‘attends and may speak’ at the House. I wonder what sorts of intervention come from those who are not bishops?