As the College of Bishops gathers in Oxford for its regular September residential, the Bishops of Penrith and Huntingdon remain Acting Bishops of Carlisle and Ely respectively and will probably be so into the second half of next year. It is also probable that there will be perhaps 5 or 6 bishops present who were interviewed to become Bishop of Carlisle or Ely but all of whom discovered that, in the words of the Archbishops—last December (York for Carlisle) and repeated exactly in July (Canterbury for Ely)—in both cases the Crown Nominations Commission (CNC), proved unable to “reach the level of consensus required to nominate a new Diocesan Bishop”.
That phrase signals that among the 14 voting members of the CNC (comprising three groups: the two Archbishops, 6 of the Central Members elected by General Synod, 6 Local Members elected by and from the diocese’s Vacancy in See Committee) no candidate had been able to secure the support of 10 of the members (at least two-thirds of voting members are required) and so be nominated to the Crown to fill the see. A fuller account of the processes of CNC discernment is offered in a section of my longer PDF article.
This situation is not unprecedented—there were similarly two failures back at the start of Justin Welby’s primacy with Hereford (March 2014) and Oxford (May 2015) and it seems that, as I discussed at the time, his own appointment to Canterbury was one where achieving the necessary level of consensus was also challenging. It is, however, highly unusual and concerning to have two failures in such quick succession. This means that the current CNC (including 6 pairs of new Central Members elected in July 2022—see details about the election and result) has in the first two of its five years failed to nominate in 25% of its 8 Commissions. In contrast, its predecessor did not fail in any of the 16 Commissions over its full five-year term.
Read on here