DR JOHN SENTAMU’S REPLACEMENT as Archbishop of York is the Most Reverend Stephen Cottrell. Having been suffragan Bishop of Reading and then Bishop of Chelmsford, holding the Church of England’s second most important job means Cottrell (below) will likely also be in the running to succeed Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury, when the time comes.
Cottrell’s promotion is a textbook case of what the Church of England presently thinks leadership looks like, and how it measures success. At Chelmsford he was known for large-scale thinking and diocesan initiatives. By the time he left for York, the diocese was managed by its bishop, three suffragan bishops, and seven archdeacons. Yet in 2021 it advertised for a diocesan chief executive on £90,000 a year — a manager to manage the managers — while also being in the process of rolling out 61 clergy redundancies.
There were sighs of relief when Cottrell’s successor at Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, assured
