C of E prepares spiritual response to war as UK military warns of rising threat

The Church of England is considering how it could offer spiritual comfort and leadership to a nation at war as the world faces mounting conflict.

Rev Hugh Nelson, the C of E’s bishop to the armed forces, said military personnel had been warning him for the past two years of their “rising concern about the threat of very, very serious conflict, including conflict that involves the UK”.

The church was taking the potential challenges seriously, he said. It did not want a repeat of its lack of preparedness for the Covid pandemic, Nelson told reporters in London.

Preparations included looking back to how senior religious figures responded to earlier conflicts, such as the second world war and the Falklands conflict.

A senior military figure will address the church’s governing body, the General Synod, on the current global climate when it meets in York next month.

Brig Jaish Mahan, who has served in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan, will speak about the challenges facing the UK and his own experiences in conflict.

A paper published before the meeting of the synod says: “While a conflict directly involving the UK is not an immediate risk, given the very serious impact such a conflict would have on every person in the country, we must be prepared.”

Nelson referred to the government’s national security strategy, published earlier this week, which warned the UK must actively prepare for a “wartime scenario” on British soil “for the first time in many years”.

The bishop said: “As a church, we want to take seriously those challenges, both to do everything that we can to pray for and work for and advocate for peace … [and] to begin to have conversations towards plans about how the church might need to respond if there were to be a serious conflict.

“We do not want to be in the situation that we were all in – church and wider society – pre-pandemic, when those that knew things said there will one day be a pandemic, and none of us had done anything in preparation for that. So we want to take that seriously.

“We have looked back at some of the ways in which senior church leadership – archbishops and bishops – led, the things that they said, particularly in the second world war.”

Proposals for working with schools on issues of peace, war and conflict, and practical suggestions for making churches hospitable and welcoming to armed forces personnel and their families, are expected to be published in the coming months.

There are almost 200 C of E army chaplains, serving as regulars and reservists across the Royal Navy, army and Royal Air Force.

The synod would consider changes to enable army chaplains “to do what they need to do without having to go through quite a lot of administrative and bureaucratic steps”, said Nelson.