General Synod Election Candidates 2026

Candidate for General Synod 2026-2031

           The Revd Jeremy Moodey

Thank you for taking the time to read this address, which I have tried hard to
keep to one page. I am a self-supporting associate minister at St Mary’s in
Chesham (Bucks) and am seeking your support for a second term on Synod.
Over the last five years I have been an active member, not a silent one.
I served throughout on committees tasked with clergy wellbeing (see below)
and spoke regularly, putting written and supplementary questions to bishops
at each group of sessions. In July 2026 I asked the Bishop of Lichfield about
the Church’s official World Cup prayer, which ran to twenty-two lines without
once mentioning Jesus, and which invited us to see ‘the hand of God’ in a
football match. I felt obliged to point out that the most famous hand of God
in the history of the game was in fact a handball forty years ago! The
exchange was reported in the national press. A small thing, but it stood for a
larger one: the national church too often speaks in a voice that is neither
recognisably Christian nor plainly written, and Synod is the place to say so.

My priorities for 2026-31
• Mission and evangelisation. This must be the Church’s first priority in the coming quinquennium, and
everything else follows from it. I have chaired Church Mission Society since April 2025, a mission agency that
has been sending people to share the good news of Jesus since 1799. If we do not recover our nerve about
proclaiming the gospel, the rest of our debates will be arguments about the furniture in an emptying house.
• Vocations and theological education. I have been a trustee and treasurer, and latterly vice chair, of Trinity
College Bristol since June 2022. The number of women and men being recommended for ordained Anglican
ministry is far below what our parishes need. Reversing that is urgent, and it will not happen unless we fund our
theological colleges properly and speak about ordination as a calling worth giving a life to. I am committed to
women’s ordained ministry at all levels in the Church and to the Five Guiding Principles.
• Clergy wellbeing. I was CEO of Clergy Support Trust from 2017 to 2020, and more recently a member of the
Remuneration and Conditions of Service Committee of the Archbishops’ Council and of its successor, the
Advisory Group for the Terms and Wellbeing of Ministers. I saw how many clergy struggle with burn-out, financial
worry and patchy pastoral support. The Clergy Covenant has not been implemented consistently across
dioceses. Conditions of service, pension provision, and pastoral care and supervision all need further work.
• The parish. I am delighted to endorse the Save the Parish manifesto (see here), and in particular its call to
redirect funds from bloated diocesan bureaucracies back into stipendiary parish ministry. Posts in parishes have
been cut while diocesan posts have not. That is the wrong way round, and Synod controls enough of the
machinery to change it.
• Marriage and sexuality. On the follow-up to the Living in Love and Faith process, I start from the Church’s
historic teaching on marriage and sexuality, and my Synod voting record on LLF since 2021 will confirm this.
But I remain committed to gracious dialogue with those who take a different view, and to working to preserve
the unity of God’s church as far as possible.

Who am I?
Born in London and raised in Essex, I read history at Leeds and worked first as a diplomat in the Foreign Office
and then as an investment banker. I moved into the Christian charity sector in 2009 as CEO of Embrace the Middle
East, and in 2017 became CEO of the 362-year-old Sons & Friends of the Clergy, which I relaunched as Clergy
Support Trust in 2019. I trained at St Mellitus College and was ordained deacon in 2021 and priest in 2022. I am
married to Ruth and have two grown-up daughters. My interests are football (Spurs, and a qualified referee),
progressive rock, theatre, hill walking and, perhaps most of all, choral singing. I have a particular affection for the
choral evensong tradition in the Church of England and relaunched evensong in my own parish church.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to get in touch via the contact details below. I
hope very much that after prayerful deliberation you will feel able to give me your support, if not as
your first preference, then as your second or third. Thank you again.

14 Chartridge Lane, Chesham, Bucks HP5 2JJ
[email protected]
[email protected]
07712 777371 (Mobile)
Proposer: The Revd Joy Mawdesley,

Associate Rector, St Nicholas, Newbury
Seconder: The Revd Martin Davy,
Rector, Holy Trinity, Theale

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