General Synod Election Candidates 2026

The Very Revd Dr Jessica Martin

I offer myself to serve on the General Synod of the Church of England
for the quinquennium beginning in November 2026, as one of the
decanal representatives for the Province of Canterbury.

I would bring to the office particular experience and skills which it is
my desire to use for the service of the whole Church - its mission, its
ministry and, crucially, its unity. This is a time of crisis both in the
world and in the nation - in its response to climate crisis, in its
domestic and international politics, in its understanding of mutual care and interpersonal
relationships; and in its understanding of what nation and community is (and is not). The
Church is called to respond in faith and hope to the signs of the times, and its governance is
crucial to that response.

Since January 2025 I have been Dean of a small Cathedral serving Essex and East London.
It has a vibrant and growing congregation with a significant ministry to children and families
and another to refugees and asylum seekers. Resourcing these very distinctive ministries
has been a priority within the Cathedral’s emerging vision; and the challenges of faithful
service to every person within a diverse area also shaken by anti-immigrant sentiment is a
kind of cameo of the Church’s national challenges in the current political climate. It is
something I deal with directly on an everyday basis; and it is a preoccupation of the Bishop’s
Leadership Team within the large and extraordinarily various diocese of Chelmsford.

At the same time the Cathedral’s emerging vision seeks to build upon its longstanding
commitment to environmental sustainability (it was the second Cathedral to achieve Gold
eco-status with A Rocha) and to commit to working for the good of creation at a time of
climate crisis, again within a context where climate denial is a prominent local political
theme. The challenges of speaking into so fraught an area with calm faith are continually
present in the decisions we make as a Cathedral about the nature of our ministry, teaching
and action.

Before becoming Dean of Chelmsford, I served in Ely Cathedral for eight years as
Residentiary Canon for Learning and Outreach. Consequently my Cathedral experience has
encountered the challenges both of the ‘historic’ Cathedral where visitor experience and
Christian ministry seek to find a common voice; and of the ‘working’ parish Cathedral where
there are few tourists but a growing mission to new Christians alongside pressing and often
clashing forms of community need - and a constant struggle to resource the work to which
we are called. I am deeply convinced of the unique mission of Cathedrals and can bring
experience of very different but equally valuable models to the conversation about what
Cathedral are called to be within the whole Church of England.

During 2024 I worked on secondment to the NCIs, as one of two interim theological advisers
to the House of Bishops, during the fraught and difficult conversations in the last formal
stages of Living in Love and Faith. This period as a church ‘civil servant’ gave me valuable
insight into the delicate balances and relational complexities of speaking for and with faithful
Christians in deep disagreement. I can bring a long experience of the difficult road the
Church has walked in its response to sexuality, commitment, faithfulness and the honouring
of difference, having begun that road as one of the three non-episcopal advisers to the
‘Pilling report’ of 2012. I wrote the Prologue to that Report. My own position is clear, and was
articulated in my 2020 book Holiness and Desire (long listed for the Michael Ramsey prize),

which is that permanent, faithful and stable relationships between those of the same sex can
and should be hallowed; I also believe that every relationship calls for sacrifice,
self-discipline and self-giving for all who are called to follow Christ. The internal divisions the
Church suffers are wounds we can ill afford at a time when the world is in such need of
Christian hope.

I have been a parish priest in a multi-parish benefice, at one point serving five churches and
covering two further churches of a different denomination within an LEP. This deeply fulfilling
ministry also gave me a realistic understanding of the major challenges facing the parish
system, but I continue to believe that parish ministry, properly resourced, is the necessary
bedrock of what the Church of England can offer its people. The Body of Christ is called to
be as various in its local communities as the communities themselves, and should be wary
of affinity marketing, especially at a time when divisiveness and conflict are exacerbated
through the overweening marketing decisions of big tech.

I spent six years in SSM ministry, combining a full-time academic post at the University of
Cambridge (where I taught and researched on the border between literature, Church history
and theology in the period 1530-1700) with ministry in local parish churches, eventually
heeding a call to bring my whole self to that ministry and leaving the academy. What I learnt
within the academic disciplines - refined and changed by the immersive experience of
priestly service - is now at the service of the Church. I write, and hope to write more: not only
Holiness and Desire but also The Eucharist in Four Dimensions (2023), an examination of
the contested place of communion in contemporary culture, and (in progress), In the Body, a
book about the metaphors by which the Church understands itself and the effect on our
behaviour in a time of heightened anxiety about risk.

My hope and prayer is that as a Dean of a small, vibrant Cathedral in a diocese where the
nation’s dilemmas are held in microcosm, with the background and knowledge I can bring, I
may be freed to serve as God wills within the wider governance of the Church. I would offer
my time, care and skill in continuing hope of the emerging unity of Christ’s Church and its
call to serve a world in crisis.

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