clergy conduct,gospel,housing,independent safeguarding,national safeguarding,prayer,safeguarding,youth,youth work

GENERAL SYNOD 2026 - HOUSE OF LAITY

Dr Dean Huang

Candidate for the Diocese of Southwark

Hospital doctor - School safeguarding governor - Charlton Deanery

Dear Elector

lam writing to ask for your vote to represent the Diocese of
Southwark in the House of Laity. |am a hospital

doctor in the NHS, a safeguarding governor at a local
school, and for the past decade a member of Grace
Church Greenwich.

This election comes at the end of five demanding years —
a painful reckoning over safeguarding, and hard choices
about money and ministry. | recognise the enormous effort
made by so many to keep our churches going, and that
many of us are tired.

That is why three things would have my attention:
safeguarding that parishes can have confidence in, money
and structures that serve local ministry, and clergy
supported well enough to remain.

lam only standing after much reflection and prayer, and
the encouragement of people who know me well enough
to have talked me out of it. | do so with some trepidation,
but | will work hard and | will listen.

If elected, | commit myself to being a prayerful and faithful
member of Synod: understanding the issues with the
rigour | would bring to a clinical question, and seeking the
Lord's guidance on how to vote. | will represent all the laity
of this diocese, and | will be available to anyone who
wishes to ask or tell me something.

WHY 1AM STANDING

About me

At Grace Church Greenwich | lead small groups
and help with the Sunday youth work, where |am
cheerfully outnumbered.

Before that | belonged for ten years to a congregation
serving the Chinese community in London, where | served
on the congregation council and as a lay leader.

My wife and | have lived in south-east London for over
twenty-five years. |am a safeguarding governor at a local
school in Blackheath — in practice, the annual

training, the policy reviews, and the termly visits that
make safeguarding a whole-school habit rather than a
filed policy.

| look after patients in hospital, where | am a personal tutor
to medical students and a trainer of resident doctors, and |
have served as their training programme director. | co-
chair an international clinical guideline, which means
bringing people who genuinely disagree to a text they can
all sign, without blurring the difference. | help plan NHS
imaging services across south-east London.

The Church exists to make Christ known in this country.
Everything else should be judged by one question: does it
help us get on with the gospel, or get in the way? | want to help
Synod do what serves that end, and question what does not.

DEAN HUANG : ELECTION ADDRESS 2026 : PAGE 1 OF 2

If I'm elected to General Synod...

01 — SAFEGUARDING

| will press for safeguarding
that parishes can have
confidence in.

Serious failures continue to come to
light. They devastate those who have
been harmed, and they contradict
everything we say about the love of
Christ. In February, Synod voted
overwhelmingly to endorse a new
national safeguarding charity with a
board majority independent of the
Church; detailed proposals returned in
July, and legislation is to follow.

Independence has to be real rather than
assumed — the last attempt, the
Independent Safeguarding Board, did
not survive. But a national body,
however independent, is not what a
child meets on a Sunday morning.
Responsibility stays in the parish, and
this year's independent audit found staff
and volunteers there had limited
confidence in recognising grooming
and boundary-testing.

As aschool safeguarding governor |
have sat through that training myself,
and | know the distance between
completing a module and recognising a
pattern. | would want to be satisfied that
both the process and the capacity are
genuinely in place, in parishes as much
as nationally.

Aclosing word

Thank you for reading this. May | also
encourage you to read all the addresses
carefully and prayerfully? The decisions of
the next Synod will reach every parish in
this diocese.

| would be grateful if you would
consider giving me either your
first or highest available
preference vote.

With many thanks and every blessing

in Christ,

Dean Huang

02 — STRUCTURE, MONEY,
PARISH

| will keep the parish in view
whenever money and
structures are debated.

The argument about the Church's
national wealth comes down toa
simple question: does enough of it
reach ordinary parish ministry, and
does what is meant for the poorest
parishes actually arrive there? It is
not settled — Parliament sent the
Church's own governance
Measure back in March as "not
expedient", and it was withdrawn —
so it will run through the whole of
the next Synod.

| have spent my working life in the
health service, where the same
arguments are had. | have watched
local provision consolidated into
central hubs for reasons entirely
defensible on paper, and it is rarely
the well-connected who fall
through the gap that opens.

CONTACT

Email: [email protected]
Mobile: 07801 909748

Church: Grace Church Greenwich,
Charlton Deanery

lam grateful to Philip Miles and Annabel
Holloway for proposing and seconding me.

Scan or visit
youtu.be/hsfOomoEUBHE

DEAN HUANG - ELECTION ADDRESS 2026 - PAGE 2 OF 2

03 — CLERGY CONDUCT &
WELLBEING

| will watch how the new
clergy conduct process
works in practice, not how
it reads.

Two things test how a church
values its clergy: the support it
gives them day to day, and what
happens when a complaint is
made. The new Clergy Conduct
Measure replaces a 2003 process
long criticised as slow and
burdensome for complainants and
clergy alike. The next Synod will
see whether the new system is
better or merely newer.

Someone in difficulty should be
supported while a matter is looked
into, and the people investigating
should not also be the people
caring. Nor is wellbeing a soft
subject: morale, pay and housing
decide whether people can remain
in ministry at all, and a church that
wears out its clergy will not find it
easy to call more.

Training doctors has taught me
what a demanding vocation does
to people when they are
supported badly, and how much
difference it makes when they are
supported well.

Off duty at my local tennis club; the
backhand remains, like most
things, a work in progress.