http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/20/justin-welby-powerful-evangelical-church
Justin Welby's ascension shines light on powerful evangelical church
Two people associated with Holy Trinity Brompton are now in Church of England's most important posts
Justin Welby, the new archbishop of Canterbury, who joined the congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton in his 20s. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA
The ascension of Justin Welby to archbishop of Canterbury is confirmation of the quiet parallel rise of a controversial evangelical church in central London to become the most influential congregation in the Church of England.
Welby was in his late 20s when he joined the congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton in Kensington. He was working in the oil business and had relocated to London in 1983 after five years in Paris.
The years he spent at the church, becoming a lay leader there before quitting his high-salary career in 1989 and moving to Durham to train to be an Anglican priest, had a powerful impact on him.
Holy Trinity Brompton, or HTB as it has rebranded itself, is no ordinary church.
On Thursday afternoon, in a service attended by David Cameron and the Prince of Wales at Canterbury Cathedral, Welby will be enthroned as the symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. And yet the vicar of HTB, Nicky Gumbel, is almost certainly a more influential figure in England than Welby, his notional boss.
HTB is the only part of the Church of England that is confident that it is growing. The Alpha course first developed there – doctrinally extremely conservative but socially flexible and modest – is now an international phenomenon, operated as a franchise in more than 160 countries.
Welby and Gumbel are old friends, share a common approach and move in the same circles. Unlike the "Notting Hill set" of Tories from a similar background who took over the top of the party, the HTB crew worked their way up through the grassroots of the church over a period of 30 years. Their triumph has arguably been greater.
How HTB has developed and succeeded gives an insight into Welby and a few clues to how he might tackle the challenges he faces ahead.
The peculiar skill of HTB has been to preserve the confidence of the public-school officer class that it had a duty to lead, but to drop the surrounding pretensions, the idea being that what remains is professionalism and commitment.
Much of what is viewed as a product of Welby's business background, such as an emphasis on quick, clear decisions and careful examination of outcomes, is at least as much due to HTB.
Another key part of that attitude is the desire to promote lay people. Although the church, and Gumbel in particular, believe strongly in the importance of leadership, it is not at all hung up about whether the leader wears a dog collar. Serious Christians are expected to commit themselves seriously to the church. At a time when the Church of England is running out of money to maintain its establishment, this has obvious attractions.
Welby was converted at Cambridge University – where he met his wife, Caroline Eaton – through conversations with Nicky Lee, one of Gumbel's closest friends, who later became a priest and served at one of HTB's "daughter" churches. HTB pioneered this practice of "church planting" in England, where a small congregation takes over an abandoned or failing building and revitalises it.
As a young businessman making his way in London, Welby was part of the conversation circles in the vicar's kitchen where characters and convictions were formed. Although his later career diverged from the pattern – he never worked in an HTB church himself – it remains part of the foundations of his view of Christianity.
HTB sounds like some sort of wonderful conspiracy, a sort of elite religious order like a Protestant version of the Jesuits, targeting the intellectuals and the influential. But on close examination this view dissolves into something much more nuanced.
What holds HTB together is not a common doctrine or agenda but manners and style – and the worshippers' eagerness to get out of their minds. It was one of the first churches in England to embrace charismatic practices – constant prayer, the lively expectation of miracles, talking in tongues, and even the ecstatic outbursts of laughter, fainting, and animal noises known as the "Toronto Blessing". This would be odd in any context. And it has changed Christianity in England profoundly.
The church today is the product of an extraordinary marriage between the traditional piety of English public schoolboys and the raucous, unbuttoned spirituality of a Californian who had been the keyboard player for the Righteous Brothers in the 60s. John Wimber, who died in 1997, introduced to mainstream evangelicals the idea that ordinary believers could pray for healing and expect to be answered. He was also a huge enthusiast for church planting.
In 1983, in the aftermath of the great loss Welby suffered when one of hisWelby's six children, his seven-month-old daughter Johanna, died in a car crash, he and his wife Caroline visited Wimber's church in Anaheim in California where they were prayed over "to be released so we could express our pain freely to God … a very liberating experience", as he later said.
Wimber's ideas were brought to HTB in the late 1970s by the then curate Sandy Millar, an upper-class Scot who had been a barrister before ordination. At that time, the morning services replicated the experience of the grander sort of public-school chapel, with a robed choir, a liturgy from 1662 and a well-bred congregation lined up on pews.
When Millar became the curate, he introduced a much looser and more family-friendly service on Sunday evenings, which rapidly outgrew the morning service. By the time he retired, in 2005, he had moved the whole church from prayer book to PowerPoint. The pews had gone, too, and the choir sang Christian rock.
None of the main figures in HTB today were converted at the church or through the Alpha course, but they came from the same social background as the older Millar. Gumbel, Lee and Ken Costa were also all converted at Cambridge in the early 1980s and all converged on HTB when they came to London.
Welby, who had been at Eton, had been converted by conversations with Lee at Trinity college, where he was studying history and law. His wife's sister was for a while the vicar's secretary at HTB.
Yet though they all came from apparently establishment backgrounds, most were in subtle ways outsiders.
Gumbel and Costa are Jewish, and Welby himself was the child of a broken home whose father, it emerged long after his death, turned out to have been a German Jew named Weiler who took the name of Gavin Welby when he was working as a bootlegger in New York.
It was Gumbel, working as Millar's curate, who more or less invented the Alpha course. Over a 10-week course, the participants eat a simple meal together on Wednesday evenings, followed by a talk and then a discussion in groups of 10. During a residential weekend in the sixth week participants are encouraged to pray for the Holy Spirit to descend and manifest itself.
This way of reinventing Christianity to fit with the habits of modern social life has been hugely successful and attractive not just internationally but across denominations. Pope Francis, when archbishop of Buenos Aires, sent four of his bishops to one of the annual Alpha conferences in London.
But in the early 1990s, it was regarded with suspicion and some hilarity by the rest of the Church of England. Stories were told of people emerging from an Alpha course and praying with such fervour for a bus to arrive that they never noticed one pull up and drive off. Millar's Calvinistic theology repelled liberals, while bishops and many of the clergy resisted church plantings on their turf.
Gradually, all this has changed. The Alpha course has moved even into liberal churches. This was largely because it was so much more fun than other Christian activities that congregations would go in search of a course even if it wasn't offered to them.
Wimber died in 1997 and the year 2000 passed without the world ending as many charismatics had half hoped. Gumbel, though still regarded as a conservative figure, scrupulously avoided being drawn into the terrible Anglican schism over homosexuality.
Mark Elsdon Dew, the press officer for HTB and an old friend of Gumbel's, says the vicar is much more in touch with social change than most church leaders simply because he still leads three Alpha courses himself at the church every year, so he hears – and listens to – the voices of ordinary unbelievers.
HTB's services, the preaching, even the miracles, are all slick and informal and the atmosphere seems to most people genuinely friendly.
Today there are 25 church plants from HTB and the last five have been in working-class parishes without any traditions of middle-class Christianity to build on. It is now much more engaged in social action and the rehabilitation of prisoners. The church is moving right out of its comfort zone.
One thing it has carefully avoided is engagement in the Anglican sex wars – something Welby will not be able to do.
In fact there is at least one civilly partnered couple in one of HTB's church plants, who are out to their friends in the congregation. I talked to one of the men, who did not want to be identified. "We have been there for 12 years," he said. "We have made a lot of friends, and they are very engaged with the issue, and they have thought about it a bit. My take is that there is a huge disconnect between what most of the people here think and what the leadership thinks.
"The thing that makes evangelical churches popular is the informality, the lack of structure of the service, the fact that they don't use traditional liturgy, and they've got good music that young people love and they engage with. I don't think it's about what they believe, because a lot of the time they don't know what they believe. I just think that, fundamentally, it's quite fun."
Welby was in his late 20s when he joined the congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton in Kensington. He was working in the oil business and had relocated to London in 1983 after five years in Paris.
The years he spent at the church, becoming a lay leader there before quitting his high-salary career in 1989 and moving to Durham to train to be an Anglican priest, had a powerful impact on him.
Holy Trinity Brompton, or HTB as it has rebranded itself, is no ordinary church.
On Thursday afternoon, in a service attended by David Cameron and the Prince of Wales at Canterbury Cathedral, Welby will be enthroned as the symbolic leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion. And yet the vicar of HTB, Nicky Gumbel, is almost certainly a more influential figure in England than Welby, his notional boss.
HTB is the only part of the Church of England that is confident that it is growing. The Alpha course first developed there – doctrinally extremely conservative but socially flexible and modest – is now an international phenomenon, operated as a franchise in more than 160 countries.
Welby and Gumbel are old friends, share a common approach and move in the same circles. Unlike the "Notting Hill set" of Tories from a similar background who took over the top of the party, the HTB crew worked their way up through the grassroots of the church over a period of 30 years. Their triumph has arguably been greater.
How HTB has developed and succeeded gives an insight into Welby and a few clues to how he might tackle the challenges he faces ahead.
The peculiar skill of HTB has been to preserve the confidence of the public-school officer class that it had a duty to lead, but to drop the surrounding pretensions, the idea being that what remains is professionalism and commitment.
Much of what is viewed as a product of Welby's business background, such as an emphasis on quick, clear decisions and careful examination of outcomes, is at least as much due to HTB.
Another key part of that attitude is the desire to promote lay people. Although the church, and Gumbel in particular, believe strongly in the importance of leadership, it is not at all hung up about whether the leader wears a dog collar. Serious Christians are expected to commit themselves seriously to the church. At a time when the Church of England is running out of money to maintain its establishment, this has obvious attractions.
Welby was converted at Cambridge University – where he met his wife, Caroline Eaton – through conversations with Nicky Lee, one of Gumbel's closest friends, who later became a priest and served at one of HTB's "daughter" churches. HTB pioneered this practice of "church planting" in England, where a small congregation takes over an abandoned or failing building and revitalises it.
As a young businessman making his way in London, Welby was part of the conversation circles in the vicar's kitchen where characters and convictions were formed. Although his later career diverged from the pattern – he never worked in an HTB church himself – it remains part of the foundations of his view of Christianity.
HTB sounds like some sort of wonderful conspiracy, a sort of elite religious order like a Protestant version of the Jesuits, targeting the intellectuals and the influential. But on close examination this view dissolves into something much more nuanced.
What holds HTB together is not a common doctrine or agenda but manners and style – and the worshippers' eagerness to get out of their minds. It was one of the first churches in England to embrace charismatic practices – constant prayer, the lively expectation of miracles, talking in tongues, and even the ecstatic outbursts of laughter, fainting, and animal noises known as the "Toronto Blessing". This would be odd in any context. And it has changed Christianity in England profoundly.
The church today is the product of an extraordinary marriage between the traditional piety of English public schoolboys and the raucous, unbuttoned spirituality of a Californian who had been the keyboard player for the Righteous Brothers in the 60s. John Wimber, who died in 1997, introduced to mainstream evangelicals the idea that ordinary believers could pray for healing and expect to be answered. He was also a huge enthusiast for church planting.
In 1983, in the aftermath of the great loss Welby suffered when one of hisWelby's six children, his seven-month-old daughter Johanna, died in a car crash, he and his wife Caroline visited Wimber's church in Anaheim in California where they were prayed over "to be released so we could express our pain freely to God … a very liberating experience", as he later said.
Wimber's ideas were brought to HTB in the late 1970s by the then curate Sandy Millar, an upper-class Scot who had been a barrister before ordination. At that time, the morning services replicated the experience of the grander sort of public-school chapel, with a robed choir, a liturgy from 1662 and a well-bred congregation lined up on pews.
When Millar became the curate, he introduced a much looser and more family-friendly service on Sunday evenings, which rapidly outgrew the morning service. By the time he retired, in 2005, he had moved the whole church from prayer book to PowerPoint. The pews had gone, too, and the choir sang Christian rock.
None of the main figures in HTB today were converted at the church or through the Alpha course, but they came from the same social background as the older Millar. Gumbel, Lee and Ken Costa were also all converted at Cambridge in the early 1980s and all converged on HTB when they came to London.
Welby, who had been at Eton, had been converted by conversations with Lee at Trinity college, where he was studying history and law. His wife's sister was for a while the vicar's secretary at HTB.
Yet though they all came from apparently establishment backgrounds, most were in subtle ways outsiders.
Gumbel and Costa are Jewish, and Welby himself was the child of a broken home whose father, it emerged long after his death, turned out to have been a German Jew named Weiler who took the name of Gavin Welby when he was working as a bootlegger in New York.
It was Gumbel, working as Millar's curate, who more or less invented the Alpha course. Over a 10-week course, the participants eat a simple meal together on Wednesday evenings, followed by a talk and then a discussion in groups of 10. During a residential weekend in the sixth week participants are encouraged to pray for the Holy Spirit to descend and manifest itself.
This way of reinventing Christianity to fit with the habits of modern social life has been hugely successful and attractive not just internationally but across denominations. Pope Francis, when archbishop of Buenos Aires, sent four of his bishops to one of the annual Alpha conferences in London.
But in the early 1990s, it was regarded with suspicion and some hilarity by the rest of the Church of England. Stories were told of people emerging from an Alpha course and praying with such fervour for a bus to arrive that they never noticed one pull up and drive off. Millar's Calvinistic theology repelled liberals, while bishops and many of the clergy resisted church plantings on their turf.
Gradually, all this has changed. The Alpha course has moved even into liberal churches. This was largely because it was so much more fun than other Christian activities that congregations would go in search of a course even if it wasn't offered to them.
Wimber died in 1997 and the year 2000 passed without the world ending as many charismatics had half hoped. Gumbel, though still regarded as a conservative figure, scrupulously avoided being drawn into the terrible Anglican schism over homosexuality.
Mark Elsdon Dew, the press officer for HTB and an old friend of Gumbel's, says the vicar is much more in touch with social change than most church leaders simply because he still leads three Alpha courses himself at the church every year, so he hears – and listens to – the voices of ordinary unbelievers.
HTB's services, the preaching, even the miracles, are all slick and informal and the atmosphere seems to most people genuinely friendly.
Today there are 25 church plants from HTB and the last five have been in working-class parishes without any traditions of middle-class Christianity to build on. It is now much more engaged in social action and the rehabilitation of prisoners. The church is moving right out of its comfort zone.
One thing it has carefully avoided is engagement in the Anglican sex wars – something Welby will not be able to do.
In fact there is at least one civilly partnered couple in one of HTB's church plants, who are out to their friends in the congregation. I talked to one of the men, who did not want to be identified. "We have been there for 12 years," he said. "We have made a lot of friends, and they are very engaged with the issue, and they have thought about it a bit. My take is that there is a huge disconnect between what most of the people here think and what the leadership thinks.
"The thing that makes evangelical churches popular is the informality, the lack of structure of the service, the fact that they don't use traditional liturgy, and they've got good music that young people love and they engage with. I don't think it's about what they believe, because a lot of the time they don't know what they believe. I just think that, fundamentally, it's quite fun."
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