An Address to the Anglican Evangelical Junior Clergy Conference, Audley End, 11th-13th July 2011
Anglican Evangelism and Evangelical Anglicanism, 1945-2011 — the challenge we face
Anglican Evangelism and Evangelical Anglicanism, 1945-2011 — the challenge we face
In some respects, the Church of England actually emerged from the Second World War in better shape than the nation itself. Nationally, there was a positive and proper sense of victory. For all the moral compromises the war had entailed, German Nazism, Japanese imperialism and Italian Fascism were nevertheless things the world was better off without.
In 1943, however, the Church Assembly had called for a commission “to survey the whole problem of modern evangelism, with special reference to the spiritual needs and prevailing intellectual outlook of the non-worshipping member of the community” and to report back with plans for “‘definite action’ to meet the spiritual needs of present-day men and women.”
That commission was duly appointed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and its report, Towards the Conversion of England, was published in 1945.
Although it is possible to criticize the report in some of the details, its explicit desire for ‘conversion’ would be applauded by Evangelicals, as would, in essence, its working definition of evangelism itself:
To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through Him, to accept Him as their Saviour, and serve Him as their King in the fellowship of His Church. (Para 1, though see Packer 1976 for a critique)
Amongst other things, the report also contained radical proposals about lay equipping and ministry deemed necessary to the ambitious campaign of outreach it envisaged.
Thus it appeared the Church was ready for the challenge of the post-war world. So what happened?
In October 1944, William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury who had inspired the commission and the report, died at Westgate-on-Sea. His replacement, Geoffrey Fisher, was a man of a very different temper, and what the Church of England actually did over the next two decades was to revise the Canons of 1604.
Although this revision was long overdue (note the date!), and indeed had commenced before the war, a reviewer of a recent biography of Fisher is surely right in describing it as “a glaring example of mistaken priorities” (Donald Gray, review of Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury 1945-1961, by David Hein, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, [2008] 59:801).
And for good measure, when the revision of the Canons was completed, the next item on the Church’s agenda was liturgical revision, which took up the seventies and eighties. Only in 1988 was there a belated attempt at something similar with the declaration at the Lambeth Conference of the ‘Decade of Evangelism’. Even then, however, the Church was already immersing itself in the issues of women’s ordination and, now, consecration.
I begin here, however, in order to point out that, with good leadership, it is possible even for the Church of England to get its priorities right. But the sad truth is that we have generally had bad leadership. And that is why we are here — to consider the future leadership of the Church.
Had things gone differently, of course, then evangelical Anglicans might have found themselves playing a lead rôle in the life of the Church. As it was, they found themselves as a minority within an organization whose outward style was predominantly Anglo-Catholic and whose underlying theology was increasingly liberal.
Evangelicals were tolerated, but not taken very seriously. Nevertheless, evangelical ministry continued with vigour.
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