Keele and the Church of England

Sunday, 4 September 2011

Has Keele Failed?

by Rev. John P. Richardson, Church of England

This was the title of a book edited by Charles Yeats, to which a number of then-prominent evangelical Anglicans contributed in 1995, arguing that ‘Keele’ had very much succeeded. What they meant was that the commitment made at the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress to remain as part of the Church of England, against pleas to leave, had a good outcome both for evangelicals and for the Church.

I refer to this in my e-book, A Strategy that Changes the Denomination, partly as an example of the historical development of Anglican evangelicalism, partly because I think it shows how past generations of evangelicals have been over-optimistic in their assessment of the last forty-five years.

If we think that the aim of ‘Keele’ was to ensure that evangelicals remained within the Church of England, then obviously it was a success. We have.

But that is surely not a sufficient aim.

If we assess the results of Keele by what subsequently happened, both to evangelicalism and to the Church, the outcome is far less assured, not least because the Church of England itself has changed so much since then.

When I was a young trainee clergyman (just six years on from Keele), the phrase going round was that we were ‘in it to win it’. In other words, our commitment to the Church of England was on the basis that we expected to change it — we expected it to become more evangelical. But more than that, we wanted it to be not just ‘the best boat to fish from’ but a better boat doing more fishing.

So is it?

My own answer would be ‘no’. It is not a worse boat, but it is not a better boat. More importantly, there is no greater commitment to actual fishing now than there was then. Yes, we have ‘Fresh Expressions’ — but doesn’t that say that the old expressions are a bit stale? And we have ‘Back to Church Sunday’, but then we fill our churches at Christmas anyway.

For more, see:

http://ugleyvicar.blogspot.com/2011/09/has-keele-failed.html