Charles Raven on Burying the Bad News

Posted on October 17, 2009 
Filed under Opinion

This week a spokesman for Fulcrum, the ‘open’ evangelical’ grouping the in the Church of England, has claimed that the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans will fragment the Church of England, weaken its structures and polarise debate. Many might think that as far as the first two charges are concerned, the Church of England has been managing to bring these about quite effectively on its own without any help from the FCA in Great Britain and Ireland, but Kuhrt claims that the FCA needs to ‘bury good news’ and to substantiate this he buries the bad news. 

As far as the third charge is concerned, the FCA is not polarising debate, but its existence inevitably brings issues to the surface. And this is what happened at a meeting of the Church of England’s Evangelical Council last week as the Revd Stephen Kuhrt represented the Fulcrum position on the FCA. An alternative view was given by the Revd Vaughan Roberts in his address ‘Why I Praise God for the FCA’.

Both are published side by side in this week’s Church of England Newspaper, but this is not simply a Church of England matter. The FCA in these islands is part of the global GAFCON movement and much as some would want to deny it, the problems which have engulfed the Anglican Churches of North America are inexorably manifesting themselves in England.

Vaughan Roberts is an excellent advocate for the FCA and there is no point in repeating him. My focus is on Stephen Kuhrt’s critique of the FCA in which he unintentionally draws attention to the very reasons why we need it.

First, we are told that what the FCA and Article 13 of the Jerusalem Declaration ‘opens up are the grounds for pretty much any parish or grouping with a grudge against authority appealing to FCA UK and receiving its support.’ This is a parody. ‘Being Faithful’, the GAFCON Theological Resource Group’s commentary on the Jerusalem Declaration, makes it clear that ‘the breaking of communion between churches is only to be applied in extreme circumstances’ and ‘should be exercised with due process and over time’ (p65) and commends the eight step pattern of discipline recommended in ‘To Mend the Net’, the 2001 proposal for restoring order in the Anglican Communion by Archbishops Maurice Sinclair and Drexel Gomez (which was shunted into a siding by one of Stephen Kuhrt’s favoured ‘Keele Evangelicals’, former Archbishop George Carey).

The Jerusalem Declaration recovers the principle of church discipline, which for the Anglican Reformers was a mark of the true church, along with the faithful preaching of God’s Word and celebration of the sacraments. What the FCA has done is not to encourage fragmentation, but to reveal the fragmentation that already exists. Doctrinal discipline is virtually non-existent in the Church of England today, as Vaughan Roberts notes, and irrespective of the formal status of the Church of England doctrinally as defined in Canon A5, in practice pretty well anything goes. One cannot enter a Church of England parish church with any certainty that orthodox Christianity will believed and preached simply because it is part of the Church of England.

It is this reality which Stephen Kuhrt has to bury, because it calls into question the assumption of evangelical success which underlies his second criticism of the FCA, namely that the it will encourage cynicism about the Church of England’s structures ‘at just a time when these structures need encouragement and endorsement’. He claims that evangelicals in the Church of England have ‘never had it so good’ and that the Church ‘has never had more evangelical bishops than it has now.’

Assuming charitably that all bishops who identify themselves as evangelical do actually still hold to distinctive evangelical beliefs, we need to ask why, in that case, is the Church of England, taken as a whole, so manifestly a failing institution – without an agreed agenda, with declining numbers and with some dioceses facing serious financial difficulty?

The answer seems to be that despite the superficial success of the ‘Keele’ strategy of engagement with the structures, those evangelicals in positions of leadership continue to duck the key question of discipline, and as long as they do that, in practice they collude with the liberal agenda of non-scriptural inclusion and by silence give plausibility to false teaching.

To take a current example, Stephen Kuhrt cites Steve Croft, now Bishop of Sheffield, as one of those who has been able ‘to build a mission shaped agenda right into the heart of the Church of England’. It is not being cynical about his positive achievements to point out that nonetheless, Bishop Jack Spong, who was once rebuked even by Rowan Williams for his extreme scepticism, is next week visiting St Marks’s Broomhall in Sheffield as part of a lecture tour without, it appears, any censure from the Bishop of Sheffield. A diocesan spokesman told me that the Bishop was aware of the event and as long as Bishop Spong was ‘just speaking’ this would not be a problem.

The Progressive Church Network which is organising the lecture tour tell us that ‘Bishop Spong never fails to inspire and encourage those who, like him, believe it’s time to jettison some of the worst dogma which has attached to the Christian tradition’. And included in those ‘worst dogmas’ are the incarnation and atonement. Even if Bishop Spong had simply hired a secular venue for his lecture, should not such views be met with more than silence from an orthodox bishop?

In contrast, when I invited Bishop Howell Davies, a retired Uganda bishop, to conduct a confirmation service in 2000 in place of the then diocesan bishop Dr Peter Selby, who was actively promoting the gay lesbian agenda, Bishop Davies was issued with a ‘letter of unwelcome’ by Peter Selby albeit ,somewhat bizarrely, after the event.

And coming right back to the present, would the Bishop of Sheffield be willing to open one of his churches to a bishop of the Anglican Church of North America? According to the Archbishop of Canterbury their orders are irregular and therefore their ministry cannot be recognised in England so we have a neat illustration of how dysfunctional church structures have become – the hospitality of a parish church is given to the most outspoken heretic of the Anglican Communion while godly orthodox bishops would, presumably, be excluded.

What is true at the local level in England is also reflected in the dysfunctionality of Lambeth initiatives at the international level. Stephen Kuhrt believes that the FCA have had a very negative take on, for instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement after TEC’s Anaheim Convention in July, but is it plausible to believe that the Archbishop would have been willing to issue a statement setting out views on homosexuality quite the reverse of his own – to the chagrin of many revisionists – if it had not been for the determination and courage of the GAFCON Primates in being willing to take practical steps to confront false teaching?

One of those upset friends was, unsurprisingly, Peter Selby. The former Bishop of Worcester has sometimes been described as a maverick, but does have a knack of saying the right things for the wrong reasons. In his address to Inclusive Church on 7th October, he sharply criticised the increasingly personalised and ad hoc leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, arguing that ‘when it comes to sexuality, he has taken on an exclusive concern with finding ecclesio-political answers to the current panic. Out of the systemic malaise we seem to inhabit has come an apparently overwhelming false consciousness: a place where the thoughts he thinks arise from the role that has been pressed upon him by others.’

So the GAFCON movement is not the only group to have serious questions about the Archbishop’s leadership of the Communion. Fulcrum evangelicals are like investors in denial, unable to admit they have made a mistake and cut their losses when everyone else can see the business going down the drain.

Peter Selby’s analysis is spot on. The Lambeth inspired Covenant process is driven by pragmatism. It refuses to deal honestly with profound underlying theological differences and this lack of integrity makes the whole process vulnerable to the clearly worked out ideology of TEC and its allies. His address was entitled ‘When the Word of the Street is Resist’ and perhaps it is no coincidence there are already voices in TEC calling for its ample funds to be used for the encouragement of revisionist Anglican congregations and structures in England and the UK. It is unlikely that John Spong’s lecture tour in England will be his last.

So Kuhrt’s third concern, that the FCA ‘will encourage an unhelpful standoff with more liberal groupings and work to increase rather than resolve polarisation on the issue of homosexuality’ expresses an attachment to a status quo which systematically puts the orthodox on the back foot, encouraging them to treat basic Christian doctrine and morality as matters for ongoing debate rather than that to which we hold firm.
At the international level, it became increasingly clear to those who eventually founded the GAFCON movement that the ‘listening process’ initiated after the 1998 Lambeth Conference had become a technique for delay and assimilation. The openly expressed frustration of ‘liberal groupings’ now that they perceive the process is not going all their way (thanks to GAFCON) simply underlines the point. The FCA has brought a much needed theological clarity into a process which had been dominated by an unholy alliance of TEC money and Lambeth hierarchy.

So it is to be hoped that the emergence of GAFCON means the game is over for the revisionists as far as the Global Communion is concerned, but it is certainly not ‘game over’ in England. The Church of England is going to find itself in partnership for the future – the question is with whom? Any hope for the long term integrity and mission of the Church of England must lie in partnership with that biblical integrity and vitality which the FCA represents; otherwise the future may well be with TEC.

Charles Raven
16th October

This latest post by Charles Raven will appear at SPREAD.