Anglican Mainstream

By Charles Raven, VirtueonLine

Just three weeks after the announcement of the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration, it is already clear that GAFCON has irrevocably changed the Anglican Communion. The majority of the world’s Anglicans now no longer look to Canterbury.

Structures that stifle spiritual life will eventually find themselves bypassed and this is exactly what was expressed in the courteous but firm response of the GAFCON Primates Council to Rowan Williams’ criticisms, declaring in the final paragraph that ‘We assure the Archbishop of Canterbury of our respect as the occupier of an historic see which has been used by God to the benefit of his church and continue to pray for him to be given wisdom and discernment.’

It is of course disorientating for the leadership of the Church of England to find itself described as belonging to ‘an historic see’ of the Anglican Communion when it naturally thinks of itself as ‘the historic see’.

The reality which GAFCON, as a confessional movement, forces the Church of England to face is that the spiritual devastation caused by the promotion of a false gospel is not safely contained on the other side of the Atlantic, but that the same counterfeit Christianity has become deeply ingrained in its own life with the real risk that under pressure from a increasingly secularised culture it may follow the same path to apostasy as has been pioneered by ECUSA/TEC.

The seriousness of the their Church’s spiritual wound has been routinely denied and downplayed for so long, not only by revisionists, but also many who would identify themselves as evangelicals, that there is now a very powerful temptation to try and carry on the pretence.

This would be a tragedy, because stern though the GAFCON diagnosis of Western Anglicanism is, it does also manifest a certain mercy towards the Church of England. We now have over forty years experience to confirm that evangelicals are incapable of reforming and renewing the Church of England from within, but with GAFCON comes the possibility of a new start if they have the courage and humility to embrace this global fellowship which embodies doctrinal and mission commitments which they should hold dear.

So from an English perspective, how is GAFCON a vehicle of God’s mercy? In the Jerusalem Statement the GAFCON movement declared that it had ‘come to the devastating conclusion that we are a global Communion with a colonial structure’. Historically the typical response of colonised nations has been to throw off the yoke, real or perceived, and separate from the former colonial power. It has been observed that the Anglican Communion represents the high water mark of the British Empire and it would not have been surprising if the GAFCON movement had formed itself into a new Communion and formally broken with Canterbury.

Theologically, as some strongly argued at Jerusalem, there would have been a case for such separation and that might well have effectively abandoned the Church of England to the consequences of its own doctrinal confusion and compromise. But in the providence of God, GAFCON did something more radical. Rather than leave, it reconstituted the Anglican Communion as a confessional body with spiritual authority vested in the participating Primates.

GAFCON also drew back from making an explicit call for a new province in the British Isles as it did in North America. So the Church of England has not been shut out; but the danger is that it will shut itself out despite the remarkable tribute which the GAFCON movement has paid to the mother Church; the Jerusalem Statement’s starting point for doctrinal definition is almost word for word that of the Church of England’s Canon A5 and the Declaration affirms the Thirty-nine articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as authoritative for Anglicans today.

The crucial first stage in the reception of the GAFCON movement amongst English evangelicals occurred at the ‘Global Anglicanism and English Orthodoxy’ day conference on July 1st in London at All Souls, Langham Place. Speaking alongside the Archbishops of Uganda, The Southern Cone and Sydney, Dr J I Packer urged that the Jerusalem Declaration should be the agreed basis for orthodoxy and missionary action in England, that PCC’s and Diocesan Synods should adopt it as their ‘guiding star’ and that all new and existing bishops should be required to subscribe to it. He sat down to a standing ovation.

It was a defining moment; some forty years previously Jim Packer and John Stott resisted the call by Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones for Anglican Evangelicals to leave their doctrinally mixed denomination, but now the alternative is not outside Anglicanism, but within and it is time to act. Not surprisingly, this meeting evoked a vigorous response from N T Wright, the Bishop of Durham, who claimed in a statement released on 6th July that ‘the English situation is NOT like America.

Of course there is something you can call ‘liberalism’, which has affected many parts of the church, but life is much more complicated and interesting, and actually hopeful, than the old, tired rhetoric of ‘creeping liberalism’ would allow for’ and ‘the present structures are neither powerless nor spineless. The General Synod of the Church of England has not voted to allow same-sex blessings or the ordination of practicing homosexuals’.

Unfortunately for Tom Wright, ‘creeping liberalism’ caught up with him at the Church of England’s General Synod just a day later during the debate on the admission of women to the episcopate.

It is true that Synod is certainly not spineless, but in defiance of senior bishops, it voted down all legal protection for those in conscience opposed to the innovation. When the hierarchy realised that the majority were in danger of forcing conservatives, especially the Anglo-Catholics, out of the Church of England the Bishop of Durham attempted to get an adjournment of the debate ‘to break bread’ as he recalled St Paul advised shortly before being shipwrecked on Malta. Synod rejected this opportunity to take stock and forged ahead.

The fact that no provision was made for those opposed to women bishops was based on the understanding that to do so would amount to the approval of sex discrimination and, as the Bishop of Fulham noted, many did not attempt to hide their animosity towards those wanting protection of conscience. By the same token, it is easy to foresee the Synod going on to justify the admission of those in same gender sexual relationships to holy orders and the episcopate.

Anyone doubting this should ponder the remarks of Giles Goddard, Chair of Inclusive Church as he celebrated the Synod’s vote: ‘It is a time for rejoicing. We have reached another milestone in the long process of removing the barriers to inclusion in the Church of England.’ We have been warned. As one attendee at the debate remarked afterwards ‘at least the Conservative Evangelicals have GAFCON to look towards for spiritual oversight’.

A clearer example of ‘creeping liberalism’ would be difficult to find and the reason it succeeds is that, as Archbishop Peter Jensen reminded delegates at All Souls, the revisionists know that because of the social climate they have time on their side.

They also know that in Rowan Williams they have an Archbishop of Canterbury who is far too compromised by his unrepented advocacy of the gay/lesbian movement to exercise effective discipline and so through clever manipulation of the listening process they have managed to establish the goals of the gay/lesbian movement as a potentially acceptable option, dependent only upon the achievement of consensus. Even without any votes taking place at Lambeth, the participation of TEC bishops, received as bishops in good standing while actively supporting Gene Robinson, further entrenches their plausibility.

What little discipline has been exercised in England, for instance in connection with the ‘gay wedding’ at St Bartholomew’s, London in May, has been on the grounds of procedure rather than the moral and doctrinal issues. Given also the well established fact of widespread unbelief amongst the clergy, there is little ground for optimism that the Church of England will be able to resist the inexorable pressure of the prevailing culture.

The Bishop of Durham’s dismissal of GAFCON is not an idiosyncrasy. He is representative of a mindset amongst many senior evangelicals. For instance, Bishop Gavin Reid expresses a similar complacency when he writes that ‘the crucial issue or us in England is how much we should allow ourselves to be driven by a controversy that basically belongs to the non-English provinces and is not, therefore, "Church of England"’.

The GAFCON Primates could with much more consistency have claimed that the current controversy did not belong to their provinces either, but they did not abstract themselves because they saw that the spiritual health of the whole Anglican Communion and indeed the worldwide Christianity was at stake in the North American situation. And if that was true for those provinces, how much more for England, given the historic significance of the See of Canterbury?

The dismissal of GAFCON as irrelevant to England therefore comes dangerously close to that sin which so grieved Jeremiah in the final years before the destruction of Jerusalem, of spiritual leaders ‘healing the wound of my people lightly’ (Jeremiah 6;14,8:11).

But by identifying with GAFCON, as a consistently confessional movement, English evangelicals can act on the basis of a much more penetrating diagnosis. Point 13 of the Jerusalem Declaration recognises that denial of the faith can occur through either ‘word or deed’; the way to stop the insidious effect of false teaching is to disassociate from the authority of those promoting it. We should not wait until leaders or Churches actually act on false teaching, because by then much of the damage will have been done as the North American situation sadly demonstrates.

The New Testament does not make a distinction between ‘word’ and ‘deed’ and warns against continuing in fellowship with those who promote false teaching. If Anglican Evangelicals were able to recognise that heretical words are as serious as heretical deeds and act on that basis in England, for many, GAFCON and the support of the Primates Council would be absolutely necessary and vital to their continued existence. Radical action may hazard buildings, stipends and pensions but that is preferable to hazarding the gospel and because of GAFCON the risks for those who do act, in a principled and responsible way, are at least reduced because they can count on continued recognition as legitimate members of the Anglican Communion.

The GAFCON movement is not simply a response to the problems in North America. It is a radical initiative to liberate the Anglican Communion from revisionist hegemony in which the leadership of the Church of England, especially the present Archbishop of Canterbury, has been deeply and demonstrably complicit. It is over a quarter of a century since what we now call the Global South spoke prophetically to the Church of England through the Partners in Mission report ‘To a Rebellious House’ (1981) and now the Church of England cannot avoid that fork in the road to which the Anglican Communion as a whole has come. This may well be its last chance to acknowledge the seriousness of its wounds and the need for outside help. While the sternness of God is evident in the verdict of GAFCON on the mother church and its leadership, this movement also embodies the kindness of God; it has not abandoned the Church of England, but offers itself as a ‘rescue mission’ - if we English have the humility to embrace it.

—The Rev. Charles Raven is Senior Minister of Christ Church Wyre Forest which is an independent Anglican congregation but located within Worcester Diocese.
 

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