Dear Friends,

This week I’ve had the chance to travel with one or two of the generals of the UK church to observe and learn from some of our partners around the Anglican world.  One I was particularly delighted to travel with, as I have owed a huge amount to him ever since I heard him speak about ‘how and why I can be filled with the Spirit’ on VHS tape in 1996. This was a clear turning point in my life.  

Awaiting us in Cairo were recognised generals from their own worlds – as Anglican Archbishops gathered for their Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA) meeting with invited observers attending. 

You know the feeling as a kid at school when you wandered into the staff room? 

Of course I’ve been around just about long enough to know that some of the people who seem a lot in the world’s eyes may not be so much in eternity, (and vice versa), but there was a humbling integrity in the room and my traveling companions that impressed me. It is not inevitable that you gain the whole (ecclesiastical) world and yet lose your very soul. Some manage to march forward on their knees. 

Remembering Rowan

Ironically perhaps this reminded me of being in the room with Archbishop Rowan Williams as a young curate when he was doing what he did best. Living the cruciform life. Patterning himself on the way of Jesus. Putting others interests before himself. I remember acrimonious debates at Synod on the Global Communion, the Windsor Report, or similar, and his interventions at the end. Rarely to swing the debate to his personal position. Mainly to pray. 

I found myself describing this to my spiritual director over zoom from my prayer shed as I prepared to travel. I was imagining Rowan as a pacifist General of church who would lay down his life for the sheep when his rod and his staff proved insufficient defensive weapons. After a heated debate Archbishop Rowan would ask us to rise. He would invoke a Spirit-fuelled silence that brought a depth and holiness into the room of Majestic proportions, and led our troubled hearts to the still, still waters he had presumably helped cultivate in years of disciplined prayer and obedience and a million acts of laying down his own life and right to ‘choose his own way to go’. He opened up a spiritual reality resonant of Jesus’ beatitude: Blessed are the Peacemakers. A pacifist ‘General’ with an eirenic spirit we still need today. He let himself be crucified to hold the Lord’s beloved church together. 

Canterbury? 

One of the debates in the Communion was until recently, if the office of Canterbury survives the current controversies, could another non-Englishman be appointed, and, more radically, could it be a Global South Archbishop who is chosen to lead the Anglican Communion? Just as an Argentinian outsider has shaken parts of the papacy, with what has seemed to many as a radical humility, could a South Sudanese, Chilean, Indian or Malaysian fill the international third of the role (leaving the Diocesan and National aspects to an English man or woman)? It is certainly a job that needs breaking into three, and there is good reason for us in England to want to receive such ministry on these shores as well. But that all seems desperately unlikely now. 

At SOMA we talk about long distance birds, albatrosses, bringing back olive branches of hope from around the Anglican World to the UK. It’s hope we sorely need in England. As we seem to be recessing into our age of senility, easily forgetting where we have come from, other parts of the Communion are coming of age as young and mature adults capable of leading a vibrant and spiritual church. 

Cairo

It was a joy to travel with Nicky and Pippa Gumbel, who were both visiting Alpha International, and preaching at the Cathedral on the following Sunday as well as Nicky being an unofficial voice for the broad ‘alliance’ of parties ‘compelled to resist the House of Bishops’ as an observer at the GSFA meeting. It was humbling to hear their heart and passion for the church and there is at least one photo going around of me looking like a fan-boy around them. We were joined in the invited guests from the Church of England by John Dunnett, who I have known since doing ARROW on the CPAS leadership scheme and who now spends his time networking and encouraging the troops though the umbrella group CEEC. Sitting between two such ‘generals’ in these meetings was an honour. 

6 other observers included representatives from two mission partners, the remnant of ‘orthodox bishops in The Episcopal Church (USA) a bishop with substantial experience in the DRC Congo from Australia who now has an international remit and two reps of the Anglican Network in Europe lead bishop who couldn’t be there. 

This broad range of observers perhaps represented the optimists, the realists and the pessimists when it came to direction of travel in the Church of England, with optimistic Nicky passionately arguing that we can turn this around. 

His big pitch was for unity, a theme he returned to in the final day. For Nicky it’s all about having everyone around the same table. He wants the whole Anglican Communion to be represented in Rome (Primates meeting in 2024) and would have loved everyone to have been at the 2022 Lambeth Conference even is they came to resist. He’d love the whole church, well beyond just the Anglicans to unite together. “I don’t want to be part of any other body that doesn’t include all of you here”, he said, and “If we stop it please don’t throw us out, align yourselves with us.”

It felt like a ‘here comes the general’ moment (from the bit in the musical when George Washington arrives on the scene). He emphasised that this was him speaking in his personal capacity, not on behalf of organisations associated with his name. But this was his very personal story of resisting his friend of more than 40 years.

That was the final impassioned speech of a long session, and combined with some factual updates the following day left a lasting impression on the Primates. The Primates were keen to hear from the observers but they were nevertheless largely nonplussed by the idea that it could be the General Synod holding Archbishops and Bishops back from changing doctrine. For them as the Archbishops go, so goes the church. It’s the Bishops’ job to defend doctrine, it should not be left to the laity or clergy to fight the battles their ‘shepherds’ are supposed to lay down their lives for. But they heard the legal fact that nothing yet has been decided despite press releases and conferences from the most senior clergy in England that had sowed confusion around the Communion. The hoped for miracle may yet be possible. 

For while the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had done the maths and realise they can’t take their proposals through Synod in what most commentators think would be the honest way (changing the Canons), and while they are are embarking on an attritional divide and conquer campaign pushing out of the church a percentage of those who can’t accept their de facto doctrine change which will lead to a ‘simpler, humbler if not bolder’ church perhaps more united behind the newspeak of the House of Bishops, there are growing signs that they have not done their maths right at all. Several reports out of London suggest the Lambeth office had calculated that their actions could lead to an exodus of clergy representing 10-15% of CoE congregants.

But Justin Welby had reportedly reassured everyone that while his old constituency would be cross they would go with him on this. He was delighted they were recruiting reps to Synod who would ‘back Justin’ while they were not realising still where this all was heading. What an absolute nightmare it must now be to the College and House of Bishops when they realise that even those charismatics might have awoken with a jolt from a slumber and many find themselves suddenly in alliance with people they had barely been in a room with for decades – the ones the Lambeth staff had been content to lose. Already there has been a massive reduction in vocations in our own Diocese back home as potential ordinands and leaders hold off putting themselves forward for ministry in a church that seems willing to renege on its doctrine, or sense the troubled waters and steer clear of the crocodiles. 

No-one quite knows where this will land, and for those in the peripheries of churches where we have laid few foundations for understanding the counter-cultural worldview of ‘dying to self’ rather than ‘affirming self’ this will be a change of pace many are ill-equipped to cope with. It’s one of the reasons it’s helpful to holds up the mirror of history and the mirror of our Global church partners to us, because while none of us have the whole Truth – that title lies with Jesus alone – we get perspective when we listen to those who are ready and able to lay down their lives for him about whether the Christianity we have been marketing is an adequate summary of his message at all. 

To Archbishop Justin Welby’s credit he has invited another senior ‘General’ to speak at the next synod. The voice of the father of the house of Primates, the longest serving Archbishop in the Anglican Communion. This man is not currently a part of either the renewal group of the Global Anglican Futures Conference or the campaigning fellowship within the Anglican Communion that is the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans. It will be interesting if the Synod and English Archbishops can hear him more clearly than they did the studious and polite Primate of Alexandria when he attended last February. 

Whilst it was good to travel with our UK ‘Generals’, there was a real sense that the Communion has now been reset to the Global South. A hundred or so years ago 90% of Anglicans were in England. Now you’d be generous to claim it was 75%, as you’d have to assume we have 20+million Anglicans, when 90% of them rarely attend church). The new generals have in many cases lived through wars, religious persecution, threats to their lives, poverty and the like. They are unlikely to be as cowered into submission as elements in the Church of England seem to be. The ‘middle ground’ of Anglicanism should be the sort of middle ground achieved by a steady plumbline. Dead centre on Christ. Not hotchpotch unity between radically divergent religious world views. ‘Take up your cross, deny yourself and follow Him’ is their cry echoing Jesus’ own call to his disciples. It’s a costly call that takes you beyond the self-affirmation of ‘he loves me just the way I am’ to a ‘he loved me while I was still his enemy, died for me, and calls me to sin no more, die to my old way of life and be re-born into a new one, where for me to live is Christ and to die is gain as I am changed from glory unto glory’. [Albeit the latter is more of a mouthful].  

Whether that message can land in our ‘mile wide and inch deep’ Church of England and charismatic circles is another matter entirely. It’s been a long time since we dug deep for the old, old wells of spiritual vitality that once drenched these islands in the Spirit. Is there any chance we can hear the cry of the new Global South ‘Generals’ and dig deep once more? 

[post edited 23.10.23 | 24.10.23]

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Previous Posts in this series: Foreword | introduction | Remember The Baby | The Bathwater Needs Flushing | Driven to Distraction by Success | Whoever Pays the Piper | Losing My Religion | Spiralling Out of Control | Look to the rock

HTB Network Thesis in 30 Parts: Featuring: Origins | Renewal | Success Culture | Managerialism | Theology | Trajectories.