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Observations from a friend
It is a privilege for me to comment as someone from a different denominational background, though I am really no denominationalist at all. Somebody asked me "Are you speaking as a Baptist whom the Baptists think of as an Anglican, or as an Anglican who the Anglicans think of as a Baptist". The answer is neither really because I have never actually been a Baptist either. I am a terrible mixture denominationally.
I will begin with a very brief word of autobiography, so that you can get me in a context. Then something by way of a comment on a theological basis, much of which has been alluded to elsewhere. However I want to mainly arrive at three areas of questions which, in a sense as a friend invited into the teaparty, I would like to put to you - questions which I hope may focus your own thinking and those of the local groups that you belong to, and may help to focus some of the things that we have been thinking about and to encapsulate some of the issues in a different way.
So just a word about my own background. Although I grew up in an independent evangelical church, it was never a separatist church. Some are but this was not, and therefore, from School Christian Union days and interdenominational youth work, through the CICCU and later on working with the UCCF, I have obviously made many personal friendships that are deep and long standing, amongst evangelicals across the denominations and especially within the Church of England, and that was greatly deepened for me when I was privileged to study at Trinity College, Bristol for a couple of years when Alec Motyer and Jim Packer were in charge of the College. They took, I think, ten non-conformists heretics every year, which was, I think, extremely good for the heretics and I hope not too bad for the College and it was an enormous blessing for us and a wonderful preparation for ministry to be there. From Bristol I went to Southampton to Above Bar Church where I was for fifteen years and not surprisingly a good deal of my time there was taken up working for evangelical unity in the city and such spare time as I had was given to inter-denominational work through London Bible College, through Keswick, UCCF and not least through the Proclamation Trust.
So if I am a friend observing, if I'm looking over the garden wall, for me at any rate it is a very low wall, and as I and my family have been so warmly welcomed at St Helens since we joined the Proclamation Trust staff and as I am invited, it seems to me, to preach in more Anglican and free church pulpits these days, I feel increasingly like a cousin rather than perhaps a friend-- a friendly cousin of course!
Gospel Unity
What I have to say therefore stems from my perspective of evangelical unity as being central to the concerns of New Testament Christianity. It was in Westminster Central Hall over 25 years ago that Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones made his famous appeal for Anglicans to come out into an evangelical church. An awful lot has happened since then. I suppose in some ways Keele was a bit of a reaction to that. I can remember reading one of the three Keele documents when I was on UCCF staff which said that for that particular writer he felt he had far more in common with Anglican brothers and sisters of a different persuasion than with evangelicals in the tin tabernacle down the road.
I think we have perhaps come to sift through some of those things and certainly over the years some of the tensions and the pressures and personal hurts have healed to an extent, and I give great thanks to God for that. But I do think we have got to keep right at the top of our agenda the fact that we belong together as evangelical brothers and sisters whatever our denominational labelling may be. We are accustomed to regard doctrinal agreement as the basis of Christian unity because we recognise that God's revealed truth in scripture is the essential foundation on which everything else must be based. However it is good to remind ourselves that our union is in fact deeper than this because the historic view, both of the apostles and of the Reformers, is that the oft misused text in Galatians 3:28 is the true foundation (we are all one in Christ Jesus). Our membership of Christ is the true essence of our unity.
Thus Calvin in the Institutes writes "all the elect of God are so joined together in Christ that as they depend on one head so they are as it were compacted into one body, being knit together like its different members. Made truly one by living together under the same spirit of God in one faith, hope and love, called not only to the same inheritance of eternal life but to participation in one God and Christ". That is why all true spiritual unity is Gospel unity.
The writer to the Hebrews puts it this way, Hebrews 12:22 "You have come to Mount Zion to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God". Notice how relational it is: "You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly. To the church of the first born whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God the judge of all men to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, you have come to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant". So when we are incorporated into Christ we start to participate in that heavenly church which is his body, the body of Christ here on earth and in heaven, and just as Christ does not have many bodies, though there are many local churches, so we belong to the one body of Christ, and each of the various local churches are manifestations of that heavenly church. They are what P.T. O'Brien calls "tangible expressions in time and space of what is heavenly and eternal". If we are agreed on that biblical ecclesiology then it means that fellowship between local congregations is obviously to be encouraged and "connectionalism" is a perfectly proper practice. We also recognise that a denomination and its structures is para-church and not a church in itself. That is something that we may need to talk about and discuss but I think it is very important for the future of evangelical unity.
The same is as true for the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches as it is for the General Synod of the Church of England, and I take that to be the classic Anglican position, just as I take the office of presbyter or overseer, elder or bishop, to be the foundational order of ministry in the church. Presbuteros and episcopos are used interchangeably in the New Testament so that any view of the church which sees the local minister as assisting the bishop in his care of the souls in his Diocese is, I believe, to be rejected as denying the primacy of the local congregation, as the church. It also gives unwarranted significance and (perhaps) power to one person as the visible focus of unity and channel of ministry.
Obviously these are things that have to be thought through and on which we need to develop, clarify and sharpen our biblical convictions. However I raise these issues because I do believe that the progress of the Gospel in our nation is at stake. I delight to see the way in which the Reform literature proclaims on the title page "Our overall aim is to win the nation for Christ" to which I and many other non-Anglican evangelicals say a loud amen.
Yet my question is whether this can be done by you in your small corner, and I in mine, and whether we actually even need to think that way. Could it be that God is calling us to something even more radical. Not I think to an evangelical super-church, still less to a lowest common denominator conformity, but to a new dynamic evangelical unity that is also evangelistic. This would be because we realise that the days of denominationalism are actually long past, and that both the need of the nation and the nature of the gospel prohibit our dallying with it any longer.
Let me try and unpack what I mean by that. At the 1994 Anglican Evangelical Assembly, Gordon Kuhrt in his paper on Ordained Ministry, quoted these figures. In 1851 there were 18,194 Anglican clergy for 17 million adults in the population, that is 1 to 1,043. A hundred years later in 1951 there were 23,670 clergy for 41 million adults, that is 1 in 2,271, whereas in 1992 the figure was 10,962 clergy for 48.4 million adults, that is 1 to 4,415. The number of ordinations expected this summer (1994) he quotes in his paper, is 349.
Of course ordained ministry can be a bottleneck. Ministers can become adept permission withholders, but it is also true to say, that the churches will never be strong without godly leadership, without apostolic truth being taught and without visionary motivation of Christian disciples, which is always going to be the task of the full-time leader.
In that same paper Gordon Kuhrt mentions that the Bishops' pastoral letter in January this year affirmed the commission to proclaim the Gospel to all and the commitment to serve the whole nation. And then they went on to talk about imaginative and flexible patterns, involving a willingness to change and to question traditional practices. Well others will be better at Anglican-speak than I am, but if we take that on its face value, that is surely the sort of open evangelicalism that we want to encourage. We do not seek the sort of open evangelicalism that opens itself to the market of theological opinions in the mistaken impression that that is the politically correct approach for a good member of a denomination. Nor do we seek the sort of open evangelicalism that gives away its birthright in a belated attempt to introduce what is really a non-conformist style of democratic church government, where one member and one vote, however immature or untaught that member may be, has paralysed forward movement for some generations. I would want to warn against that. Yet an openness to be evangelicals first and foremost and to sit looser to the connectional adjectives that usually qualify that noun. If we are convinced about that as being a biblical position certain things follow.
The context
Firstly a word about our particular context. It is probably true to say that every generation of Christians faces the same basic challenges and issues, which is why the New Testament is so gloriously relevant the whole time. Holding firm to the faith and holding out the Word of life, the one preserving the Gospel within the church's life and ministry because there is nothing beyond the Gospel. It is not just that the Gospel is the way into Christian life, the Gospel is the Christian life. And then also holding out that word of life to the world - those are always key to the New Testament writers. Another given is that the hostility of the world and the flesh and the devil is always guaranteed to all believers everywhere, but we face the battle on different fronts and at different times in history and if we are wise we will seek to read our own times carefully through our biblical spectacles. The history of the church is that it is far more influenced by the culture of the world in each generation than we would generally care to admit. It is comparatively easy to identify and parry the onslaught of frontal attacks against us, like biblical criticism or scientific scepticism but the real danger lies in the presuppositions we import from the culture into our thinking without really a second thought. That is how worldliness penetrates the church's blood stream.
Hence the relativism of our culture with its denial of any claims that truth can be absolute, what Schaeffer used to call "true truth", inevitably leads us to pluralism. I think we have to see that the multi-faith service is therefore of the essence of late twentieth century culture. It is not going to go away, it is the flowering of our culture. The whole spectrum of sexual behaviour being equally acceptable, whatever that involves, providing it doesn't coerce an individuals right of choice - that is an inevitable correlative of our rejection of absolutes. "If God is dead" Nietzsche said a hundred years ago "then everything is permitted". That is the history of the twentieth century. We see it in society but do we see how infected we are by it? The comprehensiveness of a denomination is an inevitable produce of the loss of doctrinal conviction. There is a loss of belief that revealed truth, which is non-negotiable, can actually exist. Pluralism has to exist by majority agreement and in that sort of context tolerance becomes the greatest virtue and voting by majority is the ideal vehicle for that. A recent Bishop of Gloucester said, in a famous quote in the Times a few years back "Most people have this view of Christianity these days: that it doesn't matter what you believe so long as you believe it doesn't matter". That makes sense in our culture; that is exactly where it is destined to go.
We have our problems with this in the Free Church. In the Free Churches it is the democracy of the one member one vote exercised in the church meeting, on anything from the minister's salary to the colour the vestry should be painted, which has caused paralysis over many years. And of course if you operate in that sort of area tolerance becomes the chief virtue, because of course pluralism always tends to fragmentation, since it has no agreed basis of truth. So in the hard cases the majority, and what the majority are willing to accept, becomes the criterion of judgement and action. The government is governed by the consideration of whether in following a certain course of action the country will actually remain governable. The non-conformist in its secular sense then is an enormous threat and that is why he is usually labelled "extremist" or "minority interest" or worst still "fundamentalist".
This is because of the threat that that poses to the so-called central liberal bureaucracy. Therefore the great virtue is not to rock the boat. We all know that expression. Within local churches and within our denominational connections, unity is secured by being committed above all to the cause of unity. Hanging together becomes the raison d'être.
I believe we need to stop and ask ourselves whether we are seeing that mirrored in our own churches. We reflect our culture. Are we going that way without thinking about it? The less the Bible is heard, the more that will happen. And if we add in our careerism, where security of house and job, pension, are so important that they sometimes challenge our willingness to make any sacrifices for the Gospel you see how infected we become. Please do not misunderstand me. Those things are right and proper, "the labourer is worthy of his hire", "those who rule well are worthy of double honour". We do have the right to be supported and those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel as 1 Corinthians 9 says. Yet in that very same chapter Paul affirms, "But I have not used any of these rights", because he doesn't want his gospel ministry to be restricted by consideration of whether he could afford it or not. He doesn't want others to see him in ministry for what he can get out of it and he doesn't want to make his ministry decisions on materialistic considerations. I find that immensely challenging. "I have become all things to all men" he says "so that by all means I might save some. I do this all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings".
So as we look at one another across the wall the biggest challenge we all face is how much are we prepared to sacrifice for the sake of the gospel? Are we prepared to sacrifice our denominationalism? Even though we may greatly treasure aspects of it. Are we prepared to sit loose to our careerism? How determined are we to put evangelism at the top of the church's agenda rather than endless internal debates? I guess that even Reform could be trapped in that. We are gospel people and we must make our decisions for the sake of the gospel. Let me assure you there is no greener grass on our side of the wall. We need an evangelical free church Reform movement. Many of our churches are suffering from terminal paralysis due to hardening of the eldership. In the free churches the minister is often seen as an employee, a hired hand, who can equally easily become a fired hand. That is not a recipe for imaginative thinking. The man is covering his back, he is not likely to be forging ahead. So on the free church side independency can become an idol, and it can become an excuse for isolationism and separatism, which is a denial of the gospel. So together we need to help one another to keep the gospel at the top of the agenda, and that is why we need one another within that broader evangelical unity.
Now let me try and draw the threads together by looking at three areas in which I would like to ask my questions. We have looked at the theological base and some of our cultural demands. How do we focus our minds on this? What are the questions that this particular friend would like to encourage you to ask? Well I have put them in three categories: evangelism, ministry and co-operation.
Evangelism
Firstly evangelism. It is now a well known fact from the church census that in the decade '79 to '89 the churches in England lost a thousand members a week and of those thousand members the number of young people under the age of 25 was six hundred a week. There is some evidence that we have bottomed out, but it is not conclusive. We only have to look around in the churches to see the gaps between 15 and 50 especially to see that we have a huge task ahead of us. The widespread ignorance of the gospel is on a scale not known for several generations, possibly not since the eighteenth century. Coupled with this we are witnessing social change at an unprecedented rate. All the traditional pillars of society are under attack and the more institutional they are the more out of touch and irrelevant they are perceived to be. But we have hardly begun to grapple with this because of the constraints of our internal denominationalism with which we all operate. The great danger is that we give the structures of a past generation the status of idols. And our denominations will always lead us to preserve the wrong values.
So I want to ask a question of those who call themselves Anglican evangelicals (with an emphasis upon the noun, and I rejoice in this emphasis that Reform has). Are you prepared to think through some of those distinctive Church of England issues with the greater good of getting the gospel to the nation actually dictating your practice. For example what about parish boundaries? Are you going to be content to allow parishes to be deprived of a clear biblical presentation of the gospel generation after generation, if the parish system is to be retained? How long must England wait for evangelical clergy to be placed in all its parishes? Remember that the policy of a central comprehensive bureaucracy must always be by definition to balance numbers out across the spectrum.
I know of one parish which has seen two new congregations planted within it and now has had a request from the incumbent in the next parish to "come over to Macedonia and help us". I think that is a marvellous thing to happen, it is the only one I know of but it is a terrific thing to be happening. If we have flying bishops, then why not flying evangelistic teams and church planters? We need new churches to be planted that "do" church differently, authentically to the culture in which they are placed. We are all groping after this in our different evangelical groupings. When we all turn up at the Willow Creek Conferences or jet off to Chicago that is what we are saying, we need help. However, when you meet Bill Hybels and he says "don't do it my way, just ask the same questions and come up with your answers" we find that rather hard. So we tend to buy the video and do it his way. We forget how he says that fifteen degrees round the great Chicago loop and he would do it all differently. We must plant new churches that are authentic to the culture in which they are placed and that may mean crossing parish boundaries. It will mean new ways of reaching unchurched people because much of what we do on Sundays in our traditional churches is predictable and largely irrelevant as far as the people around us are concerned. Whilst we rejoice that we have the freedom to have those Sunday services and while none of us wants to down play their significance we are too service oriented and it may not be the best way ahead evangelistically in the next generation.
And what about out of date and expensive plant? Are we content to go on doing the job of English Heritage for them? Are the wonderful old buildings going to help in evangelising twenty-first century Britain, or do they actually speak a silent message that says "somehow what goes on in here isn't for today"? We can be far too building centred and this is true of every denomination. We may have to find new and more suitable environments to meet in. At least we need to insist on the freedom to develop those buildings to make them far more user friendly and for them to be allowed to be the tool of the gospel. Sometimes I think that the several hundred thousand pounds that we often spend on developing plant in churches could be used to hire more suitable premises for a very long period of time. It is very easy to be just slotted into thinking about buildings that we have inherited, rather than winning the nation for Christ.
And what about our own role as full-time ministers? Supposing the financial crisis deepens and the number of ordained people declines - is it going to inhibit us? Are we prepared to develop new structures of ministry, to liberate gifts and set them to work, in evangelising and nurturing without the restrictions of clergy quotas or central controls. That of course has implications for church finances and the apportionment of resources, but there may well be a need for a whole new stratum of full-time ministry, properly paid and housed, with proper pension arrangements, to staff new congregations. We should also provide models of women's ministry with right biblical parameters to develop whatever structures are appropriate for the new situation. In all these ways I am challenged as you are to die to our denominational shibboleths for the sake of the gospel. We need to get rid of this unbiblical clergy/ laity distinction in our thinking. We need to move away from status and career ladders with all their subversive distractions and to function instead as servants of Jesus Christ. We need to get away from bureaucracy and maintenance, and into vision and evangelism.
What is to stop evangelical churches pooling their resources and creating a new evangelical congregation that doesn't necessarily have to have a denominational label but could be composed of people from a number of evangelical denominations joining together. We might say that we would never sort out baptism and church government. But wait a minute. Let us keep the vision clear. If the evangelisation of the nation is important then that sort of co-operation may be the right way forward. They are questions which need asking.
Ministry
My second area of questions is Ministry. There are many aspects of the ministry that are critical to the healthy development of evangelical church life, whatever our connection may be. I think it is true to say that those who are perceived as being the ministry team are the greatest single human factor for good or ill in every congregation. If the senior minister doesn't want the church to grow it usually won't. So the selection and training and development of ministers who are of the highest spiritual calibre and with the necessary gifts and abilities to lead new and growing churches must be among the most important issues that we can face. I really do think this is the most important issue and this is where we need to keep one another to a radical biblicism. We are all the prisoners of our traditions but we don't need to be for ever.
Much of our discussion relates to the meaning of ordination or the office, the significance of technical terminology, elder, bishop, deacon, evangelist and though we want to tie them down to twentieth century western precision it is almost impossible to dogmatise about the first century context or pattern. What we can say is that the apostolic church recognised a ministry of deaconing tables, a ministry of oversight or ruling and a ministry of the Word. This ministry of the Word featured in nurture and in evangelism. We would probably agree that beyond this we all have difficulty in justifying our structures biblically. So why do we have to? Can't we begin to move away from structures to functions? Are we not free to acknowledge God's gift and equipping of labourers irrespective of whether or not our denominational structures recognise them?
We talk a great deal about every-member ministry, so what is to stop us recognising members who are gifted for full-time work, supporting them from the congregation, training them properly of course, but within the living church rather than packing them off to Theological College. We need to model appropriate women's ministry within the local church context. If the structures restrict the number of ordained people then we have to ask whether the denominational tail isn't wagging the gospel dog! We have to work out what is biblical about our doctrine of ordination, then consider how important that is alongside the biblical aim and obligation of winning the nation for Christ. There are hundreds of Christians waiting to be liberated into effective ministry and supported so that they can give their time, their energy, their hearts into that task. We already have examples of Schools workers and evangelistic workers amongst young people supported by several evangelical churches who covenant together from different denominations. Why can't we do that in church planting in new areas or resistant areas? Doesn't the local church have to decide what is needed for its ministry and then provide it under God, rather than expecting it to come to us as a matter of course.
You should be possibility thinkers because there are many evangelical Christians who rejoice in what Reform is doing and who long to see us strengthening one another for the cause of the gospel and that extends to the selection and training of the full-timers. It is the local church elders who know what the task of ministry is really all about and who should select suitable members to serve. Of course that must be tested. I would suggest it should be tested both by the congregation and by other pastors, but if we simply hand that over to people who have no previous knowledge of these candidates and within forty-eight hours or so try to assess them theologically, socially, personally and in every other way then we may find ourselves with permanent difficulties and problems. The most powerful encouragement to ministry should come from the context in which one is best known, one's home church, and from the leaders of that church. They surely should have the major input into the sort of training that is needed because they know about ministry.
In the Cornhill Training Course we try to have the highest standards attainable by each individual as they give themselves to that task for a year. We are blessedly free of academicism, we have no pecking order according to an academic structure, no competition. Each individual is recognised as an individual called by God and free to develop against their own standards so that they are liberated to study Scripture, to practice the gifts that God has given them, to discover their strengths and weaknesses within a ministry context, and because they are rooted in local church placements they learn to think ministry. They have skills and develop skills that are actually needed in the churches. I do believe we need to pray that equipping for ministry takes over from academic theology as the dominant ingredient by which we assess our training agendas. In all the denominations the church is crying out for skilled practitioners, that is why we need much better in service development opportunities, short term release and refresher courses, more practical hands on help and some consultants who can provide reliable assessments and enable us to develop strategies in ministry in particular church situations. The advantages of a network like this are obvious and we need to do more of it across the denominational divide as every time we do it the bricks in the wall are removed.
And there is one other area of ministry I want to encourage you to look at and that is the whole issue of episcopacy. I simply want to ask how important it is to you. I found Chris Green's Reform Discussion Paper No.3 very stimulating on this issue. I do commend it to you and I do urge you to discuss it. If the threefold ministry isn't a New Testament pattern as the paper argues then if it is dispensable and if we find that it isn't necessarily assisting and liberating gospel ministry, what are we going to do about that? How important is it? I cannot presume to answer that, it would be quite wrong of me to try to do so, but as a free church evangelical, seeing that as one of the major difficulties, I would encourage you to look at it and for us to discuss it together. My question is how important is it alongside gospel unity? I am not suggesting that the Presbyterians or the Independents have got it all right. My independency can be equally unbiblical and I must challenge that. But that doesn't make either situation right and we have to ask ourselves, what is the biblical perpendicular? What is the gospel way?
Co-operation
Finally then, the area of co-operation which really sums up what I have been saying. I do want to say how much I admire the concerns that Reform expresses and the good work that you have already embarked upon and I do rejoice in that. Dr Schaeffer used to talk about co-belligerency - by which he meant that people from different backgrounds can work together on major gospel issues and that is absolutely right, we must work as much together on these things as we possibly can, since brothers and sisters in the free churches share your concern for the desperate spiritual state of our country. That must be the top of all our agendas. In that sense all the other issues are subsidiary and we must keep that sense of perspective. We have got to avoid the tendency towards a perfectionist ecclesiology which separates whenever a church or connection is found to be less than perfect. That is the historic failure of independency and I for one confess it with shame. So often it has been the caricature of the old elder turning to his wife and saying "Well there's not many people who have got it right left in the world, hardly anybody in our church, in fact there is only you and me and I am not so sure about you!" It is true that that sort of separatist mentality can be impossible to escape from, but whatever church we belong to it will not be without its inconveniences.
What I want to plead for as I conclude is a greater degree of gospel unity as part of that ongoing Reformation of the church. Do not let your concern for the Church of England become ingrown. Do not let it simply follow a denominational agenda. Of course that is the primary purpose of Reform but do keep your gospel perspective and keep your fellowship with other gospel Christians right at the top of the agenda. If evangelism is not first in what we do then everything else will go sour. Perhaps we shall discover that what has divided us for so long is a luxury that we cannot any longer afford. Perhaps the current situation will bring us evangelicals to our senses.
Let me just fly one last kite. Is baptism in regard to its mode and practice an essential gospel issue or a secondary matter? I think we would all agree here today on its biblical necessity. We would all see its sacramental status as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. I believe, with conviction, that it should follow faith. You believe, with conviction, that it is a sign of faith yet to be exercised. Does that mean that we can never envisage a day when we both recognise the sign to be secondary to the saving faith and so refuse to let it separate us from the fullest possible gospel unity as we stand together contending with one mind for the faith of the gospel. We do need to be persuaded in our own minds on such things, yet the degree of biblical unity is much greater than our differences. I believe that both forms of baptism could happily co-exist side by side in the same congregation but I believe that because it is less important to me than the gospel primaries. If this could happen on an issue like baptism, what is there to stop a new pervasive evangelical networking linking up to pool our resources towards the conversion of England?
We are moving into uncharted waters. Who knows what challenges and opportunities the next few years will bring? But I thank God for Reform because it alerts us all that we don't have to settle down with compromise. He may be gathering us closer together for a clearer gospel unity and a biblical orthodoxy and a more pervasive evangelistic penetration than our separate denominations and our para church structures have yet envisaged or produced. That must surely be what we pray for. A clearer gospel unity, a wider and more pervasive evangelistic penetration - that is what matters most and that is something for which this friend at least hopes and prays.