HOW’S THIS FOR a challenge? At just a fortnight’s notice, persuade 400 people to spend an August weekday in London on the second- hottest day of the year in a packed and sweltering room with no fans or air conditioning. Lay on an hour-and-a-half’s religious service before the business even begins. Then open the podium to the floor. Are the audience still glad they came? You bet.
It is a sign of how passionately liberals in the Church of England feel that this ordeal by heat on Monday was such a success. Two young London vicars, Jo Hawes and Giles Fraser, whose churches face each other across Putney Bridge, resolved a few weeks ago that it was no use simply moaning to each other about the enforced resignation of Jeffrey John, the gay and no-longer-to-be Bishop of Reading. So they decided to try to raise a grassroots gathering of like-minded Anglicans to work out what to do about it.
From the 200 e-mails they sent out, they received 600 replies. Many sympathisers had to send their apologies because they were going to be on holiday or at work. But still there was standing room only for latecomers at St Mary’s Church in Putney. And the atmosphere was electric.
With young and old, black and white, male and female, and even the odd moderate evangelical in attendance, the meeting was of one mind. Conservative evangelicals should not be allowed to hijack their Church. The reactionaries had already managed to get Dr John thrown out of his job through superior organisation, financial blackmail and vociferous lobbying. It was time that the mild majority made their voices heard in reply.
The trouble with liberals and mainstream moderates is that they are, on the whole, milder, less fanatical and less committed. They don’t give a tenth of their income to the Church as evangelicals do. They don’t dedicate their whole life to the Scriptures. They don’t, in other words, wield power disproportionate to their numbers. But Hawes and Fraser reckon that their numbers are huge and that the tolerant wing of the Church is a solid majority. And they want to prove it.
They have set up a website, www.inclusivechurch.net, on which they have posted a statement of belief written by a group of Oxford theologians. This declares that the Church and its offices should be for all people, whatever their sex, race or sexual orientation. They need as many individuals as possible to register support for this statement on the website. And they want to match this with as many expressions of support as possible from parochial church councils, the committees that run every parish.
If the campaigners have luck on their side, the numbers will run into tens of thousands, a sizeable petition which can then be delivered to General Synod, which meets next February, and to the Archbishops’ Council. The statement of belief may also be introduced as a Private Member’s Motion at Synod.
More urgently, though, Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has called a meeting of Anglican primates for October. He has already shown, by his rescinding of Dr John’s appointment, that he is susceptible to pressure. What would strengthen his hand at that meeting would be a groundswell of support for a more inclusive Church. If he could show evidence to fellow primates that, in England at least, the majority of the Anglican Church is open and tolerant, it would be easier for him to resist any hardline solution to the issue of gay bishops. To this end, the more people and PCCs who sign up to inclusivechurch.net’s statement by October, the better.
What about the money issue? Wealthy conservative evangelical parishes have threatened to withhold funds from the Church if the argument does not go their way. Preaching at the service before Monday’s meeting, the Very Rev Colin Slee, Dean of Southwark, had an imaginative and suitably Christian solution. The Dean suggested that liberal parishes, rather than operating on an “eye for an eye” principle and threatening blackmail in return, should offer to make up the difference of any diocesan shortfall caused by evangelicals holding their money back. This generous-spirited idea should appeal to open and tolerant congregations, and would certainly call the bluff of their opponents.
Otherwise, as Dr Slee pointed out, the Church will suffer even greater schism. And the schism he identifies is not the obvious one of Nigeria or the West Indies breaking communion with Canterbury. It is the existing and widening division between those people in England who attend Church and the tens of millions of baptised Christians who don’t — many of whom, in his words, “feel excluded, unwelcome, judged and condemned”.
Monday’s meeting was full of lay Anglicans who said they had thought of leaving the Church after Dr John’s resignation. (I am one.) Why, they asked, would they want to be part of an organisation so prejudiced and, in the sense that it allows covert homosexuality but condemns integrity, so downright dishonest? The answer is that if all liberals left the Church, it would cease to be a national institution and would become a narrow sect. The Church of England is now just like the Labour Party in the 1950s and the 1980s. Moderates have to stay put and use their strength to save it from extremism. As Hugh Gaitskell said in 1960, when Labour succumbed to the doctrine of unilateral nuclear disarmament at the height of the Cold War, centrists should “Fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love.” That must be the slogan — in the nicest possible way, of course — of the mild majority in the Anglican Church.
maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk
