History Of the Church of England since the 1960's

These are the working notes for an essay I am trying to write on the recent history of the Church of England. I would be so grateful if anyone else interested in this area could flick through and give their impressions/ perspectives. The literature on this area is scant so say the least:

Notes for Recent History of the Church of England essay.

“The period between the end of World War II and the late 1950’s is commonly referred to as the “age of austerity”. (Brown 2000 170)

After the trauma of the second world war, Britain experienced a period of renewed discipline and moderation; and piety. One may account for this variously.Brown’s version is interesting. He puts it largely down to gender and the agenda to grow the workforce.

Recent times had been changing times for Britain’s women. During the war they had come out of the kitchens and worked in factories or as land girls. However, when the war was over the pressing need was for an increased birth-rate. This led to the growth of a domestic ideal. “God’s desire for chaste homemakers”, as it were, helped reinforce this.

All the pressures of social need told the women of Britain during the 50’s that their place was in the home. Girls being encouraged and encouraging others to be Godly made for going forth and multiplying

Brown writes:

“Traditional values of family, home and piety were suddenly back on the agenda…The churches benefited immediately. During the late 40’s and the first half of the 1950’s, organised religion experienced the greatest per annum growth in church membership………….The Billy Graham crusades of 1954-56 were especially noteworth, producing mass audiences in football stadia….Radio evangelism was also permitted in the early and mid 1950’s on BBC radio. Accompanying this was a revival of tract distribution and district visiting not witnessed since the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.”.

But times were changing.

In 1958 people were listening to Tommy Steele and Andy Williams. In 1959 the charts were dominated by Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. The hangover of the war was over and the greatest decade of social change in the 20^th century was about to begin.

The 1960’s-

Callum Brown sees the 60’s as the pivotal point in the secularisation of Britain. Whether or not that is the case, it was certainly socially the most revolutionary decade of the last century.

In terms of public mood and mores it is worth noting that it was the decade of the Lady Chatterley obscenity trial, the legalisation of homosexuality and abortion, the emergence of “women’s lib”, the boom of pop and youth culture, and the appearance of student rebellion.

Michael Hampson’s highly personal account of the history of the C of E, “Last Rites” characterises the 60’s as the era of “Kum Ba Yah”, and “Lord of the Dance”. It was a time of renewal and experimentation in keeping with the spirit of the times. There were new hymns, new liturgies and groups such as the Fisher Folk and the Jesus People.

Hampson makes a lot of the fact that in 1966 the first revision for 300 years came in the Service Book.

I am not convinced that that represented quite such a seismic change as he suggests. The leadership of the church during the 60’s was traditional but not conservative.

The archbishop of Canterbury was Michael Ramsey, a public school educated member of the High Church movement, who had a reputation for being humane and discreet. Ramsey presided over a time of numerical decline in the church, and also a time when the church was self-consciously trying to find its place and relevance in a rapidly changing world.

He was a builder of bridges and an outward thinking man, exemplified, for instance in his involvement in the ecumenical movement.

The church, as it always had had, had its low and high wings, but this was not a decade marked by differences between them. During this period it was change that was the thing.

Grace Davie (1994 33) characterises the C of E during the 60’s as a period of desire for relevance. She writes: “The churches – all too aware of the changes taking place around them – were looking for ways to adapt to and to penetrate this changing world. All might be well if the Church could shake off its image of belonging essentially to the past; it must, instead, present itself and its message as modern, up to date, and, above all, relevant…. The emphasis lay, precisely, in “breaking down the walls of partition between sacred and secular”

The spirit of the time was for relevance, modernity, and reform. The popularity for guitar based folk music was seized upon and co-opted into worship, the reorganizing of the parishes was planned.

Maybe the most significant “event” was the Bishop of Woolwich J A T Robinson publishing a slim book called Honest To God in which he put forward biblical scholarship and demythogization, - very academic and rationalist ideas - mainstream Anglican thought.

These ideas weren’t new. Robinson was simply adopting the dominant strand of post-enlightenment liberal protestant theology. Honest to God was published in 1963 and (according to Wikipedia) “aroused a storm of controversy”. The online encyclopedia goes on, “The book was controversial even before its publication, as an interview about it with Robinson in the Observer bore the provocative headline 'Our Image of God Must Go Some of the letters and articles for and against Robinson's views were published by the end of the year in The Honest to God Debate 

The book was almost universally condemned by traditionalists, but was hailed as a breath of fresh air by many liberals. However, not all liberals were in favour: many, including Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury thought that Robinson's theology was weak, and that he had only a vague understanding of many of the issues he attempted to bring into the mainstream.”

It is important to realise that until recently Charismatics and Evangelicals were two very separate groups, and especially so in the 60’s.

Michael Hampson talking about the later merging of the evangelical movements and charismatic movements in the 1980’s writes:

“The early charismatic movement was not a place of evangelical dogma – it was a place of authentic experience shared – but by the 1980’s it was looking for a framework, an established language, a reference point, even a respectability.Mainstream evangelicals, with a cultural and theological heritage going right back to the reformation, had initially been deeply suspicious of the new charismatic movement. …Nevertheless each side began to see potential benefits in building bridges”

The 1970’s

By the 70’s the hopes and ideals of the 60’s were expiring. The American hippie dream seemed to have gone up in smoke in Vietnam, the Beatles were breaking up, and the Tories were in.

The C of E may have achieved synodical government by 1970, a small victory in terms of the Church’s place within the establishment, but there were’t many victories to be had with the British public in the 1970’s.

It is important to see the history of the Church during the 70’s in the context of the history of the decade. If the 60’s was boom, then the 70’s was bust.

And it was as the three-day week was being introduced to combat industrial strife and power shortage, the country got its first Evangelical archbishop of Canterbury in more than a century.

Donald Coggan had a relatively brief tenure from 1974 to 1980, which marked a shift away from the liberal catholic mood of Ramsey’s reign. The 70’s is probably better known for another Bishop, ex England cricketer and evangelical David Sheppard was  appointed Bishop of Woolwich in 1969 and Bishop of Liverpool in 1975 – the enduring legacy of his ecumenicism is that there never was trouble between protestants and Roman Catholics in that city.

If the sixties saw the C of E ape secular and rationalistic thought, during the seventies deprivation and strife was fought by distinctively Christian Protestantism.

Grace Davie (p36) writes:

“As the 1960s gave way to a far less confident decade, it is not surprising that borrowing  from the secular became less and less attractive. So much that the pendulum began to swing again towards a greater emphasis on the distinctiveness of the sacred”

However what may have been achieved in terms of identity was not necessarily matched in terms of fulfilling social objectives or stopping the bleeding in terms of membership.

The 60’s saw a shift from a church that was getting more confirmation than the number of child baptism to a church that achieved only 20% confirmations to child baptisms and that dire situation persisted throughout the 70’s.(Brown 189)

The evangelicalism that now had a greater sway in the synod remained conservative on moral issues but was beginning to show more awareness in social terms.  Grace Davie writes the following about evangelicalism in the latter part of the twentieth century but to a smaller degree, it applies to the late 70’s:

“While most evangelicals remain conservative (or moderately so anyway) on moral issues – both individual and collective- increasing numbers are beginning to look  more critically at the social and economic agenda. A prominent leader in this respect is the Bishop of Liverpool (now deceased)”

“New religious movements, already apparent in the 1960’s became a focus of public as well as religious attention as at least some (though never all that many) people looked outside the mainline churches for spiritual satisfaction. Such movements …are in the main exclusivistic, standing “in some degree of protest against the dominant traditions of society and rejecting prevailing patterns of belief and conduct”At the same time house churches, sociologicallyif not theologically similar to at least to some new religious movements, began to multiply in response to a somewhat similar demand among Christians (usually evangelicals) for a greater distinctiveness in church life. (p37)

What the 70’s did see was an increase in the new phenomenon of , experience based, Acts-of-the-apostles-inspired charismatics.

Michael Hampson describes the church in the seventies in much more personal terms.

“From the entirely informal spirit of the FisherFolk and the Jesus People there had emerged a new independent exploration of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. The gospels became a direct resource book for what it means to be a disciple. The Acts of the apostles and the writings of saint Paul became a direct resource book for what it means to be filled with the spirit”(71)

Later he goes on to explain what was involved in being a Charismatic

“Firstly there was prophecy. Someone would start talking like an Old Testament prophet….We all bought into a theology that said these were direct, specific, live messages from God for those gathered in that place at that moment….Then there was speaking in tongues. Saint Paul writes about the phenomenon at length…The sound is like someone speaking a foreign language…As in Acts chapter 2 most chose to believe that the sound was that of a real language..we were also content to believe that the language was sometimes that language of the angels, genuine but unknown on earth….A third phenomenon – interpretation – goes with a word in tongues. Alone it would resemble prophecy, but following a word in tongues it is said to be the same message, repeated in the vernacular.”

The 80’s

With the reification of greed and abandonment of socialist principles of the 70’s it has seemed to many that the eighties was the decade that either we abandoned God or he abandoned us. In terms of numbers the Church of England declined at roughly the same level as during the 70’s. Robert Runcie, a liberal intellectual became archbishop of Canterbury in 1980. David Jenkins became the Bishop of Durham in 1984, the year that the BBC commissioned the highly liberal theologian Don Cupitt to make the series “The Sea of Faith” in which he equated the history of Christianity with the gradual triumphing of rationalist liberal Christianity.

As we will see later, commentators such as Davie and Hampson make a lot of the consolidation and strengthening of the protestant traditions but I remember growing up during that period and it was the liberal protestant tradition that seemed to reflect the feeling of the majority of people who considered themselves to be more or less Christian.

It was as if the church elders seemed to have felt that the genie couldn’t be put back in the bottle. Britain in the 20^th century accepted not only science, but sociology, and textual criticism, and the necessity for different morality codes at different times in history.

The world had gained all sorts of knowledge that couldn’t be unlearned.

As I remember it during the 80’s there was a genuine attempt on behalf of the liberal intellectuals in the church to make the church more relevant by explaining that the church really wasn’t that far away from secular humanism. All the “mumbo jumbo” could be explained away.

In schools and colleges, the works of Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann were being taught, and on Radio 4 David Jenkins would muse about the significance of the virgin birth. The problem, however was that the theological foundations were much too complicated to be explained to anyone outside of the sixth form or tertiary college.

Moreover it was too similar to secular values to seem worth taking any interest in. It seemed that the last thing the Church believed in was God, as refelected in comedy sketch shows like Not the Nine O Clock news. The Church seemed to many to be ridiculous.

And the liberal church was far from the whole picture. The religious Satire, “Life of Brian” caused controversy publically upsetting figures such as Mervyn Stockwood, Bishop of Southwark.

Mary Whitehouse was doing her best, despite the church to uphold what she considered to be traditional, lowish church values of the British public.

But the real change during the eighties was the groundswell of protestant Anglicanism. Churches were recruiting with groups like the crusaders and through the Christian Fellowships of Schools and Universities.

Michael Hampson claims that the eighties was the time when Charismatics and Evangelicals joined forces (p?).

My recollections are that uneasy alliances were being formed but that the two groups still viewed each other with suspicion. And yet things were never that simple. In my town there were two churches. One liberal catholic with a small and elderly congregation, and the other, St Stephen’s, ostensibly low church. St Stephen’s had both charismatics and evangelicals – united on Sunday by the common purpose of being Christians who actually believed in the Bible and were bothered to go to a church. However, I am informed, that when the Charismatics went to their festivals like Spring Harvest they bemoaned the evangelicals dour non-experiencal, text obsessed faith. And some of the town’s teenagers were attending evangelical groups where they were warned against anyone who might challenge the absolute primacy of the Bible.

Meanwhile teenagers such as I were being taught in our religious studies A levels, by chaplains who were not just teaching Bible criticism but that fixation with the bible was not just essentially a form of idolatory, but in terms of regaining a lost purity, a nonsense.

One soundbite characterisation of the 80’s was that it had a new religion – money. That might not be true, but certainly the materialism of the age knocked a lot of the religious sensibility out of the collective consciousness.

The Last Temptation of Christ might have caused upset from religious groups in 1988 but probably not much more, if that, as The Life of Brian, a farce, had eight years prior.

The liberal catholic leadership of the eighties, was a bit like the later liberal democratic party, intellectually interesting but weak and ineffectual. Disagreement was also developing between the traditional anglo catholics who were against the idea of ordinating women and the liberals who were in favour.

This was not an issue for the protestants who hardly believed in ordination at all. However the row over the ordination between liberals and ango-catholics would change the power balance and politics of the Church to the point we have today where there is brink of schism.

1990’s

The ordination of women was agreed on in 1992, and the first women were actually ordained in 1994. The decision to ordain women vicars came a year after the Evangelical George Carey was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury. The ordination of women caused such upset to the anglo-catholics that many of them left, defecting to Roman Catholicism. But more damaging was one of the concessions allowed to try to keep unity. This allowed for certain Parishes to elect to be under the control of an Anglo-catholic “flying bishop”, if they objected to their normal bishops support of women priests. This effectively created a church within a church who have since set up their own structures and are to all intents and purposes a separate church.

Now the Church was essentially an evangelical/ liberal split.

At the same time the evangelicals under Carey were becoming stronger. Carey may not have appointed many hard-liners, but he created conditions under which they could feel easy.

And of course with the “opposition” now being liberal-catholics rather than the more robust combination of anglo-catholics and liberal catholics, there was less resistance.

The other significant event in the history of the C of E during the nineties, didn’t happen here at all.

It happened in a small church in Canada. The Toronto Blessing Movement, was an “outpouring of the spirit” that occurred in the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church in 1994 which saw the Spirit move people to laugh uncontrollably (“so-called” Holy laughter) or stumble (“Holy drunkenness”).

The vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton, sandy Millar, and his curate Nicky Gumbel went on a trip over to Toronto a couple of years after Gumbel had authored a course about Christianity called Alpha.

Gumbel and Millar were reinvigorated by “Toronto”, and the reborn Alpha course became the biggest recruiting sergeant in the recent history of the Church of England.

Statistics in 2004 showed that Alpha’s Holy Trinity Brompton attracted 6000 people each Sunday. At that point over 6,000,000 people had completed the Alpha course.

It was the Alpha phenomenon that really cemented the partnership between evangelicals and charismatics.

Tensions still existed between the two but together they could present unified front of biblically centred (as opposed to tradition –based) theology in the synod. Organisations such as the Evangelical Alliance (not limited to the C of E) have helped unity.

For those who read newspaper reports about the C of E and the disagreements within its ranks today, it would be easy to surmise that the argument is all about sexuality, particularly attitudes towards homosexuality.

The real difference however is about authority. For all their emphasis on the Holy Spirit, Alpha is still a biblically-centred interpretation of Christianity. The harder line evangelicals such as Reform (who want to go right back to the reformation), or Anglican-mainstream, have something closer to a fundamentalist position on the Bible. However for the liberals the Bible is a witness to a reality that needs to be interpreted through rational interpretation.

Michael Hampson describes the issue of homosexuality, and the Christian attitude towards it, as “The issue that won’t go away”. As a former gay vicar, one might expect him to take a particular interest in this. But this has become the single most visible and acrimonious row in recent Church history.

In 2003, the Church of England announced the appointment of Jeffrey John, living in a celibate domestic partnership with another man, as Bishop of Reading. Traditionalists within the Church were outraged and John eventually succumbed to pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury (who had initially supported the appointment) and others to withdraw before he had been formally elected. He was appointed Dean of St Albans instead.

As a result of this and the consecration of the openly gay Gene Robinson in the US Episcopal Church (part of the Anglican communion), many provinces, primarily from central Africa, but a few in Asia and South America—representing half of the 80 million practicing Anglicans worldwide—declared a state of impaired communion with their counterparts. Minority groups in Western provinces have stated their opposition to what they consider unscriptural actions by the Churches of England.

There is another factor helping cleave the Church of England – the crisis in the finances.

Only a generation ago the clergy were funded almost entirely by ancient endowments. However in the final decades of the the last century there became no point in looking to parliament or the Crown for funds, so the church looked instead to lay people in the pews. These are known as diocesan quotas. Roughly speaking each church makes a contribution to the diocese, which then gets redistributed according to need. The wealthier parishes, which in effect means the evangelical churches, whose distinctive and certain message is the only growth area in the C of E, pay more.

Michael Hampson writes:

“With the financial situation so desperate – and those at the top in each diocese so fearful – those large churches with large quotas have a phenomenal leverage over the leadership. Only a handful have the fundamentalist clergy who could and would persuade their church councils to withold payment of quota, but a handful is all that it would take to bankrupt a diocese and leave the clergy unpaid. Limited witholdings have begun…the precedent is clear: the bishop now does what the fundamentalists say, or the whole diocesan edifice will come crashing down. You do not get much more direct control than that.

And that is why Jeffrey John is not the Bishop of Reading”

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