2 thoughts on “The real Church of England”

  1. Nick Baines males serious charges against GAFON which he only supports by hearsay. the GAFCON statements on the other hand refers to two recent incidents which can easily be checked out on the internet. This is not good enough. He should shut up or produce his evidence. It seems to me that he is slandering God’s work, a strange thing for a bishop to do.

    David

  2. Faithlessness in the once missionary global north is a scandal to the global south that received its gospel. In the north itself, skirmishes with liberals are a scandal to evangelicals to whom even their mere existence is illegitimate. The GAFCON narrative is a rhetorical fusion of both. It is obviously unfair and mistaken, but what narrative would be more accurate?

    Two careful studies of secularisation– Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God, and Callum Brown’s Death of Christian Britain– attribute the abandonment of Christian practise to a shift from seeing the meaning of life as inevitably bound up with the biological family to seeing it in other terms. Eberstadt relates the declining birthrates of Northern Europeans to their difficulty with traditional Father-Son language for God. Brown shows that the secularisation of Britain was the abrupt result of British women deciding not to define themselves as wives and mothers. The secularisation that is often attributed to ideas by those who especially like ideas seems to these scholars to be more about ways of life.

    In different ways, they both show that as northerners have rejected procreation as the centre of their lives, they have found themselves at some distance from both the familial ethos of the Bible and the ordinary lives of billions elsewhere on the planet. They leave home for a single life; they marry much later; their professional relationships matter most; they may divorce; they may well age alone. To those who live out of family more than they live in it, even the liberal Anglicans who seem so faithless to GAFCON can seem all too full of faith. Post-familial folk may enjoy New Atheist polemics that keep the old way of life at bay, but they were careerists before they were secularists, and are atheists only to be more resolute secularists. If the analyses of Eberstadt and Brown are correct, a re-evangelisation of Britain cannot succeed without a careful investigation and critique of this shift in personal meaning from procreation to materialism.

    Although discussion on the basis of that social science narrative would not bridge the liberal-evangelical divide in northern Anglicanism, it would press each side to engage realities that it tends to avoid. For example, liberals might find it sobering to reflect on Eberstadt’s finding that the intelligibility of God tends to depend on one’s predisposition to procreation. Evangelicals unaccustomed to gender studies may likewise find Brown’s analysis of the Church of England’s different approaches to men and women 1950-2000 illuminating, if disturbing. Those on both sides of the table should benefit from the quantitative and historical research into things more often assumed than studied carefully.

    Even Anglicans in the global south may recognise something in these books that they already confront themselves. Many in Nairobi uneasily balance tribal relations and urban mores. How has the East Africa Revival spoken effectively to this tension? Melbourne is about as socially liberal as San Francisco. If Sydney Anglicanism has successfully promoted a discernibly different path through the life cycle for Anglicans there, can its success be measured? If the answers are Yes and Yes, then everyone would benefit from thorough accounts of how it all works. If not, then what exactly is it that the Church of England is failing to do? Even if the myth of a decadent north that needs to be rescued by the rising south were true, there is no sign that GAFCON has the sort of social strategy that has characterised the successful revivals of the past (eg Roman Catholicism in C19 Ireland).

    Indeed, if Eberstadt and Brown are right, then the fear in the heart of GAFCON is not unreasonable. The world’s most powerful institutions view the global north as a success to be replicated in the Global South, and insofar as they succeed churches there will face the spiritual challenges of materialism with we struggle. What is unreasonable is the thought that we are not all facing this together.

    http://howthewestreallylostgod.com/

    http://www.evolbiol.ru/large_files/secular.pdf

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