OUTSTANDING PARISH CHURCH WEBSITE

As Cranmer's Curate blogs off for a week's break, he leaves the youth group with an outstanding parish church website to peruse - that of All Saints' Fordham near Colchester, Essex.

He also leaves the youth group with the Collect for Bible Sunday. Your curate may be nit-picking but he doesn't like the way the Common Worship version of the Collect puts 'scriptures' with a small 's' unlike the BCP which capitalises it, as it does with 'Word'. Cc thinks the lower case leaves a possible way open to the recognition of the putative 'holy scriptures' of other religions:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

POLITICALLY INCORRECT HYMNS FOR SONGS OF PRAISE

A local news report about a nearby Anglican church hosting the BBC's Songs of Praise with a '300-strong congregation drawn from people of different faiths' got Cranmer's Curate thinking about how politically incorrect some of our great Christian hymns are.

Take the famous Advent hymn O Come Emmanuel:

O come, thou Rod of Jesse, free thine own from Satan’s tyranny; from depths of hell thy people save, and give them victory o’er the grave

And:

O come, thou Key of David, come, and open wide our heavenly home; make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path to misery

The message is clear - there is a hell, it's utterly miserable and only the Messiah promised in the Old Testament as a descendant of David, the son of Jesse, revealed in the New Testament as Jesus Christ, can save us from going there.

These musings co-incided with a quote cc came across in the national press from Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards:

I don't want to see my old friend Lucifer just yet. He's the guy I'm gonna see, isn't it? I'm not going to the Other Place, let's face it (Sunday Telegraph, 17/10/10, p33).

At least Mr Richards appears to agree with the Christian writer of O Come Emmanuel that there is a heaven and a hell. But the frivolous tone in which he talks about eternal damnation, compared with the hymn's faithful biblical outlook, is clearly a major point of difference.

What other politically incorrect hymns do the youth group consider would be good for a Song of Praise?

COULD ST AUGUSTINE'S PLEASE BE A SOCIETY THE REFORMERS COULD JOIN?

Thinking Anglicans has found a website for the new Society talked about at the Reform national conference this week. St Augustine's is apparently the name. But the most pressing question now emerging in the wake of the Reform conference is not whether the new Society is being named after Hippo or Canterbury but who will actually own it.

Will it be owned by Reform or by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and thus potentially be an amalgamation of Conservative Evangelicals, Charismatics and Anglo-Catholics?

In essence, the question is whether St Augustine's will be a distinctly Reformed Evangelical Society within the Church of England or whether it will embrace theological diversity under a broadly orthodox banner.

It is easy to pontificate from the safety of the blogosphere. The vision for a Society for Conservative Evangelicals within the Church of England, which the Reform national conference supported by resolution, will not translate into reality without positive and proactive leadership. The man, under God, most capable of delivering such leadership is Reform chairman Rod Thomas. He produced a masterly address on the Tuesday of the Reform national conference, and is a godly and able leader who deserves the support and confidence of our movement.

Eschewing the jeans and baseball boots which seem to be becoming increasingly de rigueur among contemporary church leaders, Mr Thomas sported a smart suit and tie, which seemed both respectful and appropriate given his desire to move Reform from being an informal 'network of networks' to a more structured, united and effective Anglican Evangelical movement.

Cranmer's Curate was not there on the Wednesday of the conference, so cannot comment on the further deliberations about the Society on that day. It was very good to meet members of the youth group on the Tuesday.

Your curate is one of those who would very much hope that St Augustine's will be a distinctively Reformed Evangelical Society, with members required to subscribe to the 39 Articles of Religion and the Reform Covenant.

That does not rule out co-operation and co-belligerency where appropriate with our Anglo-Catholic friends in the new Missionary Society of St Wilfrid and St Hilda.

But please could this be a Society that our Reformation martyrs Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer would in good conscience be able to join?

Rod Thomas in particular deserves our prayers for the challenging months ahead and last Sunday's Collect is most appropriate:

O Almighty and most merciful God, of thy bountiful goodness keep us, we beseech thee, from all things that may hurt us; that we, being ready both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

REFORM SOCIETY MUST GROW OUT OF OXBRIDGE

Reform chairman Rod Thomas’ enthusiasm for a new Conservative Evangelical Society was manifest at the national conference at High Leigh, Hertfordshire yesterday.

God willing, the plans will come to fruition and a Reform Society with its own bishops will emerge to preserve and promote Conservative Evangelical ministry within the Church of England.

But the following issues need to be addressed by the Reform Council, some of which emerged in the question time after Mr Thomas’ address:

• Will the leadership of the new Society be elected or will it be appointed by the existing Reform Council?

• What will be the relationship of the new Society to the institutional Church of England?

• How will the Society’s bishops be appointed and how they will relate to the Society’s council and membership?

• Will the membership of the Society be open to churches or individuals or both and under what status?

What is clear is that if the Society is to be effective in enabling evangelism, church growth, and church planting for Christ's Kingdom its leadership needs to become less socially elitist. Reform remains a southern-dominated, large-church movement with its prominent spokesmen largely drawn from Oxbridge.

Unless Reform broadens socially, the protective walls its Society offers Conservative Evangelicals in the Church of England could become those of a ghetto.

THE GRAVEN IMAGE ON THE SPIRITUAL MIRROR OF MODERN BRITAIN

Look into the spiritual and moral mirror of modern Britain, and what do you see?

A graven image of a consummate ‘progressive’ communicator who won three general elections in a row.

In October’s Prospect magazine, the editor David Goodhart produces a startlingly perceptive and disturbing insight into the soul of post-Christian Britain in his review of Tony Blair’s memoir A Journey:

Blair did shift Britain to the left, but perhaps only as far as the centre-right – and the country’s various power elites in the City, the media, the law and so on – would allow. His easy liberalism on matters of sexuality, race and gender (although not on crime) combined with his suspicion of the state and trust in markets makes him a prime minister for our times. Both for good and ill, when we look at Tony Blair we look at ourselves.

Mr Goodhart is right. It is important to remember that though Mr Blair has become unpopular, his third election victory came after the invasion of Iraq. The great persuader retired unbeaten and the fact that he personifies the soul of post-modern Britain has if anything been reinforced by the defeat of the Brownite Labour Party.

Sadly, the institutional church has bowed the knee before this graven image. It has colluded in one of Mr Blair’s most poisonous spiritual legacies – the institution of civil partnerships, into which the House of Bishops has allowed clergy to enter.

Personally, Mr Blair would appear to be a humane and sincere man who has been unjustly demonised, albeit he is profoundly wrong on some key spiritual and moral issues. But no orthodox Christian should look into the mirror of the soul of our country and come away without a profound sense of penitence and a heart-felt prayer that the true and almighty God would, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it,

grant us true repentance and his Holy Spirit, that those things may please him which we do at this present, and that the rest of our life hereafter would be pure and holy; so that at the last we may come to his eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

PAYING MORE THAN LIP-SERVICE TO SUPPORTING SMALL CHURCHES

Large Anglican Evangelical churches looking to plant new congregations are being increasingly vociferous in claiming to support smaller parish churches, for obvious reasons. To get diocesan backing for their ventures, they must not be seen to be threatening established churches. Here are some suggested ways those protestations of support can be more than lip-service:

• Face the reality that many parish churches, sadly, have become small and unsustainable because they have not been preaching the biblical gospel of the crucified, risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ. If the large, net-giving churches can find ways of saying that clearly and humbly to diocesan authorities, that is enormously helpful to orthodox Anglicans in small turnaround situations.

• Be clear about your expectation that the churches you subsidise through parish share should be upholding the doctrine of the Church of England and proclaiming the biblical gospel. Playing the ‘diversity’ game, the rules of which are that we should all be celebrating the range of ‘churchpersonships’ in a diocese, is most unhelpful to orthodox ministers in turnaround churches. But stating clearly your expectation as net-givers that the spiritual culture of an unsustainable church needs to be challenged and changed by the Word of God faithfully proclaimed and acted upon really does help.

• Try to persuade Evangelical commuters to your church to support a turnaround situation nearer to where they live. That could be a game-changer for that ministry. A switched-on, clued-up individual or couple can make a significant difference at the prayer meeting, on the PCC, and to the children’s work if they bring a family with them. The church Cranmer's Curate serves cannot currently sustain a Pathfinders group (11-14s) because there are not enough Christian families with children of that age to support it.

• Pray for ministers in turnaround situations in your diocese, even if you are not formally linked with them, at your central prayer meeting. If the excuse for not doing that is that you would have to include all Evangelical ministers in your area, the criterion is that you are praying for Evangelical ministers in non-Evangelical churches.

This support will be costly. Challenging the plausibility structure of ‘diversity’ is bound to lead to problems in negotiations with diocesan authorities over church plants and curates. Giving away people to smaller churches is costly. Raising the reality of conflict in churches in your area at your prayer meeting could be uncomfortable. But if you are protesting your support for small churches in your diocese, the price of not doing these things is your integrity.

This piece on Western Anglicanism's empty talk about diversity appeared on the US-based orthodox Anglican news service VirtueOnline.

LIBERAL CHURCH TURNED ORTHODOX WIN-WIN FOR THE GOSPEL

St Mark's Centre for Radical Christianity here in Sheffield is not normally your curate's cup of tea. But a meeting happening today certainly caught his eye because it addresses such a vital topic for the modern world:

St Mark’s Centre for Radical Christianity, Broomhill, Sheffield invites you to a library and discussion evening on Whatever happened to Sin? The word 'SIN' crops up a lot in the bible, especially in the Old Testament. But nowadays the only place you hear it mentioned is in church! Does this mean we are better people than folk who lived two thousand years ago? Or is it that we now have different language for dealing with the whole business of right and wrong. What about moral choices and personal responsibility? Or are more and more people just not bothered anymore?

The fact that St Mark's, on this occasion at least, is having the moral courage to address such a counter-cultural subject got Cranmer's Curate thinking. A liberal church that went orthodox would be one very much worth joining.

Free of the social elitism, empire building and creaming off effect that unfortunately can characterise ministry in cc's own Conservative Evangelical constituency, it could be a really welcoming place and an excitingly diverse, in a social sense, Christian community. Also, aspects of liberal acceptance and generosity of spirit could make it an environment in which hell-deserving sinners like Cranmer's Curate would be free to be honest about their sins and, now that the church has become orthodox, discover the reality of repentance.

The best of its liberal culture, combined with its new-found biblical orthodoxy, could make it a win-win church for the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, who we believe 'came to seek and to save the lost' (Luke 19v10).

Orthodox Christians should believe that the living Christ of the Bible is powerful enough to recapture liberal churches. The humbling thought is that they could be spiritually healthier places to be than many of our churches.

ACCOUNTABILITY QUESTIONS OVER RETIRED CLERGY

Cash-strapped dioceses are increasingly reliant on retired clergy. The help over-stretched parish clergy are receiving from retireds should be gratefully received but questions do need to be raised about their accountability.

These clergy are licensed so in theory they should be accountable. But unless they are doing a house for duty their volunteer status inevitably makes them less accountable than stipendiary clergy in post.

An unsupportive retired can do a lot of damage in the parish where they reside, and indeed in their previous parishes. He or she can misuse the pastoral authority that goes with their clerical status to undermine an incumbent.

But in the area of funeral ministry questions need to be raised about the impact of even well-meaning retireds, for whom the £60 or so they make from a crematorium funeral is not the primary motivating factor.

Funeral ministry, apart from the privilege and significance of it as an end in itself, is a very important way of making contacts with unchurched people in the parish. For a small parish church, the more contacts of this nature the minister can make, the better for evangelism.

A roster of retireds to whom the funeral directors regularly resort for crematorium funerals potentially takes away that opportunity from the parochial clergy.

Cranmer's Curate is hugely grateful for the support he gets from in particular three retired clergy, who are faithful ministers of Christ. Without them, your curate would not get a holiday.

But serious questions do need to be asked about the potential impact of the ever greater reliance on retireds and their accountability particularly in funeral ministry.

NEW BOOK ON ARCHBISHOP'S 'SHADOW GOSPEL’ UNMASKS INSIDIOUS EVIL OF REVISIONISM

Latimer Trust have sent Cranmer’s Curate a review copy of the new book by Charles Raven:

Shadow Gospel: Rowan Williams and the Anglican Communion Crisis
By Charles Raven
Latimer Trust. 184 pages. £6.99 RRP.
First published September 2010
ISBN: 978 0 946307 78 4

This is an elegantly written theological thriller. Or, to be more accurate, it is a theological investigative report of the highest quality. One can imagine the author emerging from a side entrance at Lambeth Palace, dressed in the requisite mac and trilby, having ‘made his excuses and left’.

Charles Raven charts the problems Dr Williams’ Hegelian theological approach has posed for the Anglican Communion since his ‘The Body’s Grace’ lecture in 1989, which became a seminal text for gay religious activists, through his championing of the attempt to water down the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10 affirming biblical orthodoxy, through the impact of his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, up to recent events in 2010.

The following paragraph about how Dr Williams chose to adapt to the ‘contradictory pressures’ of the expectation that as Primate of All England he would support the liberal English establishment’s agenda and yet be a focus of unity for the Anglican Communion, whose ‘numerical centre of gravity’ is orthodox Christian, illustrates the incisiveness of Charles Raven’s analysis:

In Hegelian terms, we can see that Williams adapted to these contradictory pressures by withdrawing from the role of advocate for the ‘antithesis’ focussed on opposition to Lambeth Resolution 1.10 (but not withdrawing his views) and instead took upon himself the orchestration of ‘synthesis’. But such a ‘synthesis’ can only emerge if the various parties are willing to be ‘dispossessed’ of their commitment to a particular outcome in advance. If they are not willing to make their positions provisional in this way, as conservatives should not and the radical liberals of TEC and their friends clearly will not, then however dialogue is dressed up, such as the ‘indaba’ project of Lambeth 2008 or the ‘listening’ commended by the Anglican Covenant, it becomes a language game of a darker kind. Its underlying ‘grammar’ is actually that of manipulation’ (p122-123).

Like any good investigator, the author has a keen sense of the insidious evil of the situation he is unmasking. His quotation of a remark in a national newspaper interview by Alpha founder the Revd Nicky Gumbel is a particularly chilling illustration of Evangelical naivety in the face of false teaching:

I think he’s absolutely brilliant. He is very nuanced, but not everyone can be in the Rowan Williams league – he is one of the greatest brains in the country.

Charles Raven, who is taking his cue from Christ’s revealed Gospel rather than from 'nuanced' intellectual philosophy, comments:

But the crisis of leadership in the Church of England and the wider Communion is more than an intellectual puzzle that can be resolved by a ‘great brain’. It is a spiritual crisis which turns on faithfulness to God’s Word which can only be resolved by repentance and that is a word Williams is very reluctant to use (p159).

CLERGY QUESTIONS SHOULD BE CENTRAL IN SYNOD VOTE

This by Cranmer's Curate appeared in the Church of England Newspaper:

The current elections for the Church of England’s General Synod do not seem to be particularly sizzling given the importance of the issues to be debated in the next session. In one Diocese the chairs were beautifully laid out in the boardroom of Church House for the hustings but there were no clerical bottoms to sit on them. One suspects that Diocese was by no means alone.

One issue that should be very central in the debates, where there are any, is the role of the parochial clergy.

A cheap popularity point can easily be scored at a diocesan or deanery synod by an Archdeacon or an Area Dean, whose own position is usually much more secure than that of the clergy he is talking to and about, proclaiming the benefits for churches without the vicar around. Gifts can be discovered, new ventures can flourish and every member ministry can thrive, as your church probably found in its interregnum.

Bottle-necks may be unblocked in some cases, but local churches subject to long interregna can find that sentiment wears a bit thin after a while.

Whilst none of us suffers remotely in the way that many of Christ’s ministers do in other parts of the world, particularly in Islamic countries, the role of the parochial clergy is subject to growing confusion and pressure in this country.

Cultural changes have had a major impact on changing the perception and role of clergy in local communities. But legislative changes, such as the Clergy Discipline Measure and the new terms of service, passed through Synod in the 10 years since I have been an incumbent, have accelerated that process. There is also quite a lot of fear amongst the clergy around the loss of posts likely to result from the current spate of deanery reviews.

The story of ‘pastoral reorganisation’, ie parishes being amalgamated and one minister having to rush around in some cases four or five churches, is a sorry one in the Church of England. It is a maintenance strategy but does nothing for growth.

‘Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and teaching,’ the Apostle Paul urged Timothy, whom he had put in charge of the turbulent church in Ephesus (2 Timothy 4:2 - RSV). If there is no agreed understanding in a denomination that preaching the word is at the heart of the clergy’s role, then we are in serious trouble.

In order to be spiritually and practically sustainable andindeed to grow, a local church needs its own minister who is gifted, called and equipped to teach that congregation God’s Word of eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.

If a church has got too small to sustain its own minister,it either has to make a pro-active case that it can be led into growth or it should close. It should not be allowed to become a drain on the time of a minister of another church or on that church’s resources.

Of course, the biblical fact that the minister of a local church should be male is relevant to this question of the role of clergy, as is the fact that the person he accounts to should be male. But the crisis facing hundreds if not thousands of local churches in the Church of England is a far more pressing issue for Christ’s ministry in the parishes than the women bishops’ debate, which is essentially about who should be allowed to wear the captain’s hat on a leaky cruise liner steaming towards an iceberg.