In a recent article, Nick Tall https://viamedia.news/2024/10/26/smoke-and-mirrors-and-the-alliance/does a brilliant job of questioning the claims of the pan-evangelical organisation called the Alliance to represent the convictions of 42% of the Church of England.  It is this statistic that implies that, because conservative Christians are the largest bloc in the Church, the rest of the C/E should recognise this dominance in various practical ways.  Tall queries the way this 42% figure is arrived at, and here my blog post demonstrates how I join him in his scepticism.   Were it to be indeed true that 42% of practising C/E Christians were convinced by the Alliance set of statements about gay marriage, then the future of the C/E might well be on a one-way journey to becoming a sectarian rump with minimal influence on British society.   The future of the C/E would be a very different one from what has been assumed to be true of our national Church over the past 400 years. No longer would it be the communion welcoming a variety of opinions about the nature of God and the Scriptures that reveal him.  Rather it would be openly advocating a movement to a monochrome understanding of Scripture and theology where disagreement was not tolerated or acceptable.   The precise differences between LGTB supporters and opponents is not being examined in the piece; rather what is questioned is whether there is any reliable evidence to suggest that the Alliance claim about 42% of C/E members is correct.  Would a detailed poll really reveal such a high figure on board in this conservative attempt to define the C/E in his way?  I do not propose to repeat all Tall’s points or rehearse any of the arguments for including or excluding the LGBT community. What I do wish to do is to agree with Tall that a church leader cannot be said to know and reliably represent the opinions and attitudes of his/her flock.  It reminds me of the doubtful claim, made once by George Carey in another discussion, that he both led and represented all 80 million Anglicans in the world. If any Christian leader, minister or Anglican vicar ever truly represented the thinking and beliefs of every member of his congregation or parish, then I would suggest that he/she is not leading a congregation, but a full-blown cult.  To suggest that attending a particular church is the same thing as following every aspect of a leader’s teaching, is probably not a safe assumption.  Something approximating a conformity to the ‘what we believe’ statements on church websites might possibly be found in some large city centre churches.  People in some cases are known to travel quite considerable distances to attend the church which meets their ‘needs’.  At a guess I would suggest that even here the choices of which church to attend is not primarily caused by enthusiasm for a doctrinal statement.  Choosing a church to belong to involves such things as music preferences, the quality of fellowship and the general culture found in a congregation.  Few of the students, joining new congregations in university cities this term, are going to put ‘orthodox’ teaching at the top of the list of the reasons for opting for congregation X.  They are more likely to ‘assent’ to conservative teaching rather than having a worked-out position that joins with the leadership in rejecting the claims of the gay community and their desire to belong.

The basic premise that what a leader says about the attitude of his/her congregation is accurate, needs, as Tall points out, to be questioned.   Some years ago, the Bishop of Oxford sent out a statement on the LGBT issue to his diocese which was, in effect, a plea for greater tolerance and understanding on the topic.  His words, though eirenic, quickly gathered a storm of protest from many conservative Christian voices.  There were supposedly 100 clergy signing the letter of protest to their Bishop from within his diocese.  Conveniently for a commentator like me, the protestors published names of all who had signed.  This enabled a breakdown which showed that a considerable number of the clergy who signed had no actual Christian community to oversee.  They were clergy who had CEO-type responsibilities for a cluster of Christian organisations, some partly or wholly funded from abroad.  There were of course a number of notable conservative parishes in the Oxford diocese with large staff numbers.  Many, but by no means all, of these ordained staff members signed up to the letter of protest to Bishop Steven.  This level of only partial support suggested that some key conservative parishes were not of one mind.  Some signed, but other clerical members of staff had not.  This hinted at the fact that unanimity was not even found among the clergy.  We would expect such differences of opinion among the lay members as well.

The 42% claim by the so-called Alliance against the attempts of the Archbishops and the House of Bishops, to press for a more tolerant approach to the gay issue, is beginning to look unsustainable.  No proper research exists to sustain a claim of such widespread support.   Even if our imaginary 18-year-old attending a large conservative church assents to the traditional conservative line, it is likely that there will be a level of dissonance somewhere in their mind.  Most 18-year-olds are tolerant by nature and the most likely reaction is to maintain a silence and agnosticism on this issue.  Why should we, or the leaders of a student congregation, expect every young person in the building to have worked out what they think and believe anyway?  Only a group which practises some kind of mental manipulation technique would be successful in policing the thinking of congregants.  Such intrusive methods would naturally arouse considerable resistance on the part of most thinking people.  I mentioned the activity of cultic groups above.  They have a variety of techniques to use to compel conformity of thinking and many of these could be considered unethical and highly controlling.  In practice, few churches in the C/E would ever resort to cultic methods of thought control.  From my membership of the organisation ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association) I am familiar with the methods employed by cultic groups to ensure ‘correct’ thinking.  These might include chanting, sleep deprivation and deliberate withholding of adequate nutrition.  I suspect that outside such groups, identical thinking in a group is an extremely improbable achievement. Most people of my acquaintance want the freedom to think through an issue in their own time and in their own way.  To be able to say at any moment that one’s opinion is fixed and incapable of moving in any way is probably never a realistic position.  My task as a parish priest was not to enforce ‘orthodoxy’ on a particular topic but encourage members of the congregation to engage with truth with all the resources that mind and heart gives to us to relate to it.  Our relationship with truth is not like having in our possession a fixed unchangeable entity, but rather the ability to explore an object of beauty.  This kind of relationship is one which draws out from us capacities to admire, wonder and be, as the hymn puts it, ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’.  

As I pondered, in my own case, how different my relationship with truth is from the unchanging grasp of ‘belief’ that seems to be the required standard of ‘orthodox’ congregations, my mind went back to the puzzling history of two parish congregations in the Oxford diocese. I knew something about each of them in the last century.  In 2018 the incumbents of these two congregations had been among those who signed the letter to the Bishop of Oxford, criticising him for his inclusive view on the LGBT question as it was being debated back then.  These two parishes stood out for me because I knew a little about their respective backgrounds, going right back to the late 80s.  The first parish in 2018 had a Vicar who had been a graduate of the Iwerne camps, and thus was deeply immersed in the ‘Bash’ project to convert the upper-middle classes to Christianity.  He was also a part of the inner circle of Jonathan Fletcher.  I knew less about the second Vicar, but he seemed to come from the same Iwerne public school drawer and was fully at home with the social mores of this part of the Cotswolds.  Both these two Vicars with their public school/Iwerne/Bash credentials had, at some point, been parachuted into these wealthy conclaves which, to my certain knowledge had not been remotely evangelical before their arrival.  

My personal links with the first parish go back to the late 60s when I got to know the man who eventually ended up as its incumbent. We were both on a four-month study course for ordinands and the recently ordained in Switzerland.  My contact with him weakened over the years and I was sorry to see that he died only two or three years after retirement.   I had a great deal of respect for this vicar.  For me he represented the essence of compassionate Anglicanism.  He spent over twenty years in the same parish and theologically he was liberal and inclusive to the core.  It was strange that after he retired, it was thought desirable to appoint someone from such a radically contrasting churchmanship.  Even if this process was conducted with proper safeguards, I cannot believe that every member of that congregation became a fully ‘converted’ supporter of the con-evo attitude towards the LGBT community and their exclusion from the church.  Parish 2 also seems to have attempted a complete assimilation into the con-evo brand.  I had known it in the 90s, practising a ‘broad-church’ ministry with a strong emphasis on pastoral care to all in the community.  This community emphasis appears to have gone, though a surpliced choir has managed to retain a place at one choral mattins a month,

The issue about these two parishes is not whether they are doing a good job or not under their current incumbents.  The question is whether parishes like these with a solid liberal past and who experience a ‘take-over’ by a con-evo incumbent, ever truly succeed in making all parishioners think in an identical way, as the Alliance 42% letter assumes.  From my experience of human nature and my direct knowledge of these two formerly liberal parishes, I suspect that these assumptions are misleading at best and fraudulent at worst.  The Archbishops and House of Bishops should not be manipulated by these blatantly false, or at any rate, questionable statistics!