Is CEEC trying to undermine the structural integrity of the Church of England?

The Church of England Evangelical Council (CEEC) has spoken.  The Council members have called on every evangelical church, member or leader, to action in response to General Synod’s decisions on marriage in London in early February.  If every individual who self-describes as an evangelical were to follow the CEEC’s call, it could possibly mark the end of the Church of England as a body which celebrates diversity and inclusivity.  In summary, the CEEC seems to be trying to transform the CofE to become more like an evangelical sect.  This new body would have a very selective and tenuous link with its past Anglican traditions.  Its roots and nourishment from its catholic past would be erased from memory.  In its place there would be highly selective reading of Anglican history. This would privilege a group of 16th century Protestant Divines over most other periods of the rich Anglican experience.  Simultaneously there would be no interest in maintaining the goodwill of the vast mass of the people of England.  Another way of putting this would be to say that the CEEC is actively seeking to create a new Church of England quite different from its traditional and current manifestations.  It would then be hard, in any sense, to refer to it as our national Church.

These are strong words, but I have identified in my mind three ways that the two recent documents issued by the CEEC can be read as a direct or indirect attack on the identity of the CofE as we know it. One is a six-page document to ‘evangelicals’ to take ‘appropriate actions’ following the Synod vote. The other is a call to the same group to write letters of protest to the various non-CEEC bishops that oversee their parishes and networks.  Were every ‘evangelical’ to follow these instructions, I can see a blizzard of pressure on the institution that would become intolerable for existing church structures and the leadership which has to deal with it. 

The first way in which the CofE is already facing threats to its existence and integrity, is that it contains within it groups and factions predisposed to show intolerance to others.  The ultra-conservative wing, represented by the CEEC, implicitly questions the right of those with moderate or liberal opinions to have a place within the fold.  There is the assumption that the CEEC and its linked organisations alone have a claim on biblical truth and thus the true Anglican tradition.  This is based on a ‘correct’ interpretation of the Bible and knowing how it is to be understood.  Those of us who have spent substantial amounts of time reading and studying Scripture over the years know that any claims of certainty when interpreting Scripture are likely to be questionable. There is hardly ever such a thing as a universally agreed understanding of a single passage of Scripture.  Many disputes from the past, like the authorship of the book of Isaiah, are answered with ‘political’ rather than scholarly tools.  The belief in an ability to arrive at certainty in many areas of biblical interpretation remains a chimera. Even the smallest amount of exposure to so-called ‘higher criticism’, which includes some knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, reveals how difficult it is to reach universally agreed interpretations.  There also has to be room for our understandings to evolve and change.  The assumption that Calvinist (or Catholic) biblical interpretations are somehow always correct is thus highly questionable.  This is particularly true for those of us who have studied theology in a non-sectarian setting.  The CEEC may represent a phalanx of Christian opinion that believes it possible to settle on fixed or final opinions about scriptural truth, but this position in no way represents the wider Anglican tradition.  The ‘liberal’ opposing point of view to the CEEC comes from those who simply do not believe in settled opinions or unchallengeable answers in theology.  For us, whether professionally educated or open to new insights at every point in our Christian pilgrimage, there is a simple demand for our right to hold on to our evolving understandings of scripture.  No one I know wants to deny that right to the conservative interpreters; they do however object when the fundamentalist wing represented by CEEC seems to suggest that all ‘liberal’, questioning thinking should be declared heretical and outlawed in the CofE.  Would the CEEC want to destroy the places of learning, – places where discussion, debate and differences of opinion coexist – to be destroyed in favour of a monochrome conservative Anglicanism?  The claim to possess the ‘truth’ in Christian teaching carries with it this implied threat.  Unless you agree with us and follow our implied assumptions about truth, we believe that you have to disappear in the interests of having a Bible-based, orthodox pure body.  To put things at its simplest, the CEEC would like all who do not agree with its teaching to go away, allowing approved evangelicals alone to ‘preach the Gospel’ as the Council understands it.

The second way that the CEEC is creating serious stress for the CofE is in the document that calls for a blizzard of letter writing to bishops.  The letter is to contain the points that are provided in a document helpfully provided by the CEEC.  All the letters which may come from individuals or parishes will say the same thing.  In CEEC’s words the letter ‘will call on our bishops to joyfully reaffirm the Bible’s teaching on marriage and sex as good news for individuals and for society as a whole.’  The comment I make to this call for letters to be written, is to contemplate the effect on those who receive such missives.  If I received 5000 such letters from a group of unknown people, I would feel very pressured and not know how to react.  What is the CEEC really trying to achieve with this document?  I could make various guesses but one thing I know that will happen, is that this action will result in stress and a sense of demoralisation among these senior Anglican leaders.

Through my blogging activities I can recall times when I have been made aware of failures among the episcopate in the safeguarding arena.  Such failures are patently visible in today’s SCIE report on Lambeth Palace. Whatever else is true, bishops and archbishops have to endure, whether or not deserved, a great deal of stress as part of their job. Whether CEEC means to increase their stress or not, it is obvious that the emails and letters that all the bishops can expect will clog up their letter boxes and in-trays for weeks to come.  Ignoring all these missives may be one way of dealing with the flood, but others may feel obliged to answer each one.  Putting extra stress on bishops is one way of making their role seem decidedly unattractive.  Is the plan of the CEEC to wear down this body of CofE leaders so that they buckle under the stress?  Will the office of CofE bishop now be seen, more clearly than ever, to be a poisoned chalice so that no one of ability would want the role?  Are there still enough able men and women in the system willing to risk their happiness and stability to take on such a task?  If the office and role of bishop ever became so toxic that suitable potential candidates refused to take it on, that would create a crisis for the Church.  Very quickly that would become destructive to the well-being of the whole body.  Perhaps the  CEEC is plotting to have its own cohort of nominees to step in, if the traditional pool of likely candidates dries up.

The third way that the activities of the CEEC are a threat to the whole CofE is through the way the current tensions over same sex marriage are being viewed by the public.  Most fair-minded non church people accept that there is a debate to be had over the nature of marriage and the issue of same-sex relationships.  Only a few will take the view that there is nothing to be discussed because some authority, whether the Bible or some religious expert, has decreed a final answer to the problem.  I cannot imagine that the wider public will ever, in Britain, favour the right-wing or authoritarian approach to the issue.  In short, any ‘victory’ by the CEEC in the current debates would in no way make the ‘gospel’ attractive to the bulk of the population.  If anything, we might see a deeper estrangement between British society and what remains of the Church.  Society has shifted irrevocably.  Short of something like a Trumpian revolution in Britain, it is impossible to imagine that opinions about private sexual morality will substantially change in the next fifty years.  To summarise, any further insistence on equating the Christian faith with reactionary attitudes on sexual morality will severely compromise the already weakened contract between the CofE and society.  The genius of Anglicanism to be a broad church, tolerating a wide variety of opinions and attitudes, will be gone for ever.

The provocative question in the title of this piece can now receive an attempted answer.  There is, no doubt, no deliberate intention to undermine the CofE on the part of the CEEC.  Nevertheless, their actions, which have been taken in the light of the recent Synod debate, have damaging institutional consequences.  Putting pressure on all the bishops is fairly harmful to their morale and thus to the wider organisation.  Thrusting all our bishops into an unwanted political maelstrom also creates a situation profoundly unhelpful to their wellbeing.   No one desires that anyone should suffer in this way, but the suffering and consequent stress to the whole institution is real.  Challenging the large section of the church we call liberals, by questioning their honesty and even their right to exist as bone-fide Christians, is a serious form of bullying.  Such bullying is debilitating and may contribute further to a weakening of the Church.  Our attempt to remain loyal members of an institution which such behaviour is found is hard to sustain.

About Stephen Parsons

Stephen is a retired Anglican priest living at present in Cumbria. He has taken a special interest in the issues around health and healing in the Church but also when the Church is a place of harm and abuse. He has published books on both these issues and is at present particularly interested in understanding how power works at every level in the Church. He is always interested in making contact with others who are concerned with these issues.

19 thoughts on “  Is CEEC trying to undermine the structural integrity of the Church of England?

  1. I count myself evangelical. But I don’t agree with the “14” , and I definitely don’t agree with bullying. Bishops can be wrong, of course, but they don’t deserve to be made ill with stress. Let us hope that most evangelicals realise that what they are being asked to do is wrong.

  2. It’s a curious union, the Church of England, a notional association of headline polarities on the one hand, underpinned by a broad spectrum of subdivisions on the other. Pick any congregation in any parish and you will find a further spread of ideas and opinions, often differing hugely from one transept to the other, if ever they were publicly aired.

    Even in a very conservative assembly there are (from experience) differences of approach that are often kept sub rosa. Some just go for the tea and biscuits and some just for the heating, although in the typical old barns we inherited, there are warmer places.

    People go along with things. Only a few fight for their doctrine. Many more aren’t that bothered what their church stands for as long as the hymns are ones they like, or they maintain their position on the flower rota.

    That said, by their silence or indifference to creed they tacitly lend proxy votes to their leaders, who assume they have more support than they really have, and carry on regardless trying to force their agendas at central HQ.

    Nevertheless, I believe the indolence lurking in their congregations will ultimately derail their plans. It’s one thing to start a war with “right on your side”, but fighting is attritional not just on one side, but on both.

    I recall many years ago, the main leader being away for a week or two, and a junior minister or two tried to lighten things up with some fresh songs and a spot of contemporary liturgy. In one sense it was a coup. But hardly anyone seemed to notice, the plot was quickly covered over and normal service was resumed. My point is this: not enough people care one way or the other. They won’t back you. Much.

    The difficulty that the prominent conservative leaders have, is that they’ve been policing the boundaries of strict doctrine all their lives (with notable not-so-private breaches), and now what are they to do if they can’t maintain it? This is how they define themselves and their faith, their identity.

    I’ve witnessed at first hand the attempted takeover by a conservative vicar and his followers of an eclectic mixed congregation, some trad evo, some charismatic types and a spectrum of different approaches in between. It ended badly. Scaling up this concept to the whole C of E, if that is what is feared, just won’t work at all.

    1. I can’t now remember where I read it, but there is a story of an ordinary middle-of-the-road community church in (I think) Swansea which called a new Evangelical vicar, quite some years ago. Word got round that he was a “good thing” and he soon attracted a growing congregation of enthusiastic middle-class incomers. The church was deemed a “success” yet many of its older, less overtly “Christian”, working-class parishioners were not only unimpressed but felt strongly that they weren’t really wanted, so stayed away. In due course the vicar moved on, and most of his “groupies” – who didn’t come from the neighbourhood – drifted away. The end result, according to the book, was that the church was weakened and lost its place as a community hub.

      Sorry that I can’t give chapter and verse – and the details may be inaccurate. And the same sort of thing could, I suppose, happen with an explicitly move ip the candle.

      1. You’re right about the “groupie” effect, I’m sure. Some people do move around, particularly in a town with many churches. If you’ve ever been in the unenviable position of having to try to find a new church to go to, it’s enlightening to see so many familiar faces in the places you visit, presumably doing or having done the same thing.

        These shifting sands congregations have never sat particularly well with me, although I myself was moving around, so can’t really complain.

        At least 2 new congregations arose from the incident alluded to above, one conevo and one charismatic, both outside the C of E. The latter is massively bigger than the former. Doubtless both pulled in movers or groupies from other places too.

  3. One is reminded of the infamous National Assembly of Evangelicals in October 1966. This took place at a time when the main “presenting” issue to the churches wasn’t marriage or sexuality but ecumenism. Many evangelicals regarded ecumenism as a dangerous phenomenon which sought to gather both evangelicals and liberals under one umbrella.

    At the meeting the famous Nonconformist Martyn Lloyd-Jones argued strongly for evangelicals to part company from denominations which – as he would have said – included large numbers of leaders and people who denied the historical Gospel. Conversely the Anglican John Stott tried to persuade people to stay inside mixed denominations.

    I think it was as a result of this gathering that the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches came into being (but I’m not sure). Of course the Christian landscape of Britain was vastly different to today’s: evangelicals were a relatively small and sidelined group within the CofE while John Robinson, Mervyn Stockwood and “South Bank Christianity” were all the rage. Nevertheless it seems to me that evangelicals find it hard to stay within “mixed” denominations such as the CofE and very easily feel threatened when change is contemplated.

    1. Sorry, Andrew, I hadn’t seen your comment when I posted mine. And you’re right, the date was 1966 not 1968. I can remember my father being perturbed by the controversy because he was on friendly terms with both Lloyd-Jones (his old mentor) and Stott. He didn’t want to lose his friendship with either, and in fact invited Stott to preach at major missions conference in the US in December 1967.

      My recollection is that the FIEC grew out of Lloyd-Jones’ Westminster Fellowship for ministers, but I may be wrong.

      1. According to Wikipedia, ‘The FIEC was formed in 1922 under the name A Fellowship of Undenominational and Unattached Churches and Missions. It was later renamed The Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches.’

          1. Well, you were more accurate than me on the dat of the Downgrade Controversy. The problem is that you can’t google something while you’re in the middle of writing a comment, unless you’ve got another device.

    2. Many thanks to you and Ms Fife for these observations. When Lloyd-Jones started his career in Port Talbot he told his congregation that it was up to them to prove to the world that not only was Christianity reasonable, but that nothing else was reasonable. This sort of talk prompted the South Wales News to observe that if Lloyd-Jones was like that at 25, what would he be like at 50? He did not mellow, and his gift for invective increased: Keswick was an ‘evangelical Ascot’, whilst the Roman Catholic Church remained ‘the devil’s greatest masterpiece’.

      Stott was cut from Nash’s cloth. His path to the episcopate was barred by Ramsey who in 1956 warned against the ‘menace of fundamentalism’. As with Nash, Stott’s was a top-down mission, and even if All Souls was crowded, it was not with the working class. He was dismayed by the counterculture, as well as by Anglican liberalism, so that his second career (which reached its apotheosis at Lausanne in 1974) was as a jet-set evangelist, perhaps something of a relief after the barren soil of W1A. Dudley-Smith’s double decker biography (1999, 2001) and that of Steer (2009) are laudatory, but this seems to me to be the most dispassionate and circumspect: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/godly-ambition-9780199773978?cc=gb&lang=en.

      You are both surely right to refer to the 1967 debate with Lloyd-Jones, but Stott included the essential qualifier: “it is the will of God to remain in a church which is sometimes called a ‘mixed denomination’. At least until it becomes apostate and ceases to be a church.”

      Yet where is that line to be drawn? Earlier in the debate he noted that the Church’s formularies are “biblical and evangelical”, but that “spiritual unity be expressed visibly. Second, the visibility of this Christian unity must include the mutual recognition of the ministries and sacraments – the must be full communion. Third, this visible unity of the Church must be founded on the Biblical faith. Fourth, this visible unity of the Church must also allow room for divergence of belief and practice in matters of secondary importance.” (Steer, 132-36). It seems to me that these criteria are perhaps mutually exclusive in some points are capable of wide interpretation. Full communion was, arguably, impaired in 1993: did the Church become apostate at that point? Has the Church deviated from the ‘Biblical faith’? Is SSM (marriage not being a sacrament, but perhaps savouring of it) a matter of ‘secondary importance’?

      It is not yet clear that the criteria for a split have been met, but it could be argued that they were met at least a generation ago. In the debate Lloyd-Jones noted that “Ecumenical people put fellowship before doctrine. We, as evangelicals, put doctrine before fellowship.”

      This reminds me of Carroll: “The question is”, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master…

  4. In 1968 there was a rupture between the two great evangelical leaders of the time: Martyn Lloyd-Jones (free church) and John Stott (C of E), when Lloyd-Jones called on Stott to leave the Church of England. ‘Come ye out and be ye separate’ has always been a siren call to evangelicals, and Lloyd-Jones felt that Stott, with Jim Packer and others, would be dragged down by the impure doctrine of the C of E. It became known as the Downgrade Controversy.

    Stott argued that evangelicals should stay and work from within to make the C of E more evangelical. This approach has achieved its aim to the extent that Stott’s successors are arguing not that they might have to leave the Church, but that the rest of us should hive off and form our own province while the con egos, the true Church, remain.

    I was wondering what Stott and Packer would make of this when I ran across this article, published a couple of years ago: https://virtueonline.org/what-does-historical-debate-between-martyn-lloyd-jones-and-john-stott-have-do-modern-happenings

    To me, it seems cheeky (to say the least) that con evos think it’s the broader church which should depart. But, as ever, these things have historical roots.

      1. No, it’s my blasted autocorrect that’s incapable of learning the term, even though I use it often!

    1. As a matter of interest I never heard Stott but I did hear Lloyd-Jones twice. There is no doubt that he could hold and enthrall a congregation!

      1. Stott wrote well, but having eagerly anticipated hearing his sermons, I was rather disappointed. The anticipation was heightened by the almost sainthood in which he was held. However he sounded a little monotonous to my youthful ear and used a fair bit of Latin. Still, tastes change as we get older.

      2. I’ve heard both of them, and they were both very good. Though I’m not sure those styles of preaching would appeal to me now.

  5. A few decades ago my nearest church was evangelical. On joining I was deeply shocked to find they were sending a small group of church members to the “unchristian” country of Poland in order to Christianise it. So perhaps this latest move should not come as a surprise to me. The attitude that ran through the congregation like a stick of rock was that if you did not held a certain set of rigid beliefs, (theirs) you were worse than an atheist. So sad. So yes, I think the threat of serious damage to the Church does exist. I note they seem fixated on rooting out any consensual sexual relationships of which they do not approve and are willing to take a public stance on issues which are frequently no business of theirs. By this I mean it is not their business to intrude into the intimate lives of others with their proclamations. Yet when abuse takes place in their midst there is no such public reaction from them. I really cannot understand why they fail to stand up against what seems to be so obviously wrong to the general public as well as Christians. They are no more likely to call out abuse than any other Christian groupings. So why turn a blind eye to serious and harmful behaviour which is non consensual and publicly deride those that do no harm to others, and who merely live their lives out true to themselves? I may well be wrong but it seems to me they have a deepseated and overriding need to feel they are “right” and are “righteous” unlike the rest of us. I do not normally comment on the cherished beliefs of Christians and other faiths. I have my beliefs and readily concede some may well be erroneous. But when those holding a set of beliefs, however sincere, damage others, I feel it is right to speak out. So I have.

  6. The authority in question is not the Bible (appeal to the Bible is circular and therefore dogmatic not evidential) nor any religious figure (ditto) but reality. That point needs to be taken on board in subsequent debate, because it is repeatedly ignored. The male female dyad prepared for throughout the plant and animal kingdoms and reaching its apex in humanity has the awesome ability to reproduce. Indeed, reproduction is why we get the male/female difference. The sacredness of that duality and awesome ability is appropriately sacralised in the institution of marriage, which merely formally recognises what already exists. That reproduction is how we all exist and that is the shape of families and family trees. But in no other age would anyone have to spell out such obvious things. There are exactly 2 gametes, and there is no-one, of the billions who have existed, who has not come from exactly 2 people, and in none of those cases were the 2 people not one man and one woman.
    2 does not appear elsewhere in nature as a principle. That is the mistake people are making. Accentuate the number, eliminate the gender? Or give both their due? As predicted, calls for polyamory have followed on swiftly, demonstrating this point.
    Friendships do not have to be 2s. The ones that are 2s are not more formal than the ones that are 3s! Only gametes and parents have to be 2s.

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