Two Kinds of Evangelical
Stickers
1. There are congregations that
hold to and are fed by serious and able evangelical ministers who bear ‘Happy Clappy
Religion’ which is what evangelicals are said to be by commentators who don’t
bother to take it seriously, So All Souls in London (for example) is a serious
evangelical ministry, till associated
with the outlook and ministry of John Stott. His the centenary of his birth is
being celebrated by reissuing some of his sermons on the Incarnation, as we
write. All Souls (and those like it) makes it clear that their congregation is
in the Church of England, though the directions of the episcopacy of the Church
of England are by and large ignored. It
seems in All Souls that the doctrinal features in the Church that it
disapproved of are simply ignored. The bulk of evangelical Anglican
congregations are stickers. At the
rate that the bishops of the church speak at all, it is likely that stickers will find it more and more
difficult to be silenced - in issues like the meaning of the Cross, women in
ministry, including its bishops, and other issues of gender. Heretic bishops
could once be counted on the fingers of a hand, but now they are the rule.
Where is there an evangelical bishop to
make that fact clear? There are none, it
seems.. The vicar of a sticking ministry does not educate his officers as to
how woeful the national leadership is. As a consequence there is more than a
touch of Quietism in the average evangelical congregation in the Church of
England
Followers to the Church of England
was provided by J.I.Packer, for example, whom adherence to the Church of England was not negotiable, and departure
from the C of E was come what may. He started well, writing of a current
radical bishop, J.A.T.Robinson, the author of Honest of God. In a critical pamphlet on Anglican radicalism, Keep Yourselves from Idols, published
in the 1963, Packer said
It is, therefore, a grave matter when a bishop appears to be driving a coach and four
through the plain and acknowledged sense of Scripture, the teaching of the
Thirty-nine Articles, and the beliefs of the mass of English churchmen’.(page
1)
By the 1970’s, Packer must have become aware
that radicalism was embedded in the elite
of the Church of England. He was humiliated by the so-called radicals as
he sat with the members of theologians
of Anglicanism in the church’s Doctrinal Commission. He found himself in a
clear minority by the currents of radical theology, with sitting with the men such as its
chairman Maurice Wiles, Dennis Nineham,
and Geoffrey Lampe. But this experience
seemed to strengthen Packer’s resolve to continue in the Church of England. And
he made an alliance and friendship with
Anglo-Catholics such as E. L.
Mascall became a friend, because they each regarded the gospel as supernatural.
Both groups were against union of English Methodism with the Church of England,
an alliance which proved successful. This
friendship led Packer to say:
.’…whatever reservations I may have
about the ecclesiology, Mariology, and Eucharistic teaching of such a man as my
learned man Dr. Eric Mascall, I am profoundly grateful to him for books like Up and Down in Adria, The Secularization of Christianity and Theology and the Gospel of Christ, and I
hope you are too. Should the future see a catholic renewal in the Church of
England, having the same non-triumphalist, non-partisan character as has marked
the evangelical renewal of the past generation, I am bold to predict that both
that the church will benefit and
evangelical-catholic solidarity against views which erode the
supernatural in the realm of redemption will become yet stronger. Such
co-belligerence will not compromise
either side , and will be tactically appropriate for furthering faith in in
those fundamentals concerning our incarnate Lord on which we are truly agreed.
Does it not seem that Packer testified his loyalty to evangelicalism
in the Church of England by experience of the opposite views, theological radicalism
and conservative high church, perhaps to test himself, but his behaviour, was
often perplexing to his evangelical friends.
Followers
Melvin Tinker was a follower of the traditional theology and practice of
the Church of England that Packer represented, though in a different way.
Melvin was the product of a family whose lives were dominated by the coal mine.
He read his first book when he was thirteen years old. Following his conversion
to Christ, he studied at the University of Hull, and his theology was learned at
the Anglican college of Wyciffe Hall, Oxford, and he was ordained into the
Anglican ministry. He became a chaplain at Keele University, then held to various
posts, one as a curate to an evangelical church and then to
a large church in Hull, a rather neglected city. `Over 25 years, the congregation, St John Newland, grew up to
500 souls. So here is a successful evangelical Anglican vicar. But during this
period Melvin got more and more uneasy by the stance of the Church of England.
He came to believe that the leaders of the
Church of England had come to promote views that were secular rather than that of the New Testament,
and viewed Christianity as a world religion along with Islam, Hinduism and so
on, therefore lacked a prophetic voice, following that culture. When Mervin
took his congregation out of the Church of England shortly before his death. it became three distinct congregations.
Melvin was outspoken when it was
called for. For example, .when the people in charge of York Minster welcomed
the LGBT , cultural Marxists, , including same-sex marriage, which is not the
official position of the Church of
England. He went on TV news to publicise this. As a consequence his plans to
hold a conference in Derby Cathedral were disallowed because of what he would
say from the pulpit.
Around this time, October
2020, he wrote in the periodical Anglican Midstream on his outlook, of which this is an extract.
There was the
accelerating downgrading of the Church of England as a Biblical denomination.
The July 2017 General Synod was a watershed with open disdain being shown
towards orthodox beliefs and believers. This didn’t mark any crossing of any
‘line in the sand’, but an unmasking of what has been there for some time with
those pursuing a progressive agenda having become emboldened to be more openly
aggressive. The trajectory was clear and it seemed to us that it was simply a matter
of time (sooner rather than later) when a form of words would be found to
enable those holding non-biblical views on gender and sexuality to be formally
affirmed as part of the ‘mutual flourishing’ favoured by the Archbishop of
Canterbury.
Melvin made it clear to his flock
that this state of affairs was intolerable. At his retirement the one
congregation he was minister of had become several congregations in Hull. Alas,
his further plans were cut short by cancer discovered in October 2021. By now he had severed the connections of these
congregations had to the Church of England of the day. And all too shortly he
was called to his Lord. What made him a
follower was that his Anglican congregation complied with the Articles of
the Church of England. Melvin was not the only minister to break from
contemporary Anglican. Happily there are others, which follow in his example. For
Melvin and these others, unlike Jim Packer and John Stott and many other solid
evangelicals the state of the current mind of the bishops of the Church of England had reached its
limits. That situation is intolerable for them. These are followers.
