Wednesday 14 March 2018

Re-Emergence

By far the post on this blog which has aroused the most public interest is nothing to do with the blessed PJH or anything about Swanvale Halt parish (unsurprisingly), but my delving into the murky world of oddball Christian movements entitled 'Beyond the Fringe'. I managed to blunder into this world, or something close to it, again a few months ago via what might appear the most orthodox of routes. Someone sent me a little booklet by the well-known evangelist John Ioannou, who goes by the name of J John, and idly I decided to find out more about him, being well-acquainted with his name but little more. Among the many honours and recognitions granted Mr John, says Wikipedia, is that he was ‘ordained presbyter and Canon Missioner by Bishop David Carr OSL’. By who, what? I thought, and off I went, round the corner if not quite the bend.

Once upon a time there was an evangelical church leader in Solihull called David Carr. He started the Renewal Church in 1972 with four people and lo, the Lord blessed the work and eventually the congregation numbered some 2000 divided among a group of church centres. Mr Carr moved from the Elim Pentecostal network, in which he was ordained in 1979, into the Free Methodist connexion. He received a good deal of support from the local authorities for the church’s good work in the community, culminating in an OBE in 2016. But he'd received something else a few years before, too.


Renewal had already been working for several years with Wroxall Abbey, the site of the medieval Priory of Wroxall and since 2001 a hotel, spa, wedding venue and conference centre: it had taken on running the ancient church of St Leonard which stood in the grounds of the Victorian mansion. Mr Carr began to see ‘many parallels between the life of St Leonard and the modern day work that Renewal was engaged in’. What he received in 2009 was a word from the Lord relating to the bit from Genesis chapter 26 where Isaac reopens the wells his father Abraham had and which had been stopped up by the wicked Philistines, and calls them by their former names. Mr Carr began to perceive his mission as relating not just to the evangelisation of the local area and reopening an old church the Anglicans had relinquished, but something bigger, a mission to do with Christian unity and ecumenism.


In July 2009, Mr Carr emerged as ‘Bishop Abbot of the Order of St Leonard and Bishop of Wroxall Abbey’. I’m not sure who consecrated him a bishop, but it may have been Archbishop Charles Travis, Chancellor of Logos Christian College in Jacksonville, Florida, which in 2004 awarded Mr Carr a doctorate (as it did to his brother Anthony, who is now also a bishop based at Wroxall Abbey). I don’t know whence Abp Travis derives his orders – you can waste too much time trying to chase down these scrawny and unsatisfying hares – but he’s part of a broader network of bishops who seem to have graduated from running their own charismatic and evangelical churches to popping mitres on their heads and wearing copes, some in the US, some in Europe, some in Africa. They call themselves the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches, and claim to be broadly Anglican while not part of the Anglican Communion itself.

At the same time, the church of St Leonard was consecrated a cathedral, colloquially known as ‘Wren’s Cathedral’ (pace St Paul’s, London), as the family of Wren the architect owned the estate at one time and his wife is buried there. The Order of St Leonard is dedicated to ‘to bring together all Christians, regardless of differing denominations and streams, without leaving their distinctive groupings, in to a unified fellowship for prayer, mission and to help the disadvantaged’, which cannot be a bad thing, can it? Dr Carr, and the other members of the Order, promote connections between Christian denominations and the crossover of ideas (he’s met the Pope).

from Classicbritishhotels.com

And what of J John, with whom we started? He’s there on the OSL website right enough, so he must be happy enough to be identified with them, orthodox fellow as he is.

There are many echoes here of other fringe churches, though curiously not the ones I’ve dealt with before. Abps Sean Manchester, Jonathan Blake et al have ended up where they are via a variety of eccentric routes and function more-or-less on their own, heading churches for the most part without laypeople or structures. No, the echoes I hear in the OSL come from longer ago. There are the Irvingites, that very peculiar outburst of Victorian piety in which the evangelical church leader Henry Irving found himself at Mass in Rouen Cathedral and heard an angel telling him ‘these are the vestments in which the Lord desires his priests to serve him’ – a visionary experience out of which came one of the weirdest Christian denominations in history, which I know is quite a claim to make (there’s an Irvingite church not far away from me, though no Irvingites to worship in it). Then there’s Hugh George de Wilmott Newman, who came from an Irvingite background but by the 1940s had decided God wanted him to reunite all the quarrelling factions of episcopi vagantes in his own person, had himself reconsecrated by whatever Archbishops he could find and eventually restyled himself ‘Mar Georgius’, thus paving the way for the British Orthodox Church under his cousin, Mar Seraphim, Archbishop of Glastonbury, which flourishes (sort of) today. It was Mar Georgius’s lifelong regret that Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher of Canterbury so disdained his sincere offer to reconsecrate him and thus bring ‘legitimate’ orders into the Church of England.

There are similarities here, but Bp Carr and the OSL don’t seem really to be bothered by such technicalities as who consecrates who. I do not want to mock them, either, because what it seems we have here is a sudden – you might even say miraculous – irruption of a Catholic sensibility within evangelical church forms. The fact of taking over that old church in the middle of Warwickshire and doing things that have been done there for centuries appears to have had a very genuine and profound effect on Renewal and on Dr David Carr, and I can’t gainsay that. The past reaches forward to the present, and the present back to the past: I view this as a true movement of the Spirit. But then I think Catholicism is the inner dynamic of Christianity, its shape continually re-emerging over time, so I would view it like that.

The cover of Dr Carr's autobiography arguably shows at least some degree of self-aware humour.

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