Renewal & Reform: The Times of the Church

Everything that my friend Fr Keith Elford of West Byfleet & New Haw might choose to write for the Church Times would be worthwhile, especially as I don’t see that august journal directly and rely on those who do expose themselves to it to tell me what’s in it. But his recent piece analysing the Church of England’s ‘Renewal and Reform’ initiative from 2015 had me blinking slightly, because I don’t remember ‘Renewal and Reform’ at all. It’s sobering to think that an ambitious initiative that was intended to transform the way the Church of England works passed me by entirely, demonstrating either that it was woefully badly implemented, or that I am appallingly inattentive, or very likely both.

‘The Church’s vocation is to proclaim the Good News afresh in each generation’, the Archbishops announced grandly in their press release inaugurating Renewal & Reform in February 2015. And Keith reckons that many of the targets set out in the final report (or rather the reports of the five working groups, on lay discipleship, resourcing ministerial education, using resources across the Church, ‘simplification’, and training bishops and deans) were indeed achieved, though he wonders whether or not that really amounted to a success in terms of R&R’s original ambitions for the Church. But, for a scheme that was supposed to galvanise the Church of England ‘for a generation’, R&R seemed nebulous and lacking in any rigorous analysis of the Church’s institutions or, more radically and importantly, what it was for.

As Keith points out, R&R was underpinned by the assumption of ‘decline’ across the Church – in numbers of worshippers, clergy, and finance (though the last wasn’t as serious as the first two) and thought about what should be done about it. But there was absolutely nothing about what this decline might be about, or (an even more uncomfortable question) why this was a bad thing. Using churchy language, what’s the specific charism and the specific vocation of the Anglican Church? Anglicanism’s traditional justifications have been eroded away entirely: the Empire is gone, Englishness means little and what little is there has next to no connection with religion anymore, and holding the middle ground between Catholicism and Protestantism are not terms anyone thinks in. Absent those purposes, might we as well pack up and hand all our worshipping communities and the buildings that house them to the Italian Mission (or someone else, as you prefer)? I concluded some time ago that if the Church of England has any point at all it is to force together different varieties of Christians within the same institutional framework and make them, at some level, live together and talk together. If God has any purpose for us, it is this; and I most especially suspect that’s the case because it’s happened by accident rather than because anyone planned it this way. It would be a mortifying consideration for all of us, Catholic, liberal or evangelical, to follow through with this idea, as much as it should be to imagine that (as I have said many, many times before) that the Lord is purging the Body of Christ of its desire for power and control, dressed up as it often is in evangelistic zeal or cynical resignation.

Does the Church of England really not know why it exists in this third decade of the 21^st century, as it didn’t seem to in the second – or, at least, didn’t ask the question? This week in my capacity as a Local Vocations Advisor I had a conversation with a gentleman sent to me, a Charismatic Christian from an Eastern European Roman Catholic background who has curiously become beguiled by the history, openness and breadth of Anglicanism, and wants to find out whether he has a vocation within it: ‘I see part of my purpose as bringing different sorts of Christians together’, he told me. If we want a ‘strategy’ in the future, we have to begin with what we think God might want of us, not just as Christians, but as these Christians in this time.