Let me start this third blog in the series by saying that one of the things I have valued about Bishop Martin’s and Bishop Mike’s leadership in Eds & Ips is their commitment to mission. In this they have sought to lead by exhortation and example. I may have sometimes struggled with the form it has taken, but fundamentally I have enjoyed their partnership in the Gospel.

That commitment to mission was something that found expression again in their videos. Bishop Martin echoed a former ArchBishop, William Temple at one point: ‘We exist … to proclaim Christ to the people of England' (Temple’s famous dictum being: "The Church is the only organisation that does not exist for itself, but for those who live outside of it."). And he warned that when we forget this, we tend toward becoming a sect. Amen. Indeed, I had much more sympathy with this sort of statement, than Bishop Mike’s much more ambiguous observation that opinion within the Church of England reflects that of wider society. Perhaps it does in the House of Bishops, but as the votes in Synod showed, the House of Bishops is some way out of step with those in the pews. And our job is not to represent the people of this nation, still less to reflect their cultural and social attitudes. It is as Bishop Martin puts it, ‘to proclaim Christ…’.

All of this finds expression in ‘Growing in God’, which has a number of strategic aims, inlcuding Growing in Number, and Growing Younger. Which again, raises significant questions about how the Bishops can come to the conclusions they have about the Church’s blessing of those in same-sex marriage. I’ll come back to the actual arguments that have convinced them in a later blog, but for now let me just make the point that the Bishops Proposals will critically undermine the Church’s mission in this nation.

Contrary to much of what has been claimed in the LLF discussions in recent years, changing the Church’s teaching will not result in the Church becoming more acceptable to society, only less defensible. Received wisdom in outreach suggests that as we become more ‘relevant’, ‘accessible’, ‘recognisable’ to our culture, we minimise the obstacles that stand in the way of people coming to faith. Without defending traditionalism as an end in itself, let me just say that to believe this now is stretching credulity to breaking point.

The idea was formulated about 70 years ago (in the 1950s), when Donald McGavren wrote a book that started what has become known as the Church Growth Movement. We need to recognise that it has been massively influential, and that without most people ever having heard of him, McGavren has shaped a lot of our generation’s assumptions about Church.

His basic idea was that in order to help people become Christians, we had to understand as much as we can about the specific culture / sub-culture they are living in, and then that we needed to redesign Church in a way that is uniquely shaped by that culture, relevant to that culture, and accessible to that culture.

After a generation of road-testing this idea, it has been found wanting at a number of levels. Apart from the development of specific and niche culture ‘churches’ (a patently unBiblical vision for the Church family), it is simply a matter of emperical observation that adopting this strategy has not led to Church Growth in any meaningful sense. Now, to be clear, it is debatable that McGavren would have sanctioned the application of this model to doctrine. He seemed to be more concerned about making the way we worship ‘culturally relevant’. But that does not take away from the fact that this is the basic missional argument that has been deployed during LLF. If we remove (now doctrinal / ethical) obstacles to Church membership, we’ll win the nation back to Christ. Or at least a hearing for Him..?

The Church (the Anglican Church at any rate) in UK is locked into a spiral of decline. Throughout LLF, our progressive ‘prophets of doom’ have leveraged this observation to justify the removal of what they seem to believe constitutes an unecessary obstacle to people coming to faith in Christ.

Except that dismantling centuries of Biblical insight and wisdom about what constitutes Christian worship and discipleship turns out to be a wrong turn of catastrophic proportions. A raft of theological, Biblical and ethical questions aside, it simply fails on the basis of the very pragmatism that justifies it. In other words, it simply doesn’t work.

Is that just anecdotal, culutrally primitive, prejudice talking? Nope - that’s hard data and research talking.

When Church growth and decline is analysed in relation to their alignment to progressive ideology, of which same-sex marriage is a cornerstone, then without exception (read that again) Churches that adopt such progressive ideology (more specifically those which legitimse same sex marraige) are in decline.

To be fair, the Anglican Church was already in decline, but the idea that last week’s vote in Synod will do anything to slow that delince is to fly in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Before Synod’s vote, the Church of England was facing extinction by 2060. The evidence suggests that date has just been brought forward! Growing Churches (meaning here denominations / networks) have all held the line on Biblical sexual ethics.

Which brings me to my ‘yes, but…’ response to the Bishops’ video. Yes to mission. Yes to proclaiming Christ… Yes to ‘making disciples’. But… this is a decision that has chronically undermined precisely that commitment. To have made it in the name of mission is, I’m afraid, misguided at best.

the diagram above, and the research behind it can be found at: https://churchmodel.org.uk/2022/05/20/uk_church_decline_and_progressive_ideology/

if you want to read an artice explaining how Churches that attract young people hold to the historical teaching on marriage, you can do here: https://christianconcern.com/news/churches-with-the-largest-youth-groups-teach-biblical-sexuality/