First, plan both the preparation for the event and the follow-up to it. ‘It is worse than useless… unless the “follow-up” has been carefully planned and the promoters have answered the question, “What do you plan to do with those whose hearts are touched?”‘

The first preparation event is what we would call an every-member canvass, but for the purpose of explaining the need for an evangelistic mission rather than the need for money. ‘Every house in the parish should be visited twice, and the visitor should make personal contact with the household.’

The main preparation event is what the book calls a teaching convention, to which parishioners are invited in order to prepare them to participate in ther mission itself. Parishioners must be able to summarise and explain, in ordinary language, the main outlines of the Christian faith. The teaching convention will be spread over several sessions, and should continue until those attending feel that they can make such an explanation. ‘The convention must be prepared for and followed up both in the pulpit and in the parish.’ To the extent possible, lay people should do the teaching.

The preparation should also build up the sense of fellowship in the church. ‘It would be of little use to to hold a mission unless those who are converted by it and, perhaps, brought to church for the first time, find within the Body of Christ a warmth of welcome that breaks down the natural barriers between man and man… This intensification of fellowship will develop from the sense of responsibility in the common task.’

The mission itself should bring in someone with experience of or at least a perceived call to evangelistic preaching, and should last long enough to reach everyone in the parish. There might be five or six talks over two or three days, in different places in the neighborhood where a different audience might be found. ‘The missioner must be able to build men up in the faith and fellowship of the Church; for a Parochial Mission which ignores the intellect and relies on emotion is not likely to have lasting results.’

Towards the Conversion of England does not say more about follow-up than the above remarks about fellowship and welcome in the church. Follow-up was apparently the subject of a pamphlet published later. The book also recognises that small-group campaigns may be the wave of the future, ‘as the age of big public meetings seems to have passed, at any rate for a time’, but it seems to me that the need now is something unmistakeably associated with a local Church. Unless local churches really don’t have a future.

On the Commission’s web-page are links to the minutes of all meetings since the last General Convention, and some earlier reports, although there’s no detailed information about their work. But it’s one place where Evangelicals could put their energy, and perhaps a place where that might be appreciated. The minutes are detailed but not always clear, and until I’ve read them all I’m not going to say much. But its most obvious difficulty is the fact that evangelism is only half of the work assigned to it, and since the word ‘mission’ is often used to refer to all the work the church does—educational, social, political etc—it is very easy for that half of its work to consume 90% of the commission’s time, and a cursory glance at the minutes of a couple of meetings suggests that this has been the case.

Take a look at what the commission has been doing, and let’s talk about how we can encourage it to give equal time to evangelism. The report of the commission (known at that time as the Commission on Domestic Mission and Evangelism) to the last General Convention can be read in the Blue Book, downloadable from here. Don’t expect much in the way of anything Evangelicals would understand as evangelism, but do ask yourself, how could I help the commission do better?

A Strategy that Changes the Denomination

John Richardson was inspired to write this book when he read a book published by the Church of England in 1945, Towards the Conversion of England. He was rightly impressed that the Church could consider a national evangelistic strategy of such scope as that book contained, and in his book he examines why such a strategy was not pursued, and urges a renewal of that strategy today.

The strategy was not pursued in 1945, he argues, because of the trajectory that has characterised evangelical movements in the Anglican Church ‘for over a century’: expansion, confrontation, division, recrimination, dissipation and regeneration. Regeneration, he says, typically comes after ‘the old battles are forgotten and the old warriors retire’, but this book is an attempt to begin regeneration without waiting for that, since he assigns 2011 to the period of dissipation. I hope and pray that his book achieves this result in the Church of England, for whom he wrote it, and the purpose of this review is to commend the same strategy to Evangelicals in the Episcopal Church, dissipated to an extent Richardson can scarcely imagine.

The key to the evangelical failures of the past is that what follows expansion has been confrontation, which leads to division not only between Evangelicals and the rest of the Church, but among Evangelicals, not all of whom are ready to confront to the same extent or at the same time. If there is to be a different future, Richardson suggests, Evangelicals must try participation rather than confrontation, and he suggests two principles which Evangelicals need to absorb if participation is to be possible. The first is to accept that the starting point is the way the Church is now, even if it violates every evangelical principle that ever was. ‘We can choose either to detach ourselves from, or involve ourselves in… denominational life. Involvement certainly risks compromise. But detachment simply abandons the institution and society and accepts the creation of our own ghettos. To affirm the denomination is not at all to approve everything for which it stands, or everything it does now or has done in the past. It is a “warts and all” willingness to recognize, despite its imperfections, that the Anglican way of doing things has a place and that we have a place in it. Only with this attitude, however, do we have the possibility, and the right, to seek deep change in the institution’ (p 44). Richardson gives several examples of ways in which Evangelicals in the C of E can engage the wider Church positively, all of which have their counterparts in the Episcopal Church, even the Patron and the Crown Nominations Commission and the Vacancy in See Committee. Confrontation is sometimes necessary in such bodies, but Richardson says rightly that it is more likely to be effective when done by a participant than someone criticising from outside (p 33).

The second principle Evangelicals must absorb is that their ecclesiology has worked against them. People from other traditions in the Church have been saying this for generations, but what they usually mean is that Evangelicals don’t see the institutional Church as essential for salvation in the way that the more Catholic among us do. The heart of Richardson’s case is that Evangelicals have been content to be a party within the Church with evangelism as their specialty, when in fact evangelism is the purpose for which the whole Church exists. Mission societies, the means by which Evangelicals have pursued the goal of evangelism for generations, actually undermine the evangelistic enterprise, because they don’t involve the whole Church, which was founded by Christ as a mission society: ‘God’s mission work to the world flows from Christ through the Church… the Church is the missionary organisation seeking people’s conversion’ (88f). Evangelism is not part of but the heart of all the Church’s mission (pp 30, 90).

Many argue that participation was tried in the C of E in the 1970s and 1980s, when many Evangelicals began to engage it positively, serving on its committees and commissions and getting appointed to the episcopate, and since this policy hasn’t led to an evangelistic Church, it should be abandoned. Richardson admits that the efforts of Evangelicals have not had the results hoped for, but argues that this is because Evangelicals had defined their goal as creating place for evangelicalism rather than recalling the whole Church to its evangelistic task. Their strategy assumed that evangelism would be done by the Evangelicals rather than the whole Church. A new approach to participation, therefore, must be tried, one which has as its goal not creating a place for Evangelicals but restoring evangelism to its proper place in the life of the Church.

The Episcopal Church had a revival of Evangelicalism beginning in the 1960s and 70s, and what has followed has been a confrontation far worse that anything yet seen in the Church of England, although the story there isn’t finished yet. It’s time for us to try participation, too, not in order to create a safe place for ourselves, but in order to set the Episcopal Church to the task Christ gave it, that of bringing those who do not know Christ to the knowledge and love of Him. An impossible task for anyone except God, but since it is what God wants, we’d better make ourselves available for it.

Richardson says that Towards the Conversion of England did not achieve its goal, but it may have helped more than he thinks. It’s true that the national program for which it called was never adopted by the Church of England, but the book itself sold like hot cakes. According to one history of the post-war Church of England, the first edition sold out overnight, and altogether it went through seven editions in its first year of publication, and at least two more the year after that. It may not have been read in the corridors of power in Church House, but it was certainly read elsewhere. It ‘prompted diocesan, deanery and parochial missions in many parts of the country’, and one of the diocesan missions, the Mission to London, attracted three quarters of a million people to the various events held in the city, and paved the way for the first visit to London by Billy Graham in 1954 ( Paul Welsby, A History of the Church of England 1945–1980 [OUP 1984] pp44 –50).

Richardson’s book may not attract much interest at the highest level of the Church of England, or even of the power structures of contemporary evangelicalism, but I pray that it will be read by others, especially in the Episcopal Church, and will one day be looked back on with the same respect with which Richardson describes Towards the Conversion of England. It’s not expensive. Order one for yourself here, and one for someone you know in the Episcopal Church.

John Richardson is the Vicar of Elsenham and Ugley in Essex, England, and there is a link to his blog on the list to the right

The prayer has several features that commend it to Evangelicals. First, it uses the word ‘bring’ instead of ‘offer’ when indicating the elements. To say that the elements are brought can hardly mislead anyone. It’s true that they are described as ‘gifts’, but since the prayer immediately preceding these words is left to the discretion of the celebrant, they can easily be referred to in that prayer as God’s gifts, which will remove any ambiguity. The celebrant could pray something like ‘Heavenly Father, You sent Your only Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, Who, before He died for us, took bread and wine and gave them to us as a sign of His infinite love.’ Then continue, ‘And so, Father, we bring you these gifts’.

Second, it refers to I Corinthians 11.26 in saying that in doing this ‘we show forth the sacrifice of His death’. Third, the language of sacrifice is firmly linked to our offering of ourselves rather than our observing the rite: ‘Make us a living sacrifice of praise’.

My own experience in using the opportunity to pray parts of the eucharistic prayer in my own words suggests that it is better to write them out and read them than to invent them on the spot. The prescribed petitions in the prayer are all very short, none of them longer than two sentences, and I find that when I pray spontaneously I tend to ramble a bit, and in the comparison between my ramblings and the crisp points of the prescribed prayer, it’s not me that comes off best. Better to write it out, edit out everything that isn’t absolutely necessary, and then put it in your Prayer Book so you can read it out. Even when I insert one of the Prayer Book prefaces, I shorten them to match the style of the printed prayer.

Congregational reaction to this has usually been non-existent, especially if printed in a full-text service leaflet, although occasionally someone will say ‘I had no idea that was in the prayer book’. And the relief of knowing that no one is likely to have read anything into the service that isn’t justified has made it worth the extra trouble.

There’s other interesting material on the site, too, including an analysis of how Anglican Evangelicals have floundered in recent decades: ‘What has happened to Evangelical Anglican ministry? In the face of declining church attendance, we have come to doubt the worth of Anglican ritual and order and of the power of God’s word proclaimed. Our loyalty to the Prayer Book, commitment to parish ministry, open approach to occasional services, support of unviable congregations, all seem a faded memory. As for the ministry of the Word, we seem more reliant on the new technology, psychology and management techniques of our age, than on the power of the Word proclaimed.’ For some reason there’s no link to this on the home page, but you can find it here.

A bit more Wesleyan than I am (which surprised me in a Moore College grad), but well within the Anglican Evangelical tradition, and well worth using when preaching or running a lectionary Bible study.

Unfortunately, many congregations have been taught that a procession with alms and elements symbolises lay participation in the liturgy, or gives them their proper role in the liturgy. Buchanan has particularly strong words about this: ‘Fancy a dud procession with two, four or even six silent laymen carrying materials which do not need to be carried, and fancy it all being over in 45 seconds, and our calling that the ‘layman’s liturgy’! How could we have ever been so blind?’ It will take a great deal of patient and persistent teaching to get such a congregation to understand the need for this to change, but this is the work that faces Evangelicals in today’s Episcopal Church.

The use of special prayers or gestures relating to the elements at the preparation, such as the Roman ‘through your goodness we have this bread to offer’ etc is especially unfortunate liturgically, Buchanan argues, since they amount to a thanksgiving over the elements, which is all that the prayer of consecration actually is. The use of such prayers renders the ‘great thanksgiving’ superfluous.

Concerning re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice, Bishop Hoadley’s words are worth remembering: ‘the Lord’s Supper was not instituted as a Stage-Play, to act over our Saviour’s death (which is an unworthy thought), but as a Rite, for the remembrance of his death once past and not to be repeated’ (A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper [1735] p 55).

Also very encouraging to read the following, in his answer to a question about the
 Diocese 
of 
Central 
Florida 
opting 
out 
of 
the 
Episcopal 
Church: ‘
We 
remain 
in 
the 
Episcopal 
Church 
because
 we 
believe
 that 
God 
has 
put 
us 
here. 


That 
is 
where 
we 
must 
begin. 


For 
if 
we 
know 
that 
we 
are 
where 
we 
are 
by 
Divine 
appointment, 
then 
we 
also 
can 
trust 
that 
God 
will 
guide 
us, provide 
for 
us,
 grant 
His 
wisdom 
and 
give 
us 
all 
we 
need 
to 
remain 
faithful 
to 
Him 
in
 the 
midst 
of 
a 
profoundly 
conflicted 
church.’

The place to start is with principles rather than practices, because there’s usually more than one way to put a principle into practice. For Evangelicals, the guidelines in Scripture are primary, of course, but it’s generally accepted that the explicit references to Communion in Scripture are so few that they have to be supplemented by the application of broader Scriptural principles, especially since Communion became separated from the kind of meal described in I Corinthians 11.20ff.

Foremost among these principles, I was taught, is this: Holy Communion essentially represents something that God gives us or does for us, rather than that we give God, or do for God. Christ’s linking of the bread and wine with his sacrifice of Himself on the cross provides the context in which everything at Communion takes place, and that sacrifice was God’s act not ours, and cannot be remembered appropriately by anything that stresses what we do rather than what God did.

So for centuries this has meant for Anglican Evangelicals avoiding any suggestion that in Communion the church somehow offers Christ’s sacrifice again. For the English Reformers, it was not a sacrifice but a thanksgiving for Christ’s sacrifice. The wording of the service, and the ceremonial of the service, was changed in order to reflect that. Some of that change has been undone in the American Prayer Books (all of them, not just the 1979 book), and one of the basic skills evangelical clergy have had to acquire is that of celebrating Communion in such a way as to prevent those present from buying into the ‘sacrifical’ idea.

The most obvious step in this direction is to omit the ‘fraction acclamation’, Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast. The words are scriptural, of course, but their context in Scripture is holiness of life, not Holy Communion, and they are almost bound to mislead when repeated right after the breaking of the bread. The rubric is very clear that the words are optional, and the Evangelicals I know avoid them like the plague.

Our reformers also made it clear that Communion should be celebrated in the context of a meal, as the last supper was, even if what we commemorate is the sacrifice of Himself that Christ made the following day and which the bread and the wine represent. ‘Do this’ could only mean eat and drink, and the context is therefore a meal which is at least representative of the meal at which He gave this commandment. Hence the evangelical preference for the term ‘table’ rather than ‘altar’, and, when practicable, the replacement of a solid object reminiscent of an altar with an actual table.

There are plenty of other things that can be done or not done, and other words and phrases that can be used and avoided by the celebrant in order to avoid the implication of Communion as sacrifice, and there will be other posts in this series that will explore them.

The resolution, which can be read here, says that Pelagius ‘represents to some the struggle for theological exploration that is our birthright as Anglicans’ and that a re-visiting of his teachings might ‘encourage a deeper understanding of sin, grace, free will, and the goodness of God’s creation’. According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Pelagius emphasised man’s ‘freedom to choose good by virtue of his God-given nature’.

Pelagius’s teachings have been revisited many times since 411, although the result has usually been a deeper understanding that the Council was correct to repudiate his ideas. Apparently the diocese in question felt the same way, because they first amended the motion so as to remove anything that suggested Pelagius’s teachings might in fact be compatible with Christianity, then refused to pass it.

Pelagius is often thought of as denying the doctrine of original sin, but apparently this was a refinement added by those won over by his teaching rather than Pelagius’s own. Ideas of this sort have arisen frequently in the church, and, as the stories confirm, are still doing so. Evangelicals will probably not be disturbed at the suggestion that we look at Pelagius’s teaching again, since the decisions of Councils only have authority if they are supported by Scripture (Article XXI, Book of Common Prayer p 872), and it never hurts to take a second look, just to be sure. But most of us will be pretty sure that those who turned the proposal down did the right thing. The Biblical teaching that human nature since Adam’s disobedience is such that we cannot choose good without God’s help has always been confirmed for me by observation: in every case I have ever seen, by the time someone is old enought to know right from wrong, they have already done wrong.

The sad part is the idea that as Anglicans our birthright is ‘the struggle for theological exploration’. As Christians, the inheritance we look forward to is that of the saints in light, deliverance from the dominion of darkness and a place in the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, and the forgiveness of sins (Ephesians 5.5, Colossians 1.12f). I’ll take that over theological exploration any day.