Signs, wonders, and worries in the land of Canterbury.
I. The Classical Evangelicals: Still Preaching After All These Years
Each morning a human tide, two million strong, surges across London Bridge and wells up out of the tube stations into the “City,” London’s financial district. Watching the grim-faced workers en route to their offices, T. S. Eliot wrote, “I had not thought death had undone so many.”
But thanks to the ministry at Saint Helen’s Bishopsgate, an ancient church in the City, death has been undone in quite a few. At lunchtime every Tuesday, about 1,000 people make their way through the narrow opening across the broad courtyard to the church, to worship the Risen Lord. This is remarkable in secular England, where only about 9 percent of the populace attend church.
Inside Saint Helen’s, Dick Lucas is occupying the pulpit; it is ten days after Easter, and the Scripture reading is John’s account of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearance. He didn’t plan it this way, Lucas says, but the text does give him the opportunity to address recent remarks by David Jenkins, the bishop of Durham. Just the previous week Jenkins had been up to his tricks as ecclesiastical gadfly and media headliner. Although theologians debated what he said precisely, it was clear the press and populace thought he said the Resurrection wasn’t really real.
Lucas calls the message of John 20 “a good cure for Durhamitis,” for John’s message is that for those first disciples, “seeing was believing.” The doctrine of the Resurrection, he says, is “not based on mysticism and visions, but on what people saw Jesus do and say.”
Lucas has been carrying on the Tuesday noontime ministry for 25 years. It arose from a group of concerned laymen who wanted just such a church and such a man in the City. Lucas was their man.
If Bishop Jenkins represents the thoroughly modern, chic, daring, avant garde, and liberal wing of the Church of England, Dick Lucas seems to be a relic of the postwar leaders who infused a new spirit and energy into evangelicalism through the thoughtful preaching of orthodoxy, Scripture, social responsibility, and the necessity of conversion. Today he seems discouraged, despite the crowds who attend his services. He is one of a handful of evangelical Anglican leaders trained 50 years ago by evangelist Eric Nash to reach the elite and powerful for Christ. Nash, nicknamed “Bash,” recruited students from the best of what the English call “public schools” (what Americans call exclusive, private secondary schools). Nash devoted himself to converting and training leaders, known in evangelical circles as “Bash’s boys.” The group that emerged—including Dick Lucas and John R. W. Stott—changed the face of the Church of England and of evangelicalism.
But now, to Lucas’s mind, much of the effort seems to have been for nought. Expository preaching, concern for doctrinal orthodoxy, the piety of the mind—all the things Bash’s boys fought for—are being ignored or merely taken for granted as the charismatic movement has revitalized evangelicalism both in and out of the Church of England.
Meanwhile, Lucas feels like part of a forgotten movement: “When you get to Saint John’s Theological College,” he says, “ask any student who Jim Packer is, or John Stott. I bet they won’t even know.” He is kinder to other evangelical Anglican schools—Oak Hill Theological College in London and Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, for example. But his concern is that a faith based on Christian content is missing in most of the churches and schools.
“The Moody-through-Graham era is now over in the UK,” Lucas says. “Christian knowledge is so thin that evangelists can no longer just reap. They must sow as well.”
Holding The Historic High Ground
Perhaps in America, John Stott is England’s best-known evangelical. English church historian David Edwards, a self-confessed liberal, calls him “apart from William Temple [who died as archbishop of Canterbury in 1944] the most influential clergyman in the Church of England during the twentieth century.” Indeed, Stott’s Basic Christianity has sold more than a million copies in 36 languages.
For a man who is almost 70, Stott keeps a frightfully crowded schedule. Yet, after delivering a masterful exposition for a new seminar for pastors at Christian Impact (formerly the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity), the dean of Anglican evangelicals settles down in a side room for a chat. He assures us that indeed there are younger leaders, committed to classical evangelicalism, to a high view of Scripture, to a thinking orthodoxy. But when pressed, he is at a loss for names.
The younger leadership, he says, “is not organized at the moment. People have said we no longer have an evangelical party but an evangelical coalition. My longing is still to hold them together. I am now afraid there is a liberal evangelical element. People are really going soft on Scripture.
“We need a leader who will try to draw together a classical evangelicalism that has room for the charismatics and others, but tries to hold the high ground for historic evangelicalism. But he hasn’t emerged.”
Stott says “the unsung hero” of the postwar resurgence of evangelicalism is “D.J.”—Douglas Johnson—the first secretary of the old InterVarsity Fellowship. “He is now in his eighties,” continues Stott, “and the younger generation have never heard of him. He had the vision of the recovery of evangelical scholarship through the founding of the Tyndale Fellowship for Biblical Research. When that started there wasn’t one single evangelical in any university post in theology or related fields. Now there are about 50, who are university lecturers in theology and related subjects.” Stott says the resurgence is “due more than anything else to that recovery of evangelical, biblical scholarship—hence the great seriousness if we forget to produce it again through charismatic anti-intellectualism.”
Stott’s concern over anti-intellectualism is understandable. After the war, it was Stott, James Packer, and other under-40 evangelicals who successfully promoted an academically informed spirituality in an evangelical party that had rivaled American fundamentalism for its cultural and intellectual isolationism. Perhaps it is this Ghost of Evangelicals Past that prompts these classic evangelicals to express their concerns about charismatic renewal. Both Lucas and Stott are too Christian, too kind, and too well bred to say anything cutting about the charismatic renewal. Yet it is obvious they are concerned, not so much about the issues that have often divided American Christians—glossolalia and “faith healing,” for example—but over the perceived subjectivism of charismatic worship as a threat to the objectivity of evangelical scholarship, apologetics, and expository preaching.
Ironically, the blossoming of the charismatic renewal in the UK is often traced to one of John Stott’s former associates. Michael Harper was appointed as a curate at All Souls, Langham Place, where Stott was rector. But as Harper became more and more involved in the charismatic renewal, the rift between rector and curate deepened. In Baptism and Fullness: The Work of the Holy Spirit Today, Stott found himself admiring the “new liberty and love … inward release … overflowing joy and peace … warmth … and fresh zeal for evangelism” he saw among charismatics. But at the same time, he found himself distanced by the influence of American neopentecostalism: the “ ‘Jesus plus’ doctrine, namely, ‘You have come to Jesus, which is fine; but now you need something extra [“Spirit baptism”] to complete your initiation.’ ”
“Growth in Christ, yes!” he wrote, “Additions to Christ, never!”
The Boomerang Of Success
In 1964, Harper resigned his post at All Souls in order to become director of the Fountain Trust, which was to become a major charismatic ministry. The tensions between classical evangelicals and charismatics have moderated as British charismatics have revised their theology; Experiences of the Spirit are still stressed as central, but they are not considered an essential second work of the Spirit. Nevertheless, the tensions remain visible. Perhaps it is not merely a tension between styles of worship and ministry, or between theologies, but a tension between generations. Thus, a remarkable success by the classical evangelicals has also been a source of discouragement. There is an ever-increasing percentage of younger evangelicals in the Church of England, but their evangelicalism is less and less like that promoted in the postwar resurgence.
The success can be seen in the shifting percentages of evangelical clergy in the Church of England. Here are figures collected by Michael Saward, vicar of Ealing, author of Evangelicals on the Move, and one-time member of Stott’s Eclectics, a coterie of 40 under-40 clergy who set out to change the face of the church: In 1870, about 20 percent of the clergy were evangelicals. In 1900, the number was up to 25 percent. By 1927, their strength had dropped to 13 percent. By the early 1950s, less than 10 percent of those being ordained called themselves evangelicals. But the postwar resurgence was able to turn the tide. By 1969, the percentage of ordinands being graduated from evangelical theological colleges had grown to 31 percent, and in the 17 years between 1969 and 1986, that segment grew from 31 to 51 percent.
But contrasting with that success is the changing nature of evangelicalism. With the increasingly charismatic flavor among the young, theological education has bent away from its former emphasis on rigorous biblical scholarship, a generally Calvinist approach to systematic theology, and expository preaching. With respect to preaching, says Stott: “I’m in as much despair as Dick Lucas is. The standards of preaching are abysmal, even among evangelicals who are supposed to believe in the Bible.”
And with regard to theology, no one puts it more directly than the genial bishop of Chester, Michael Baughen. Baughen, who succeeded Stott as rector of All Souls, Langham Place, is president of the Anglican Evangelical Assembly, an annual by-invitation-only gathering of leaders, representing different dioceses, mission societies, theological colleges, and other organizations. As a bishop, Baughen must speak and act with a broad tolerance toward all the believers in his 340-church diocese, whether they be Anglo-Catholics, liberal “broad churchmen,” charismatics, or classical evangelicals. Yet on key theological concerns, he cannot remain silent.
After learning that in the major charismatic songbooks, only 1 percent of the hymns contain references to the Cross, he fears that the doctrine of the Atonement is being ignored: “I’m about to start a ‘red party’—that’s ‘red’ for the Atonement. The church has lost sight of the centrality of the Cross.” Baughen is also worried about a fading awareness of sin. “For many Christian young people today, the greatest sins are experiments on animals and wearing fur coats, rather than the sins that are particularly given priority in the New Testament—such as sleeping with somebody else,” says the earnest bishop.
What better place to test these criticisms than at Spring Harvest, one of the new evangelicalism’s biggest celebrations.
Ii. The Young Evangelicals: Running And Leaping And Praising God
England’s best-selling religious book is a sidesplitting parody of assorted renewal movements entitled The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass (aged 37¾). Author Plass describes a rainy, muddy Christian camping and seminar event held in a mythical place called Wetbridge; and Plass spends the entire time at the Wetbridge launderette, thanks to the holes in his tent.
The real Spring Harvest is held simultaneously in several venues, including the seaside town of Minehead in Somerset. On our way we see a newspaper article about Spring Harvest. The headline reads, “Jogging for Jesus at the Funcoast Revival.” The photographs show, according to the captions, that “some of the 150 people at the Gaiety raise their arms ecstatically.” But to the practiced eye, the picture does not show charismatic believers with arms lifted in a posture of worship. It shows thirtysomethingish women with their arms raised in Christian aerobics.
The article describes the aerobics instructor, a pastor from Brighton, and the sermon he had preached: “I want to give the Evil One hell, because that’s what he deserves. Give him a good knee in the groin, OK?”
We are to spend three days at Spring Harvest, and the newspaper report does not encourage us.
Saints On Holiday
During the peak season, combination campgrounds and amusement parks all around the UK are packed with Brits on holiday. Those who have not purchased a “holiday package” in Spain or Majorca may opt to spend a week at a rainy seaside crammed next to tens of thousands of others who have come so far just to have their days’ activities planned for them.
But before the peak season, three of these holiday camps are taken over by the Evangelical Alliance for what amounts to a cross between the British holiday camp and the American camp meeting. At Butlin’s Somerwest World on the Bristol Channel are neat, if smallish, motel rooms (known as “chalets”), a huge dining hall, several nightclubs, theaters, carnival rides, snack bars and restaurants, a shopping center, a video-games parlor, a Go-Kart track, and a betting parlor. But now a sign on the betting parlor says it is closed until next Monday, the nightclubs and theaters have been turned into worship and seminar space for every age and special-interest group, and the Go-Karts are silent. This year 65,000 Christians have descended on the three camps for one of the three week-long events; 30,000 have been turned away for lack of space. The planning group has decided to expand to four weeks next year in order to accommodate 100,000 happy campers. Many have come in cars. But not a few have come in church buses, taking their holiday with the saints.
About one-third of those attending are Baptists, about one-third are Anglicans, and about one-third are “other.” Almost all have been touched—and loosened up—by the charismatic movement. We Americans are used to big—the prairie, the Rocky Mountains, the Sears Tower. But we have never seen anything like this: 65,000 Christians together for worship, learning, and fun. And this is secular England.
A Dagwood Celebration
One of Spring Harvest’s main features is the celebrations—singing and praying and exhortation done up on a large scale for all age groups. In the Gaiety Theater about 2,000 are gathered, while many more crowd the Big Top and still others watch on closed-circuit television. On the stage is a small orchestra—strings, guitars, flute, a couple of electronic keyboards, a few brass players, and the inevitable percussion. The music is made for crowds. The melodic lines cannot be whistled like old Youth for Christ choruses. But the music is rich in harmonic color and depends heavily on rhythm. The words are generally addressed to Jesus, and filled with first- and second-person pronouns, designed to promote personal interaction with the Lord. “At your feet we fall … as we come before your throne to worship you” is a far cry from a traditional hymn like “Immortal, invisible, God only wise; in light inaccessible hid from our eyes”; yet both encourage praise.
Hands are raised. People shout glory, and they sway and twist in time to the music. The Gaiety is too crowded for much more action than that, but over at the Big Top space has been kept clear for those who prefer to dance to their worship music. There several dozen hold hands in rings and dance something like a hora before the dais. The celebration is a Dagwood sandwich of music and preaching and prayer, and then more of the same.
Clive Calver For The Defense
Eager to know more, we seek out Clive Calver, formerly director of British Youth for Christ, now general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, and the guiding spirit behind Spring Harvest. He is angry about the newspaper article. It made Spring Harvest look loony, and he rises eagerly to the defense. About 50 percent of English evangelicals are charismatic, he explains, and he offers a summary of his description of the charismatic renewal, which appears in his book The Holy Spirit: A charismatic (1) is someone who believes in the continued existence of the gifts of the Spirit; (2) has had some form of crisis experience of the work of the Holy Spirit in his or her life; (3) may or may not practice tongues; (4) has a balanced attitude toward those who have had no crisis experience but have undergone progressive sanctification; and (5) has a profound commitment to evangelicalism. Fifteen years ago, says Calver, charismatic issues drew clear lines between evangelicals. Now mutual tolerance and joint efforts have borne their fruit: all evangelicals, he feels, have had their spiritual lives improved by the charismatic movement.
The defense does not rest: Not only is the charismatic renewal not loony. Spring Harvest is not a bunch of Jesus Joggers. The key to Spring Harvest, he says, is the teaching block in the program. Last year it focused on four themes under the heading “Who’s Pulling Your Strings?” There were seminars in Sartre, Bultmann, and Nietzsche. This year’s theme, “Deckchairs on the Titanic,” focuses on four “icebergs” that threaten the church’s progress—culture, pressure, change, and growth. These efforts at teaching are ambitious, but the seminars we sample seem to be made up more of good intentions than solid information.
Spring Harvest was begun 11 years ago as a one-week training session in evangelism. But after Calver went to the Evangelical Alliance as general secretary six years ago, changes were made both in EA and in Spring Harvest. Attendance at Spring Harvest has grown from the initial 2,700 to next year’s expected 100,000. And under Calver’s leadership team, membership in EA has quadrupled in the past six years.
Calver is justly proud of the numerical growth of Spring Harvest and EA, but he has his sights set higher. “This generation of evangelicals began as 2 to 2½ percent of the population,” he says. “We’ve accepted the figure that 5 percent is necessary in order to make an impact on our society. The next generation may have that opportunity.”
He is also proud of the coalition he has built. In the past, English evangelicals have been fractious, he says, “but now people are loving and working and praying together who wouldn’t have been speaking to each other five years ago. It has come so quickly that it is still fragile.”
Holding together that coalition may be a major task. But it has been our impression that the traditional denominations mean much less to evangelical Christians here than they do in the U.S. Calver validates that perception: “I am just a Christian,” he says, reluctantly owning up to his Baptist affiliation. “Christians at Spring Harvest are just Christians. Denominations don’t mean anything to them.”
Contrary to Calver’s assertion, denominational identity continues to mean something to the Anglican leaders we interview at Spring Harvest. They complain of the suspicion they feel from fellow believers because they are loyal to a church that occasionally produces the likes of the bishop of Durham. And they feel that the need for an Anglican presence was not taken into account as the various planning groups and committees were formed.
Counting England’s Flock
Peter Brierley, the European director of World Vision’s MARC Europe, is a man of numbers and trends. He is also the editor of the UK Christian Handbook, a listing of over four thousand Christian organizations arranged by type of ministry, and cross indexed by name, location, and key leadership personnel. Along with each listing is such useful information as the circulation of periodicals and the founding date of organizations—ranging from the Church in Wales, Diocese of Llandaff, A.D. 550, to the Church of God Assembly (Pentecostal), A.D. 1985.
But the UK Christian Handbook is far more than a believer’s phone book. It contains a wealth of statistical information about church-growth patterns. The good news announced in the 1989/90 edition is this: “The rate of decline in church membership is lessening.” In one way, this reflects the fact that as the elderly members die, there are fewer members in that high-mortality age group. As the attrition-by-death curve levels out, what new members are gained will mostly be younger people, and the churches in England can expect a bit of an upturn in membership.
Indeed, among the traditional denominations, Baptists seem recently to have turned the corner and begun to grow numerically. Between 1970 and 1975, the Baptist Union of England dropped just over 5 percent of their membership. Between 1975 and 1980, the decline leapt to nearly 14.5 percent. But between 1980 and 1983 the curve slowed to a 2 percent decrease followed by a 2.75 percent increase in the next two years, and an additional 2 percent growth by 1987.
“The Baptist strength is in their church attendance,” Brierley says. “They have many more people coming to them than they have joining them. One of the biggest problems the Baptists face is how to get commitments. As elderly people die, they have been replaced by younger attenders, but not by younger members. The issue for Baptists is how to convert attendance into commitment, and commitment into membership. They have now scored a slight success.”
Brierley notes that it is not just churches that have difficulty getting new members: “We have got a situation where people are reluctant to join anything—clubs, societies, trade unions. It is due to the responsibility factor. If you belong, you have an accountability, and the general climate of life in the last ten years is to go away from responsibility: Twenty-five percent of the children born in this country in the last quarter were born outside of marriage.”
Serbians, blacks, and Anglo-Catholics
Brierley notes other interesting areas of growth:
• The charts in the UK Christian Handbook show Eastern orthodoxy increasing at an enormous rate. That growth is largely because of immigrant peoples, yet “the immigrants have attracted some of their friends and neighbors. So you have English people going to the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.” But, Brierley cautions, the charts may be deceiving: “Whilst the figures look very appealing for the Orthodox, they are based on very small numbers. So any increase is going to show up as a large percentage.”
• England’s black churches, mostly made up of African and West Indian immigrants who were not accepted by the existing churches, are also undergoing interesting changes: “They follow the South African pattern of mushrooming independent churches, which split and move off to form a different church.” (On the other hand, one black minister told us Thatchernomics has resulted in reduced job availability for blacks in northern industrial areas. The net result has been a reversal of earlier immigration patterns as blacks return to the West Indies in search of work.) What is of more interest to Brierley is a newfound interest among whites. “Some of the larger, more established groups have become sufficiently attractive to draw some white believers to their congregations. The New Testament Church of God, for example, has even got two or three white pastors—but they worship African style.”
• While other observers see the Church of England growing primarily in its evangelical parishes, Brierley finds the Anglo-Catholic (high-church) parishes on the upswing in attendance (though not in membership). Why? “Because you sense God in the stillness. Not in the charismatic, not in the effervescent, the noisy, but in the quietness you sense God. In the turbulent, noisy, distracting world, people look for peace and come here.”
• Roman Catholics are going “up-class,” says Brierley. “They have gone from being working class to middle class. And although they have got decreasing numbers of priests in this country, they are building many more new churches—mostly in the suburbs where the middle class lives. Pentecostals have traditionally been going to the working class, but not so much now as they used to. The house churches have definitely gone down-class in their growth, partly because they have established churches on the housing estates [public housing].” While Anglo-Catholics have traditionally exhibited a strong social concern for the poor, Brierley believes their theological education hampers them. “It causes them to speak a different language from that of the working class,” he says.
An almost Christian nation?
American Christians tend to see nominal faith as worse than no faith at all, as an inoculation against true religion. But Peter Brierley and other British Christians see it as an opportunity for growth.
“What is the theology of nominal Christians?” Brierley asks rhetorically. “They believe in a personal God, they accept that Jesus is the Son of God. (Though they may not understand what that means.) They invariably own a Bible. It’s a holy book to them. They won’t throw it away or use it to prop open the door—that’s what the dictionary is for. They want their children taught religion in the schools. They by and large believe in life after death. Eighty-two percent say they pray—although they may pray only when they put their money on the horses.
“The key thing that is missing from the theology of these nominal Christians is any idea of the Person or work of the Holy Spirit. To them it may only be a force for good. That is partly why the charismatic movement is so important, because it is demonstrating the power of the Holy Spirit. After all, one of the tragedies of nominalism is that it is a form of godliness with no power.”
Iii. The Disappearing Denomination: Wimberized Anglicans And The Church On The Sofa
As formal church membership in England continues to decline (see “Counting England’s Flock,” p. 29), Christian identity does not seem to be disappearing. When the BBC’s religious broadcasting division telecast a Christmastime program of sacred music and testimonies by Christian artists, the audience ratings were comparable to American viewing of the Super Bowl.
However, to many believers in England, the traditional denominations seem irrelevant. Those believers do not feel particularly bonded to others by virtue of a historic set of beliefs that would define them as Baptist, Methodist, or Brethren so much as by special events and transdenominational movements.
Christians in England can attend and feel unified by national events. It is a compact country where the morning weather report on the national television channels is relevant for all of England, and the Royal Mail aims to deliver a first-class letter anywhere in the country the day after it is posted (85 percent actually make it on schedule). People in northern population centers such as York or Manchester can reach London by fast train in only three hours. Thus, national occasions such as Spring Harvest, the Greenbelt Festival (at which 30,000 Christians gather to engage with Christian artists and musicians), the Keswick Convention, the March for Jesus, or the periodic Billy Graham or Luis Palau missions, can have local and personal significance.
One example of the fading denomination, however, is a simple parish church in the industrial North. Saint Thomas’s, Crookes, in Sheffield, is a yoked parish, blending a Baptist church with a Church of England congregation. Canon Robert Warren, the Anglican minister, has been the vicar since 1971. Paddy Mallon, the Baptist minister, has been there only since 1988.
Saint Thomas’s is not the only Baptist-Church of England yoking. Warren and Mallon know of at least eight other such parishes. However, these other parishes (known as Local Ecumenical Projects or LEPS) represent an attempt to hold on to church-based Christianity in declining areas where neither Baptists nor Anglicans have enough active members to support a church on their own. Saint Thomas’s is different. While undergoing a much-needed renovation of its physical plant, the parish arranged to share facilities with the local Baptists. They got on so well that when Saint Thomas’s renovation was completed, they decided to stay together.
Booming Church, Quiet Parsons
In the 1960s, Saint Thomas’s had a congregation of about 150. Today there are over 1,000 worshipers. And they haven’t stopped growing. Both ministers say the growth is directly related to their encounters with the Holy Spirit in the charismatic movement and the ministry of John Wimber. But both say that the successes at Saint Thomas’s have all been born out of despair. They had to face failure before they could experience what God wanted to give them. One evangelical bishop told us Saint Thomas’s has been thoroughly “Wimberized.” And attending evening worship there seems to bear out that judgment. Worship begins with an instrumental ensemble accompanying extended singing of choruses rather inexpertly projected on the wall.
After Mallon’s notices and Warren’s sermon, a member of the parish offers a testimony about her healing: The emotional and spiritual integration she has experienced has been more profound than the healing. Then comes a time of openness to the Holy Spirit, openness to healing of one sort or another, as team members move through the congregation praying for those to whom they feel led. Nothing much noticeable happens. A few people stand up, one or two ask for special prayer. The service concludes, not with a bang, but a whimper.
After the service, we meet with Warren and Mallon in the church office. They are as low-key when talking to us as they are in leading worship. Considering Saint Thomas’s widespread notoriety, we are surprised that the leaders are charismatic only in their piety, but not in their personalities. Americans are used to hype and salesmanship. We expect booming churches to have pastors with booming voices. Shy clergy get nowhere in Yank culture. Yet here are the leaders of one of England’s fastest-growing congregations, so soft-spoken we often have to ask them to repeat their remarks.
Surprisingly, Warren and Mallon are generally critical of the renewal movement. “There are some unhealthy things in the charismatic experience,” Warren says; “for example, living off other people’s experience of God. Some people would rather read Joyce Huggett’s Listening to God than actually listen to God. There is a new form of self-centered self-awareness, a new pietism that fails to change the world. Evangelicals and charismatics need each other,” he continues. “A significant part of evangelicalism is doing the gospel in the power of the flesh. Charismatics need to change the world by doing the gospel. Evangelicals need to learn how to do it in the power of the Spirit.”
Despite their concerns for renewing the renewal, the pair is pleased with the ministry of Saint Thomas’s and the influence it is able to have on the wider church. Saint Thomas’s has a five-to-one export ratio—for every person who joins from another local church, five have gone out to act as leaders elsewhere. In the North of England, there is a dearth of renewal, says Warren. As a result, Saint Thomas’s has become a resource center. About one-half of the churches in northern England’s “Urban Priority Areas” have benefited from Saint Thomas’s.
Saint Thomas’s is known for its ministry to young adults. In the church, the band is warming up, and to our ears (as parents of teenagers) it sounds like heavy metal. In form, the 9 P.M. service will be much like the service we attended earlier in the evening. Music, testimony, teaching, waiting on the Holy Spirit. But the cultural forms will belong to the culture of young, working adults: rock music, vernacular preaching, moving images projected on the walls and winking from video monitors, leather-clad bodies packed into a pewless worship center.
Several of the youth leaders have university degrees in theology, but despite their educations, these leaders have targeted the inner city. The results of this evangelism in the black-leather set are impressive. In the past three years, attendance has grown to almost 400. The leaders have formed 25 discipleship groups. To join one of the groups, a young person must make serious commitments—including a three-year pledge to tithe, to forgo drugs, and to carry out some specific task within the congregation.
The service progresses according to pattern, moving from teaching to invitation. The group waits in silence for the Holy Spirt to work. The scattered video monitors no longer flash action and color, but glow unblinking in that reflective moment. Is this the same group that an hour earlier was shaking the walls with its music?
“Don’t give it too much publicity, too early” Warren had said. “The youth service is a tender plant, and it must not go middle class.”
Guerrilla Evangelism
Far to the south, Ichthus Fellowship is evangelizing southeast London. And even more than Saint Thomas’s, Crookes, it embodies the decline of the denomination.
Ichthus Fellowship was born of Roger and Faith Forster’s commitment to in-depth evangelism in the inner city. They began with a group of 16 like-minded people meeting in the Forsters’ front room. After discovering that the local churches had no work in the government housing projects, they “went public,” holding regular services in the clubroom of the “housing estate” just 200 yards from their home. They redecorated the shabby hall and issued invitations at every door in the project. By the second weekly meeting, they had doubled their number.
Since those humble beginnings, Ichthus Fellowship has expanded to nearly 2,000 people meeting in about 15 congregations.
The Forsters are about as unlike Robert Warren and Paddy Mallon as they can be. Where Warren and Mallon seem quiet, self-effacing, and perhaps a bit weary, the Forsters are outgoing, self-confident, and energetic. Roger, who holds degrees in math and theology, speaks rapidly and flashes a quick smile to punctuate each point he makes. The Forster persona fits the Forster history: rough-and-ready evangelism resulting in tremendous church growth in territory that had for centuries remained obdurate to the witness of the historic churches.
They have taken that background and applied it to a specific neighborhood through a sustained presence. One thing they learned was that the quickest and most efficient way to train Christian workers is on the job. Ichthus Fellowship’s training for guerrilla evangelism produces effective front-line workers. But it ignores the need for the study of the history of Christian doctrine. Roger Forster can probably safeguard his community against repeating the classic heresies. But what will happen after he retires? How long can a community without theologically trained leadership remain orthodox?
The Forsters are willing to take the risk. They see the Holy Spirit as very active in their work and the work of other independent churches. They see the traditional parish system as restricting the evangelistic vision of believers. Even though one-third of the Anglican clergy are now evangelical, they fear that outmoded structures will prevent any significant influence on their secular culture. While trying to “keep relationships right across the board with historic denominations,” and “never becoming separatists,” they are “putting their time, money, and energy elsewhere.”
Restoring The Church
Ichthus Fellowship is sometimes classified as part of a larger trend known as the “house-church movement,” what sociologist Andrew Walker calls “a more radical version of the Charismatic Renewal.” House-church movement is a misnomer, for only a few of the churches meet in houses. Having begun in places like the Forsters’ front room, they have quickly expanded into rented halls and then into their own buildings. Several number at least 1,000 worshipers.
Not closely linked to one another, the house churches share an important theme: the restoration of New Testament Christianity. Thus they leap over centuries of history, tradition, and culture to the Book of Acts and the letters of Paul.
The emphases of the Ichthus Fellowship are representative of this restoration theme: They emphasize fellowship, structuring the church to encourage deep interpersonal sharing; mission, making evangelism and social action central rather than peripheral to church life; and training, using on-the-job learning to produce an army of well-equipped Christian workers. And they stress three attitudes: love, by which all people are to know Christ’s disciples; humility, which allows them to learn from failure; and openness to the Holy Spirit, by which they are “determined not to get bogged down by dead traditions or sterile rituals.”
Any student of church history would recognize those themes and attitudes as being characteristic of many manifestations of renewal through the centuries. And any student of church history knows that the green shoots of renewal can bear the thorns of elitism and authoritarianism.
And as some of the house churches have often gone beyond those simple biblical themes, they have trod dangerous ground. For example, in their effort to follow New Testament patterns of leadership and structure, they have tried to revive the offices of apostle and prophet. In the early 1970s, the charismatic Arthur Wallis pulled together a group of leaders of disparate house groups. This group, jokingly called “The Magnificent Seven,” became the focus for the Restoration movement. Soon these leaders learned from a “word of prophecy” that they themselves were “apostles,” with a ministry of oversight and authority.
The unfortunate result in one segment of the Restoration movement has been rigid authoritarianism, including spiritually harmful shepherding practices in which church members are bound to submit the decisions of their daily lives to apostolic approval.
The Restorationist spirit has little regard for the historic churches. Even when they experience renewal, they seem to have produced little additional evangelistic thrust. As Gerald Coates, leader of the Cobham Fellowship in Southwest London, says, “Often the charismatic evangelical churches have changed their liturgy, but otherwise remained the same. They’re just happier now—which is infinitely better than being miserable, but it doesn’t fulfill our Lord’s commission.”
Because of their passion for re-forming the church by producing an alternative body, Restorationists are accused of two serious faults: recruiting members primarily from existing church bodies, and neglecting to evangelize the unchurched.
Here the evangelistically committed Roger and Faith Forster distance themselves from the Restorationists: “In the early phases of the house-church movement, they weren’t very evangelistic,” says Roger. “They actually spoke against it,” chimes in Faith, adding, “They said the church needs to be renewed and sorted out.”
The Forsters also distance themselves from the Restorationists on another point: Ichthus has always tried to work in cooperation with existing churches. Restorationists, at least in the early years, were exclusive and condemning of those who remained in the denominations. Typical of that attitude is Coates’s comment: “You sit under a ministry of confusion, you get confused. If you sit under a ministry of heresy, you become a heretic.”
Coates is not so critical as some of the Restorationist leaders in the North of England. Their exclusive spirit resulted in a major split between two factions in the Restorationist movement, labeled R1 and R2 by sociologist Walker. R1, largely based in the North of England, more rigidly adheres to the original vision and retains its exclusivist attitudes and authoritarian practices. One Anglican minister told us, “R1 meets the needs people feel for structure and security. It is tight, moralistic, anticultural, and antitradition. Thus R1 people can feel free and pure from pluralism and scandal.” R2, more adaptive and willing to work with other Christian believers, is largely southern. Some of those in R2 are even known for their “greenish” (environmentalist) and “pinkish” (socialist) politics. R2 is also less strict in its attitudes toward women in leadership. As Coates says, “We’re not nearly so concerned about the women who might be ordained as most of the men who have already been ordained.”
“Our desire is to release women as much as we can,” says Coates. “We’ve been like an army fighting with one hand tied behind our back. Within evangelical circles, there’s very little left of the intuitive gifts and abilities. This may sound like a sexist comment, but men tend to be more logical than women, while women are more intuitive than men. Generally speaking. Because we’ve silenced women, we’ve pushed out the intuitive area of life, the vision, the leading of the Holy Spirit. Roger Forster and I and a few other teams would see no problem with seeing women in leadership, eldership, apostolic ministry. They’ve been doing it.”
In a country where traditional religion seems generally on the decline, Restorationism has gained attention because it has grown so rapidly. The outspoken Coates attributes Restorationism’s growth in part to the independence of its parts, its lack of formal organization: “God has asked us to serve him in our generation by planting seeds that will extend his kingdom. Rarely does that happen by a coming together. Quite the opposite. It’s the multiplicity of churches and groups and church plantings that is effective, although it looks very disorganized.”
In more recent years, Restorationism’s growth has slowed, and its more moderate forms have become socially acceptable. (British pop singer Cliff Richard is a member of the Cobham Fellowship, and “700 Club” host Sheila Walsh was once associated with it.) The accusations of “poaching” from the more-established denominations are no longer heard so loudly.
Estimates vary widely as to Restorationism’s continuing expansion. A graph in the UK Christian Handbook shows three groupings of independent churches. Brethren and Congregational churches are portrayed in slow decline, while the house-church movement is shown expanding rapidly—from an estimated 95,000 adherents in 1987 to a projected 200,000 in the year 2000. This growth is, however, a straight-line projection of the growth experienced by these groups in the early eighties. Many who are close to the house churches fear the movement has stalled and serious evangelization of the unchurched is not the priority it should be.
Evangelism is, however, a renewed priority in Baptist circles.
Baptists Decide To Survive
David Coffey, director of the Baptist Union’s Department of Evangelism, says, “It is an interesting time in Baptist history.” Church membership, which had for a long time been on the decline, has begun to register its first consistent gains in many years (see “Counting England’s Flock,” page 29). Not surprisingly, says Coffey, those gains can be directly traced to a small group of committed activists and to his denomination’s commitment to the necessary structural change.
The collection of activists is called Mainstream, a movement founded in 1979 by a handful of individuals whose spiritualities ranged from charismatic enthusiasm to Keswickian pietism—but all of them committed to the life and growth of the Baptist church. The Reformed wing of the baptistic churches, especially, has seen quite a turnaround, says Coffey. He cites Roy Clements of Cambridge and Peter Lewis as being key movers in this awakening.
But structural changes are as important as parachurch movements, according to Coffey. In the early eighties, someone stood up in the Baptist Union assembly and asked pointedly why they had been experiencing a membership decline. The result of that question was the appointment of an investigative team. Their report, “Signs of Hope,” said evangelism is not an option, but the raison d’être of the church. As a result of this report, the Baptist Union decided to give evangelism a higher priority by creating in 1985 a Department of Evangelism, whose director is now part of the BU’s secretariat. For British Baptists, both moves were highly unusual.
The Baptist turnaround reflects other changes in British church life: Baptists, like Anglicans, are seeing an increasing percentage of evangelical students in their theological colleges; and Baptists, like almost all UK Christian bodies, have seen a renewal of worship, which, among other things, has moved the main focus of worship music from a choir to the congregation as a whole.
The increased membership in Baptist Union churches is a mixture of transfer growth (largely from Brethren, Elim, and Anglican sources) and conversion growth. The transfer growth partially reflects the lower profile of the denomination in the UK—people who move these days are likely to shop for a church rather than automatically identify with the local franchise of their former church. Even those Baptists who are committed to evangelism, Coffey says, speak of the denomination within which they work as “the best boat to fish from.”
Iv. The Renewal Of Social Concern: When Compassion Is Labeled “Left”
Michael Eastman, secretary of Frontier Youth Trust, a coordinating and resource organization for youth ministries, remembers the debates of his student days at London Bible College: the discussions then centered on theology as evangelicals evaluated and interacted with the forces of liberalism and Neo-orthodoxy. The relatively small numbers of evangelicals drew (or threw) them together in theological fellowship and study across denominational lines.
Later, as evangelicals grew in strength, issues of ecclesiology began to dominate as believers considered their place in the historic denominations. A major public showdown occurred in 1966 when independent preacher D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who had been scheduled to address the National Assembly of Evangelicals on the subject of unity, called instead for evangelicals to leave the historic churches. A surprised John Stott was chairing the meeting when the respected Welsh preacher spoke; nevertheless, he rose and rebuked Lloyd-Jones and rallied Anglican evangelicals to their churchly duty. Most Anglican evangelicals stayed with the established church, but the event stimulated careful thinking and critical discussion.
The next debate to rock English evangelicalism was brought on by the charismatic renewal. Again Stott was at the center of the controversy, decrying the implications of neo-Pentecostal theology. These three postwar debates have settled down as neo-orthodoxy has faded, as loyal Anglicans have proved their value to the evangelical movement as a whole, and as the charismatic movement has modified its own theology, even as its yeasty ferment has leavened nearly every part of the evangelical lump.
But those debates, the tall, rangy Eastman remembers, were not so acerbic as today’s intra-evangelical squabble. The advent of Thatcherism has created an English version of America’s Religious Right. And the net result is a politically polarized evangelicalism: one that has labeled Eastman and others Left, and offered the not-too-subtle hint that those who make social concern an aspect of the gospel lack something in basic Christian understanding.
Eastman, for one, is not interested in politics. But he is interested in helping hurting people. Although not an Anglican, Eastman served as a resource person on the archbishop of Canterbury’s commission that produced the 1985 report Faith in the City. “Pure Marxist theology,” was how one spokesman for Mrs. Thatcher’s government characterized the report just before it was released. (England’s Marxists, however, wouldn’t own the document. “Woolly liberal document,” they sniffed.) Curiously enough, the report contained little or no theology, but rather it brought together and analyzed statistics on poverty and unemployment. The problem, says Eastman, is that Thatcher has destroyed the postwar political consensus. Political debates used to be pragmatic, about the best means to achieve agreed-upon ends. Ends—such as relieving youth unemployment—were assumed to be good. The New Tories are not really Tories, he says, but a reincarnation of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberals for whom a theology that radically separates the church and its “spiritual” business from the state and social concerns will do just fine. That kind of theology may catch the imagination of blue-collar workers “on the up,” but it certainly did not sell in Scotland, with its Calvinist heritage that emphasizes the integration of social and spiritual concern. That is why Mrs. Thatcher’s speech to the Church of Scotland Assembly, emphasizing policies that taught responsibility, provoked a storm of criticism in the UK.
On the wall of Eastman’s City Road office is a map of Saint Giles’s parish, the bit of Anglican geography in which the Scripture Union building sits. Eastman walks to the window and looks down at the busy streets. He talks about the 80 percent Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant population of the area, how their lack of facility with English locks them into jobs in garment-industry garret workshops, “in almost nineteenth-century sweatshop conditions.” He talks passionately about the new urban underclass as “the fourth world.” He resonates with the phrase of Liverpool bishop and former all-England cricketer David Sheppard, as he speaks of the “communities of the left-behind.”
Eastman turns back from the window. “Frontier Youth Trust must work with youth who are marginalized by unemployment—one-and-a-half million or more in this country. In places such as parts of Liverpool and Newcastle, 80 percent of the youth are unemployed. It used to be we could call for something to be done purely on humanitarian grounds. But now,” he says with an air of frustration, “if we even raise the question, we are labeled leftist.”
Catholics Are No Longer Outlaws
Pope Pius V’s 1570 bull of excommunication and deposition against Queen Elizabeth I, who sought to embrace believers of both Catholic and Protestant persuasion within a single national church under her jurisdiction, set off a long struggle. English Roman Catholics were viewed as traitors for their ongoing loyalty to a foreign-based religious leader and were barred from holding office unless they swore disbelief in papal supremacy and transubstantiation.
England was regarded for centuries by the Vatican as a missionary region whose ancient Catholic bishoprics of Canterbury, York, and London were vacant because the state had installed a succession of Protestant usurpers.
But the Church of England and its Anglican offspring, such as the U.S. Episcopal Church, still maintain much in common with the Roman Catholic Church—for example, the historic succession of bishops, a sacerdotal priesthood, a belief in the “real presence” of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, and liturgical worship. Tension has persisted within Anglicanism itself between Protestant and Catholic elements.
Following the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival led by John Keble, E. B. Pusey, and John Henry Newman, a freer atmosphere led Rome to establish a new hierarchy in Britain, and the spread of Anglo-Catholic sentiment led to new moves for rapprochement. But any hopes of mutual recognition were dashed by Pope Leo XIII in an 1896 bull declaring Anglican priestly orders null and void.
The modern quest for reconciliation began in earnest with a visit to the Vatican in 1966 in which Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey and Pope Paul VI agreed to seek unity and set up the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). This panel of clerics and theologians produced statements on several doctrines in which substantial agreement was declared while differences still remain. Pope John Paul II visited Canterbury Cathedral in 1982. At the local level, joint Anglican-Roman Catholic work proceeded even faster in some places with many parishes entering covenant relationships where strong common beliefs were shared by parish priests, laity, and bishops on both sides.
But the movement for women priests and bishops, which was winning the day in the influential Anglican branches in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and other nations, has raised perhaps an insurmountable barrier to Anglican-Catholic reconciliation. The Vatican under two popes has declared this is out of the question in the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1988 Lambeth Conference, Anglican bishops voted overwhelmingly to recognize the right of a regional church to ordain women priests and bishops even though other regional churches reject the practice. Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie said this compromise was needed to maintain unity, but he acknowledged that relations would be impaired among Anglicans as well as with Roman Catholics with whom unity discussions had reached a serious stage. Pope John Paul II publicly declared he suffered anguish over the Anglican decision and released a letter to Runcie saying the Lambeth decision “placed new obstacles in the way.”
During an official visit to the Vatican September 29–October 2 last year, which was denounced by Ulster fundamentalist firebrand Ian Paisley, the Pope and the archbishop signed a joint declaration that asserted: “The question and practice of the admission of women to the ministerial priesthood in some provinces of the Anglican Communion prevents reconciliation between us even where there is otherwise progress toward agreement in faith on the meaning of the Eucharist and the ordained ministry.”
They added that continued dialogue and theological study will “help to deepen and enlarge our understanding” even though “we ourselves do not see a solution to this obstacle.”
Still a major sticking point is the role of the papacy itself. While Runcie and many Anglican clergy would gladly acknowledge the primacy of the bishop of Rome, few Anglicans would be willing to accept Vatican control over national or regional church affairs. And while a large segment of Anglican clergy in many countries see themselves essentially as “non-Roman” Catholics, surveys have shown a majority of the nominal Anglican laity in the U.S. and England regard themselves as closer to the Protestant ethos.
Anglican evangelicals have welcomed the Anglican-Roman dialogue but raised several criticisms of its fruits in an “open letter,” written primarily by John R. W. Stott and signed by prominent clergy and lay leaders. Among them is a view that the results of the first dialogue “betray a reluctance to allow the Spirit of God through the Word of God to challenge our inherited beliefs and practices.”
On the crucial question of justification by faith, the Anglican evangelicals complain that ARCIC theologians implied the Reformation split over this doctrine was due to a “misunderstanding,” while it actually came from a fundamental disagreement between Reformers who taught that believers are justified solely through the righteousness of Christ, and the Council of Trent, which rejected this teaching.
“If justification by grace alone through faith alone is now believed by both our churches, its implications need to be spelled out especially in relation to such authorized Roman Catholic beliefs and practices as purgatory, penance, indulgences, and masses for the dead,” the letter said.
Moreover, “in both churches we discern a gap between theory and practice. Neither nominal Anglicanism nor popular Roman Catholicism seems to manifest the joy of the justified.… There can be no reconciliation without repentance on both sides.”
By Richard L. Walker.
Salvation From Structural Evil
In the postwar evangelical renaissance, young and enthusiastic ministers, many of them Bash’s boys, entered the cities and tried to work with the youth. But everything they thought they knew about youth work, everything that worked so well in their schools, did not work in the city. Thus they began to experiment, to look to social workers, educators, and other professionals for help, and to network. As these young ministers discovered one another, they got together informally to share, and in 1964 their organization was formalized as Frontier Youth Trust. John Stott was the first chairman and David Sheppard was the first secretary. Stott was also at that time president of Scripture Union (which promoted Bible study and evangelism in the schools), and he suggested there might be some connection between the missions of the two organizations. Thus they were joined.
The next major step in the development of evangelical social concern was “Keele ’67,” the first National Evangelical Anglican Congress (NEAC). At that congress, postwar Anglican evangelicals hammered out their positions on many key issues, ranging from liturgical reform to ecumenical relations. The Keele statements were also a landmark in social concern. Once again John Stott was the motive force for change, and Sir Norman Anderson provided the theoretical grounding. Keele ’67 admitted “shame that we have not thought sufficiently deeply or radically about the problems of our society.” The statements on social concern caught the imaginations of postwar evangelicals. Within just two years, George Hoffman, one of the pre-Keele agitators, was appointed to head the newly formed TEAR Fund (from the initials of The Evangelical Alliance Relief Fund), which has since grown to be one of the two largest non-Roman Catholic aid agencies in England. Other agencies followed, such as Evangelical Christians for Racial Justice and the Shaftesbury Project, an evangelical think tank on social issues begun in 1969 on the fringe of Inter-Varsity Fellowship by Alan Storkey, one of the few British advocates of the Reformed social thought of Abraham Kuyper and Hermann Dooyeweerd.
The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, a training center for relating faith to the social forces at work in the modern world, was founded by Stott after he retired from All Souls’ in 1975. The London Institute and the Shaftesbury Project have recently been merged into a new organization, Christian Impact. Evangelicals involved in these organizations have made their influence more widely felt by participating in the drafting of major Church of England reports such as “Faith in the City” and “Not Just for the Poor,” as well as by writing for Third Way, a magazine of Christian social thought.
The forefathers of English evangelicals saw major social needs and devoted countless hours righting wrongs. William Wilberforce’s crusade against slavery is the best known of many efforts, ranging from the establishment of Lord Shaftesbury’s “Ragged Schools” to educate poor children (the forerunner of modern Sunday schools) to the founding of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Yet, according to historian David Bebbington, these nineteenth-century reforms sprang from a hatred of sin rather than from a humanitarian impulse. The lives of many people were significantly bettered by these efforts, but only because sin was so closely associated with social degradation.
Today’s evangelicals have adopted a social concern that could be called liberal, in the proper sense of that term: committed to democracy, civil liberty, and social progress. They strongly rejected the 1968 World Council of Churches definition of the church’s mission in socio-political terms, but they have built a theology that holds together the need for salvation from both personal sin and structural evil. Perhaps because premillennial eschatology has never flourished in England the way it has in America, British evangelicals are much more optimistic about their potential impact on society.
V. God Save The People: Is English Evangelicalism Going Populist?
In some ways, the story of Christianity in England parallels that of the war between the classes—between those of high birth and good education who know what God wants for everyone, on the one hand, and those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow and alternate between despising Christianity as the religion of the squirarchy and appropriating the liberating message of the gospel as preached and sung in the common tongue. Evangelicalism embodies this class tension, having its roots in the Wesleyan revival, which, on the one hand, drew on Enlightenment epistemology while at the same time preaching a gospel for the transformation of the masses.
We visited a thirteenth-century village church with a friend who is actively working to bring renewal to the parish through small study groups. The chancel of the church, he pointed out, was in good repair because it was maintained by the noblesse oblige of the local squire. The nave showed signs of serious deterioration where water had leaked through the roof and into walls. The nave was the people’s responsibility, one they had a hard time paying for. It was sad to see a historic building rot. But our friend tells us how an interest in the good news has developed among the church’s aging membership.
Down the road from the thirteenth-century church and up a narrow lane stands the Primitive Methodist Chapel. It was built in the nineteenth century by the people of the village. At the time, they had to petition the squire for permission to build it. It is a building of no architectural significance, but humbly built, it symbolizes the dedication of the common people to the spiritually (and socially) liberating gospel. (It was in just such chapels across the land that England’s labor movement was organized.)
The village church and the neighboring chapel are remnants of a Christianity that was. Through the years, the Church of England has been perceived as the church of the ruling class. Thus, Christianity has often been perceived as not having much to do with the common man. For many years, the general feeling was that religion was for those who could afford it.
Now the squirarchy no longer rules either society or the church. There is a decided feeling against class distinctions even among those with money, education, or patrimony. And like their secular counterparts, today’s English Christians despise class.
Are the changes we have observed over the past 20 years in English evangelicalism part of a generalized anticlass reaction?
One friend said that the Evangelical Alliance, which in the last decade has come under the control of professional evangelists, has shifted from an organization with a clear doctrinal identity to a fuzzy, experiential movement. Is this a populist change?
The first two NEACS (1967 and 1977) were called National Evangelical Anglican Congresses. They were heady occasions for hammering out doctrinal and policy statements. But the most recent NEAC (1988) was a National Evangelical Anglican Celebration. And a good time was had by all—except those who wanted to hammer out doctrinal and policy statements. Is this a sign of Anglican evangelicalism becoming a movement of the people rather than a religion of the leadership?
The “house churches” of the more moderate R2 variety are growing rapidly in blighted urban areas where attendance at the Church of England is .085 percent. (Compare that to the national average of 9 percent general church attendance.) Is English Christianity finally becoming the religion of the oppressed?
Charismatic worship style (although not necessarily charismatic theology) has penetrated nearly every corner of evangelicalism, shifting the focus from the liturgical and kerygmatic role of the pastor and preacher to the joyful participation of the congregation. Is this a sign of the democratization of evangelicalism?
This charismatic-flavored evangelicalism also tends to have a strong social-concern component, with activity on behalf of the poor and the unemployed viewed as an essential part of the Christian life. Is this not a people’s religion?
Many of these changes are the results of the labors of classical evangelicals, the postwar leadership that not only called for a learned and thoughtful spirituality, but also fought to place social justice on the evangelical agenda, ministry in the hands of the laity, and worship music back in the mouths of the people. The rest of these changes may be more closely tied to other influences—including the importation of some American religious trends. But one thing is clear: While the measures of organizational life stagnate or decline among English evangelicals, the heart of organic life is still beating strong.
