The Church – what it is and what it is not

 

The Rector writes in the month of the Lambeth Conference

 

On July 14th 1833 (175 years ago this month) the great and the good assembled in the Church of St Mary in Oxford. They came for Morning Prayer and a Sermon,  the Annual Assize Sermon,  and the congregation was swelled with the Judges and Lawyers. The preacher was a priest who was also the newish Professor of Poetry in the university, John Keble – perhaps some of the keener members of the congregation knew him as the author of a book of poems entitled “The Christian Year”.   Doubtless the Lawyers in their high-backed pews settled back to endure the Sermon, some probably closed their eyes,  Assize Sermons were like that. What they heard in the next half hour opened their ears and their eyes.

 

Keble preached not on the law or society, he preached on the Church, and he had hard words to say. He accused the Church of England and he accused the Establishment of what he called “National Apostasy”,  of falling away from the faith, of denial of the Church’s calling.  I suspect that there wasn’t much of the usual “Lovely Sermon, Padre”  at the church door afterwards.

 

The context of Keble’s protest was what the government was doing.  Parliament was debating an Act to reform the structure of the Anglican church in Ireland and reduce the number of Bishops and Dioceses, which in practical terms made a great deal of sense. In the southern counties of Ireland, where the population remained Roman Catholic, there were very few Anglicans and far too many Bishops, so it was necessary to combine and amalgamate,  and make the governance of the Church something more sensible and sustainable.

 

But Keble’s point was not what was being done, but who was doing it. Parliament, the State, was daring to lay hands on the Church,  treating the church as a department of state and part of the establishment, and the Bishops were doing nothing about it.  It was “national apostasy” and sacrilege.

 

Keble was asking, what is the church ?  Is it just a part of the establishment, or a loose association of believers, or a divine body, called and indwelt by Christ, with a higher allegiance than the magistrates and the lawyers and the MPs, or even the monarch ?   The church is more than just a human body, but a divine society under Christ her Lord. That was Keble’s point.

 

In the last few months we have been studying Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians at evening worship on Sundays. Ephesians has a strong sense of the Church as a divine society, a body of which Christ is the true head,  and the Church grows in relation to him, and only in relation to him:  “From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love”  (Ephesians 4:16). This is no merely human association simply to be governed and ordered in human terms, by human whim. Keble and others dated the nineteenth century renewal of the Anglican Church from that dramatic Sermon, and sought to recall the church to a wider and higher and deeper understanding of itself as a divine community. The Church of England with all its problems was and is just a part of a wider catholic, universal church, as the Creeds bear witness. Yes, it is very human – “the glorious company of saints and fatheads” as a Bishop once called it – but also a universal community in which Christ lives and moves.

 

In one of C.S.Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters”  the Senior Tempter suggests that the Junior Tempter gets his hapless victim to think about the church, the local church with its awkward characters and its factions and its dullness, for that is the way to weigh him down.  The victim must not be allowed to see the church as it truly is, spread throughout space and time, kept and indwelt and empowered  and preserved by Christ. Provided the hapless human can just see the limited picture then there is nothing to worry about. If he or she sees the real picture then the Tempter might as well shut up shop and go home.

 

We worry about the Church of England and about the wider Anglican Communion, and this month much of this will be focussed in the “Lambeth Conference” of Bishops (though some have already declined the invitation to be there). The disagreements of the Bishops, over issues of gender and sexuality and where the boundaries of the community are to be drawn, are real and mirror the concerns of the wider church (not just Anglicans either, it should be said). It is not too much to hope and pray that in the midst of the struggles to understand and discern and maintain the bonds of peace and unity they and we will have a glimpse of what the church truly is – not a very human body with uncertainties and contradictions, but a community held and maintained in life by Christ. A change of perspective, a sense of the bigger picture, might just be the way for truth and unity to be found.  Pray for them.

 

                                                  Roger Clarke

                                                  July 2008