England’s Evangelicals

TRENDS

A slumbering church awakes to the challenge of making the gospel relevant to society’s needs.

“The Christian religion is a fundamental part of our national heritage,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher proclaimed in a controversial speech to the Church of Scotland General Assembly last summer.

Few could argue, for England has maintained an official Christian church for centuries. The surprise came when the Conservative prime minister predicted democracy would not survive without the “moral impulse” provided by “the truths of the Judaic-Christian tradition.”

While hardly embracing a distinctly evangelical theology, many see the prime minister’s comments as further indication of a return to the nation’s religious foundations.

No More Quiet Pietism

Such a return is a reminder of an earlier day, when William Wilberforce, Lord Shaftesbury, and other nineteenth-century British evangelicals led the fight to abolish slavery, improve factory working conditions, reform prisons, and help the poor. But the church’s enthusiasm faltered during the first half of the present century when evangelicals in England withdrew into an insular pietism that had little visible impact on society.

Billy Graham’s stirring crusades in Harringay Arena in 1954, coupled with the foundational work of Inter-Varsity Fellowship (now Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship [UCCF]), are generally credited with reviving evangelism in England at midcentury. That revival continues.

Where 25 years ago no bishops and only about 7 percent of new clergy in the Anglican Church were evangelicals, now numerous bishops and half the new clergy profess evangelicalism. Attending a National Evangelical Anglican Celebration (NEAC) gathering for the first time this year, Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie acknowledged, “Much of the vigour of our Church at the present time lies with you.” Significantly, up to half of all English evangelical Anglicans are charismatic, many support Liberal or Labor political policies, and most are from the educated middle class.

Such vitality, however, is not limited to the state church. Evangelicalism is also on the move through the traditional independent, Free, and Baptist churches. And the charismatic house-church movement has swept across England during the past two decades.

Clean Hearts, Dirty Hands

A major focus of England’s evangelical revival has been a return to the activism of the previous century. “Christ calls us to penetrate society like salt and light, to become involved in its struggles, to feel its pain, and to get our hands dirty in its service,” Anglican churchman John Stott told thousands at last May’s third decennial NEAC gathering.

The call to an evangelical understanding of the “social gospel” goes beyond the Anglican community as well. Clive Calver, a Free Church minister and general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, notes an increasing desire among evangelicals to demonstrate the gospel. “Indeed,” says Calver, “some have observed a great revival in evangelical attitudes and a genuine return to roots of social and political involvement.”

Calver lists a variety of relatively new organizations reflecting such involvement and generally revealing conservative social goals and liberal economic ones. The Evangelical Coalition for Urban Missions, for example, addresses problems of poverty and violence in England’s inner cities. Care Trust spurs church action to stop abortion, while Evangelical Enterprise seeks training for the unemployed. Calver’s list also includes groups such as Prison Christian Fellowship, Evangelical Christians for Racial Justice, and dozens more.

Other organizations seek to integrate evangelical Christianity with various aspects of modern English life. Open University’s Colin Russell, who is both president of Christians in Science and vice-president of UCCF, reports “the Christian Union is the largest student group on every campus.” Moreover, the ninth annual Spring Harvest conference this year drew over 60,000 evangelicals to discussions on Christianity’s cultural relevance, while the Parliamentary Christian Union links evangelical legislators across the sharp partisan lines dividing present British politics. The irrepressible Lord Denning has led Lawyers’ Christian Fellowship for three decades, and similar groups now exist for artists, scientists, and doctors.

Still, evangelicals wrestle with their role in society. Jill Dann, who chairs the Anglican Evangelical Assembly, sees the major need of English evangelicals as “facing up to the influence we actually have today in our society.” And with growing materialism in the South of England, worsening poverty and unemployment in the North, spreading political violence, and the increase in abortions, British evangelicals face a daunting task. It will take, says magazine editor Tim Dean, a “vision for reformation.”

Overwhelmingly Secular

In fact, those realities make claims of success by evangelicals seem pretentious to some observers. While Wilberforce and Shaftesbury could mobilize an evangelical minority to stir a predominantly Christian nation during the last century, evangelicals now confront an overwhelmingly secular state.

For example, fewer than one in ten Britons regularly attend church (which is less than one-fourth the U.S. rate), and that figure is slipping. Even if a third of British churchgoers are evangelical (which Calver offers as an optimistic estimate), this still represents less than 3 percent of the population. At best, evangelicals represent an increasing slice of a shrinking pie.

“Evangelicalism is both stronger and weaker than in the past,” notes the rector of All Souls, Langham Place, Richard Bewes. “It is stronger in numbers, and that is very encouraging, but the country has lost its biblical world view far more than America has.” Jerram Barrs, a Presbyterian pastor and director of L’Abri Fellowship in England, puts it more bluntly: “We are a pagan society. Saying I’m a minister is a barrier to communication.”

This casts a shadow on the future of evangelicalism. According to Bewes, the movement draws mostly from those previously familiar with Christianity, a shrinking pool. “The biblical framework of thinking has been replaced by a pseudoscientific world view,” he states.

As a prominent Cambridge University scientist and theologian with an evangelical background, John Pulkinghorne is especially familiar with this pseudoscientific world view and has countered it with books and lectures showing the compatibility of traditional Christianity and modern science. He fears for the loss of a residual Christian perspective from English society, which he attributes to the “decay of religious education in our schools.”

Finding near total ignorance of the Bible among school children, Pulkinghorne partially blames the indifference on hostility of teachers toward Christianity. Prime Minister Thatcher recognized this as a problem in her speech to the Church of Scotland. Subsequently, her government enacted legislation requiring that school prayers be “wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character” and that classroom religious education “reflect the fact that the religious traditions in Great Britain are in the main Christian.”

Evangelical legislator Alistair Burt, who is a junior government leader on education issues, explains, “Schools should not try to produce Christians, but they can imbibe children with values that underlie Christian faith.” Jerram Barrs sees little promise in this approach, however. “Religion is such a despised subject in school,” he states, “and what students get is all rubbish.”

Yet Barrs, like Thatcher and Burt, perceives a sense of moral bankruptcy afflicting modern British society, and believes this creates an opening for evangelism. Parents are asking him, “How can I communicate moral values to my children, or are we just here to make lots of money?” For evangelicalism to continue growing, Barrs concludes, “The Word must be made flesh here in twentieth-century England.”

This is precisely what minority evangelicals are trying to do, though not always in ways that the staunchly Conservative prime minister might favor.

By Ed Larson in England.

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