Can the Church be Renewed?

Can the Church of England still be reformed and renewed? Amid doctrinal confusion, institutional failures, and widespread discouragement, is there reason for hope?

In this new video Lee Gatiss makes the case for hope without naïveté. Drawing on Scripture, the Reformation, and the lessons of church history, he examines John Henry Newman’s claim that “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant”, and explains why deeper historical roots can strengthen confidence in biblical, Reformed Anglicanism.

He also explores where renewal begins: through faithful preaching, earnest prayer, courageous leadership, and the patient work of ordinary local churches. The challenges are serious, but neither Scripture nor history gives Christians cause to surrender to despair. The Church of England can be turned around, one parish at a time.

For anyone feeling weary or discouraged about the church’s future, this video offers encouragement for continuing service and fuel for prayer.

Alternative visions

There are other visions being offered at the moment. A video on YouTube from William Taylor, and an associated interview with him, demands that a different approach should be taken, and says that not to take his approach is biblically disobedient and uncourageous.

William’s take on all this comes out of his exposition of Titus 3 to his church staff team and others, I believe. I have also expounded that text, at the Junior Anglican Evangelical Conference in 2021, if you want to hear a somewhat different take on it. Or you could buy my book Fulfil Your Ministry: 2 Timothy and Titus and the Challenges of Serving the Gospel or see how it has been handled in the past in my Reformation Commentary on Scripture volume.

There is much that I agree with in William Taylor’s diagnosis of the present crisis in the Church of England. As I have said many times before, the senior leadership of the Church of England has made many serious errors. Faithful Christians cannot simply shrug their shoulders at the Prayers of Love and Faith (or the many safeguarding and disciplinary failures). There are times when we must resist, contend, and refuse to go along with those who depart from biblical teaching.

But what worries me increasingly is the ecclesiology of this proposed alternative (as well as the way it is being presented). The timing of it is also disappointing, and I hope those voting in the General Synod elections happening right now will not think William’s view is shared by the vast majority of conservative evangelicals — because it really isn’t.

William has argued that faithful evangelicals should no longer use the Church of England’s normal processes for selection, training, ordination, and appointment. All the Church of England bishops are tainted and even the Bishop of Ebbsfleet is complicit so we should not come under his ministry. For William, this is not a matter of tactics and different consciences, he says. It’s what the Bible says. Young men considering Anglican ministry should instead be ordained through REACH-South Africa, work in a few sympathetic Church of England churches that he himself recognises — as lay workers — and “wait to see” whether a future settlement catches up and allows their ministry to be recognised (by bishops that he says are tainted and shouldn’t be recognised).

There is a strange circularity here. The young man is being asked to reject the authority of the Church of England's bishops to select and ordain and appoint him somewhere now, while hoping (on what basis?) that some future Church of England bishop will exercise that same institutional authority to recognise his overseas ordination later. I know that’s possible. But if all serving bishops are compromised by virtue of remaining within the House of Bishops, it isn't obvious what would make that later act of recognition spiritually acceptable in a way that it isn’t now.

Meanwhile, clergy already in the system can receive “alternative spiritual oversight”. William himself has indicated that his alternative overseer is the former Bishop of Blackburn, Julian Henderson (who we must assume, therefore, is not in fellowship with anyone in the House of Bishops, as William says that would be biblically unacceptable?). There is an irony here. In 2018 Julian chaired the House of Bishops Delegation Committee which oversaw the controversial guidance on using existing liturgy to mark a person’s gender transition. The Church of England press release quoted him saying, “We commend it for wider use.” To be fair, Julian subsequently apologised for the confusion caused by his different roles and made clear that he did not support the guidance. But it was he that commended the use of that liturgy — which William says was his red line in the LLF debacle.

That illustrates the difficulty of drawing hard lines about who is and isn’t sufficiently separated from compromised bishops. We don’t need to go down the line of asking which bishop it was that ordained William himself and what he was like, as some have. But it does leave one wondering what exactly it is that cleanses a bishop of taint or contaminates someone they are involved with.

There is an even more fundamental problem. Alternative spiritual oversight isn’t actually episcopal oversight.

CEEC itself is admirably clear about this. Its provision of alternative spiritual overseers is “informal and temporary”, and it’s not necessary where the bishop is orthodox on sexuality issues. It does not remove a minister’s legal obligations to his diocesan bishop. Julian has described it as pastoral support in which an overseer might visit annually, preach, pray, and maintain contact with the minister and PCC. Legal and safeguarding accountability remains with the diocesan bishop. That may be very valuable pastoral support. But it isn’t episcopal jurisdiction.

Suppose an incumbent goes badly wrong. Can his alternative overseer suspend him? Discipline him? Remove him? Ultimately tell him that he can no longer be the incumbent?

No.

This matters. As I argue in Reforming and Renewing the Church, evangelicals need bishops not simply when bishops agree with us, but because ministers themselves need oversight. A bishop should be able to encourage and defend a faithful minister. But genuine oversight also means that somebody outside the local church has authority to say “No”.

Otherwise there is a danger of confusing the authority of Scripture with the authority of the minister’s interpretation of Scripture. In a strongly incumbent-led evangelical church, particularly one whose culture rightly emphasises submission to biblical teaching, opposing the incumbent’s strategies may easily become construed as opposing the Bible. Disagreeing with William’s contemporary and very specific applications of Titus 3 to church politics becomes disagreeing with Titus 3. It becomes disobedience to God.

That can become dangerous, in many many ways. For example, if the test of faithfulness becomes separation from everyone who hasn't separated sufficiently from people we think are compromised, the circle inevitably contracts. The network progressively consists of people who already agree about doctrine and strategy. Internal disagreement (about almost anything, but especially political strategy) can then increasingly look like doctrinal compromise. What sort of movement is being built by this? Is it culturally healthy?

The retirement question provides an interesting thought experiment. I’m not saying William intends to provoke such a confrontation. But imagine an incumbent pursuing his strategy who reaches the Church of England’s compulsory retirement age and decides that he ought to continue nevertheless. His alternative overseer could advise him to retire. But he could not make him do so. The lawful ecclesiastical authorities could.

At that point William’s stated policy of “do things and then the structures follow” runs head first into reality. A parish isn’t the personal possession of its incumbent. There is a PCC, patron, churchwardens, bishop, archdeacon, canon law, and the law of the land. An incumbent cannot simply create a new ecclesiology and expect everyone else eventually to recognise it.

This also exposes a danger in creating a small evangelical ecosystem in which we select our own candidates, train them in our own institutions (unrecognised by the wider church), arrange alternative ordinations by bishops thousands of miles away, employ them within perhaps 20 sympathetic churches (when the money for it can be found), and choose alternative overseers from among people we trust.

Who then tells us when we are wrong? Who can get rid of us or discipline us when we go astray?

My worry is that this could all create a highly clerical model of leadership which sits awkwardly with the actual constitution of a Church of England parish. So that paradoxically, a strategy designed to escape unacceptable episcopal authority could end up concentrating considerably more authority in the incumbent, and the informal network which validates him.

What William is suggesting is something. But it is not a strategy to actually reform and renew the actual Church of England.

My argument in Reforming and Renewing the Church is different. We should resist error vigorously, but remain and contend within the Church we are seeking to reform. Use patronage. Use PCCs. Use Synod. Train people. Seek ordination. Revitalise churches. Plant churches. Challenge bishops. Support faithful bishops and oppose false teaching. Above all, preach the gospel.

Bad episcopal oversight is a serious problem. But the solution to bad episcopal oversight cannot simply be no effective episcopal oversight at all, or choosing my own personal bishop whose authority over me exists only by my continuing consent.

So, as I say in the video attached to this blogpost, we should use the legitimate freedoms, offices, formularies, and structures of the Church of England to contend for its reform and renewal. We should not embark on an eccentric and supposedly radical policy based on an endlessly recursive doctrine of contamination. Should we really ask a young ordinand (or a whole generation of ordinands), keen to pursue gospel ministry in an Anglican way, to carry the enormous personal and institutional risks that are generated by someone else’s peculiar ecclesiological judgment?

Hope for gospel renewal in the Church of England

So the choice is becoming increasingly clear. We can retreat into a small network of perhaps 20 sympathetic churches, creating alternative routes to ordained-but-lay ministry in the hope that one day the wider Church of England might recognise what we have done. Or we can remain, contend, and work to reform and renew the Church of England in biblical faith — alongside Church Society, CEEC, the Alliance, and the many other faithful clergy, laity, churches, patrons, organisations, and even bishops who have not given up on it.

That is the harder and messier road. But our hope was never in ecclesiastical structures being pure or in all our bishops always getting everything right. Christ has not abandoned his church, and his word has not lost its power. So let’s stay, contend, and get on with the work of reforming and renewing the Church of England in biblical faith.

Lee Gatiss is the Director of Church Society and author of Reforming and Renewing the Church: Gospel Confidence from Scripture and History.