Topical Tuesday: Engaging our culture as Anglicans

Many ministers would secretly like a tunnel linking their homes to their pulpits. A profound cultural change has taken place with such alacrity that even someone of relatively junior years (I’m 31) can discern how quickly and completely traditional Christian ethical values have gone from the mainstream to the margins. This reality, added to our own temperaments, means we invariably adopt one of two approaches to ‘the world out there’: one, ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ – ranting our moral outrage, prophesying doom, and daring the world to go to hell in a handcart; and two, the withdrawal of Christian ethical and cultural expression from the public sphere altogether.

The second sometimes goes hand-in-hand with a worked-through understanding of the relationship between church and state, the nature of the biblical gospel, the identity and mission of the church, and a certain eschatology. For some Christians, non-engagement with issues of culture, ethics, and politics is deliberate and principled.

I happen to disagree with those principles, and I sincerely believe that a confessional Anglican ought to be committed — on a set of other scriptural principles expressed in the historic formularies of the Church of England — to contend for the expression of biblical norms in all areas of public life, for the spiritual and cultural benefit of both church and state. But I rather suspect that many have retreated (or acquiesced in the retreat) from public cultural engagement not for matters of principle, but for matters of pragmatism. That is to say, we don’t make a Christian contribution to public discourse, not because we are Two Kingdoms, but because we are too cowardly.

I certainly put myself in that category. I’ve hidden behind the spectre of becoming a caricatured ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ in order to excuse my own refusal to stand up for what is right, true and good, and against what is perverse, false, and evil. I’m therefore grateful for Christian Concern’s "Cultural Leadership Symposium" which I attended for two days in late January, for giving me the clarion call — and the backbone — to contend for the validity and urgency of bringing God’s word to bear in public life.

Andrew Symes of Anglican Mainstream did such a good job of summarizing what was heard and discussed at the symposium, that I need not write my own version (read his here).

What I’d like to suggest is that as Anglican evangelicals, our own Articles, Homilies, and liturgies demand that we be rather more committed to interceding, contending, and working for cultural transformation than we actually are. Read the Litany: ours is a church that was once committed to pray for God’s deliverance in areas of economics, public health, foreign policy, local and national government, the legal system, prisons, vulnerable persons, and national security.

So what happened? Did we lose (i) our conviction that the gospel is a vision for all of life (indeed, the whole cosmos under Christ’s rule), (ii) our commission to be the church for a nation – the Church of England; (iii) our compassion and concern for the welfare of our nation, (iv) our competency to articulate and defend a biblical view of culture, or simply, (v) our courage?