Church growth and decline in the UK 2: Is church decline due to ‘progressive ideology’?

John Hayward’s second claim is that the patterns of growth and decline he maps can be explained by the extent to which the various denominations have embraced/capitulated to something he calls ‘progressive ideology’. He unfortunately offers no evidence (beyond a claim that it is obvious to all) for the existence or nature of this ideology…

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Two great Christian resources for International Women’s Day 2018

I spent a good chunk of Thursday (International Women’s Day 2018) at the launch of two excellent resources. One is the Sophia Network Minding The Gap research. This is a survey of 1200+ women in the UK church, asking them about their experiences. There was much hope in the stories uncovered, and much darkness too. My friends at Sophia were kind enough to ask me to respond to the research at the launch (my first time speaking at an event in the House of Lords…); what I said will appear on their blog soon, and I don’t want to pre-empt it here, but I do want to honour them for doing the work so well, and for their ten years now of advocating for gender justice in the UK church. The second is the Project 3:28 Database. This is, simply, a database of female Christian speakers in the UK, created in the hope that it will become big and comprehensive enough that the endlessly tedious, and always weasel, suggestion that ‘we couldn’t find a woman’ to speak at this or that conference will be rendered obsolete. I’m honoured to be able to name the people–Natalie Collins; Hannah Mudge; David Bunce; Vicky Walker–who made this happen as friends, but I also feel a tiny slice of ownership. Natalie collated the stats on Christian conference speakers in the UK in 2o13; on the back of this, a group of us got together about four years ago and asked what we could do to change things. It was one of those tables that it was an utter privilege to have a seat at: I looked around at Natalie, Hannah, Paula Gooder, Elaine Storkey, Wendy Beech-Ward, and Krish Kandiah, and wondered what I had ever done to merit being in that company. We committed to continue to publish the stats year on year, which we have (Natalie has done most of the work), with visible results. Some conferences embraced the implied challenge: Spring Harvest, for example, committed to producing their own data, and to working towards improvement. Others didn’t–I remember the day we received a formal letter from one organisation’s lawyers, the sinking feeling of what that might mean, and then the elation of realising that they were actually scared of our little collective, because we were speaking the truth in public. We dreamt at that first meeting in 2014 of some resource profiling and championing female speakers at conferences; we continued to dream and pray. We were committed to doing it well, or not at all. An astonishingly generous anonymous gift of nearly £5000 pushed us to try to make our dreams a reality; we raised a good chunk more, and Natalie, Hannah, Vicky, and David created the website we now have. We are grateful for the donor who gave thousands, and for the many donors who gave £10. The website is both beautiful and wonderfully functional, and I am hugely impressed with the way my friends have brought it to reality. I have just checked and, three days after launch, there are over 120 gifted female speakers registered. Some–Amy Orr-Ewing; Paula Gooder–are as well known as almost anyone in the UK church; others are much less famous, but are women who have something to say. I hope and pray that it will grow ten-fold or more, that there will be a mighty army of gifted women offering themselves to the UK churches to preach the gospel and to teach the faith. I hope and pray too that event organisers–from the biggest national conference to the most modest local church away day–will use it to expand their imagination of who could come and speak. It’s not perfect. I look at it already and think and pray about questions of intersectionality, about how we prevent this thing, if we can, from being another way of silencing other oppressed groups. We want all women, not just white women, not just able-bodied women, not just straight women… We will have failed if somehow our structures exclude some class of women. East of Eden and longing for the End, however, perfection isn’t available to us. All we have are our best attempts to make things a little better, and the promise that, in the redemption won by Christ and in the transformation brought by the Spirit, our best attempts might be graciously taken up by God and made into something truly significant. Could this be one such? I don’t know. I do know that at the small launch event we were joined by Veronica Zundel. I’d not met Veronica before; I discovered that she had worked back in the day with John Stott, no less, on the...

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Reflections on a new defence of ‘complementarianism’

I recently picked up a new book arguing in more detail than I have seen before the thesis that the doctrine of the Trinity, specifically the Father-Son relationship, gives warrant for what tends to get called a ‘complementarian’ understanding of gender relations – the idea that there is something inherent in human nature and intended by God in male authority and female submission. The book is: Bruce A. Ware and John B. Starke (eds), One God in Three Persons: Unity of Essence, Distinction of Persons, Implications for Life (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015). I did not expect to agree with the various authors: not only have I taken a fairly straightforward stand against ‘complementarianism’, I have argued even more forcefully that analogies from the triune relations to human interpersonal relations are always poor; a set of essays using the latter form of argument to defend the former conclusion is, well, not something I would have written a commendation for, even if they had been foolish enough to ask me… That said, reading books with which you disagree is much more important than reading books with which you agree; if they are well-argued and adequately researched, they sharpen you and force you to refine your thoughts; sometimes they even contribute to a change of mind, and, as I often tell students, the only way to prove you have a mind is to change it occasionally… * * * It is an edited volume; inevitably the essays vary in quality. The worst are genuinely bad. Unfortunately, the nadir is the opening essay, by Wayne Grudem, which in part lists a series of fairly central points in classical Trinitarian dogma (most egregiously, inseparable operations), and then claims each must be wrong by gesturing towards a few unexamined proof-texts. Now, of course, I accept the theoretical possibility of challenging the ecumenically-received doctrine on the basis of serious and careful exegesis; I am Baptist, evangelical, and Reformed, and hold to sola scriptura tenaciously. That said, ‘serious and careful exegesis’ involves rather more than quoting an English translation of a verse and asserting its meaning is obvious; further, I have the view, perhaps old-fashioned, that one ought to understand the faith before trying to overthrow it. The reader who perseveres beyond this infelicitous opening is rewarded, however. I confess to not keeping a close eye on the literature here, but I believe that these essays move forward the present state of the ‘complementarian’ argument in this area in significant ways, not all of them necessarily helpful to its supporters. There is some good historical work (in marked contrast to the opening essay): Robert Letham notes that the doctrine of eternal generation has come under some attack – from both sides of the gender debate – recently, and offers a robust historical and systematic defence, culminating in the claim ‘ the dogma of eternal generation is the cement holding together the doctrine of the Trinity’ (121); well, no – historically that is inseparable operations (see Gregory of Nyssa, Ad. Ablab.) – but I take the point. (Eternal generation is another basic point of trinitarian orthodoxy that Grudem has rejected, incidentally.) Mike Ovey’s chapter is curious but also instructive. It is again serious historical scholarship, investigating the status of the fourth-century debates in the mid-350s, around the time of the promulgation of the famous Blasphemy of Sirmium. Ovey examines three anti-Sirmium writers, Athanasius, Hilary, and Basil of Ancyra, and a number of symbolic documents of the period, including the Blasphemy itself; his claim is that in all these writers and documents, a basic submission of the Son to the Father is taught. This is more-or-less true (I think there is more to be said about Athanasius), but in danger of being misleading: the 350s are perhaps the most unsettled and unstable period of the whole fourth-century debate (which is saying something…). Hilary’s thought is rapidly developing through the decade and beyond; to treat De synodis as a mature and settled expression is just wrong. To give only the most obvious example, Ovey picks up on Hilary’s account of names, and particularly of what the name ‘Son’ means (147); Hilary repeatedly revises his theory of names – there are, for example, no less than three distinct doctrines visible in the De Trinitate (he announces a change of mind in Book VII, and visibly changes his view again in Book XII). The question of the divine names becomes vital in the final settlement of the Trinitarian controversies: in response to Eunomius’ heavily-platonised theory of names, Basil of Caesarea develops his account of theology as ‘epinoietic’, which is the decisive insight that allows the development of Cappadocian...

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‘A dirge for the down-grade?’

I recently had a meeting in London at the Oasis Waterloo centre; arriving slightly early, I stayed on the tube for one more stop and went to the Metropolitan Tabernacle bookshop, which I frequent fairly regularly, mostly for its republications of older Puritan and Baptist material that is not easily available elsewhere. I picked up, amongst other things, a slim paperback promising Spurgeon’s original source materials on the ‘Down Grade’ controversy, the event that led to his withdrawal from the Baptist Union, and to several strained relationships. The volume is not complete (most obviously to my eyes, MTP2085, ‘A Dirge for the Down-Grade’, is missing; that said, I had the privilege of discovering and cataloging Spurgeon’s own notes on this sermon back in the day, so I may be ascribing it undue prominence…); it does, however, collect the relevant notes from the Sword and Trowel, which is valuable. I had not read the material abstracted like this before, and several consistent themes jump out from it, when read in sequence. Spurgeon is deeply concerned about a general falling-away from Biblical Christianity infecting the churches in his day; he constructs this, not as a matter of degree, but as a fundamental binary: ‘A new religion has been initiated, which is no more Christianity than chalk is cheese…’ (S&T, Aug. 1887) One is, on his construction, faithful – or one is apostate. There is no middle space. Now, of course, every evangelical will have some sympathy with this; we believe in conversion and the new birth; there is a basic binary divide: once-born vs twice-born; in Adam vs in Christ; … But every thoughtful evangelical will also hesitate, because in our history we have repeatedly and wrongly aligned this basic binary with other opinions which, whilst perhaps important, are not direct correlates. Far too often, we have questioned the salvation of people with whom we disagree about this or that; it is a habit we desperately need to break. Spurgeon repeatedly insists that in speaking of a ‘down-grade’ he is not speaking of Arminianism; this is interesting: a century or more earlier a Calvinistic Baptist like Spurgeon would have absolutely identified Arminianism as a departure from Biblical Christianity – and rightly so; seventeenth-century Arminianism was, basically, a rationalistic system. In the eighteenth century, an ‘evangelical Arminianism’ developed which – right or wrong (my sympathies here remain with Spurgeon…) – was nonetheless recognisably committed to the authority of Scripture and the necessity of the new birth. What is he speaking of? Strikingly, his most common illustration, cited in almost every reference he makes to the ‘Down-grade’, is that pastors not only attend the theatre, but defend the practice of so doing. Next to the theatre, he references the decline of attendance at prayer meetings, and some more theological themes, but this is his most regularly repeated point. Here, my sympathies are not with Spurgeon. It happens that, presently, I do not go to the theatre very often; our local theatre closed a couple of years back. In a different context I would go more often. I do not regard this as a basic failure of morality, or a departure from Biblical Christianity (‘theatre’ not being a common Biblical term, as far as I recall…), I know why seventeeth-century Puritans objected to the theatre of their day – they were right to – I do not think their concerns speak meaningfully to the theatre of our day, or of Spurgeon’s. Now, of course, I may be wrong about this, but I suspect there will be relatively few who are wholly with Spurgeon on this one today, and even fewer who would hold up, as he did, theatre-going as the key demonstration of apostasy from the Biblical faith. I read the texts finally with some sadness; Spurgeon’s basic concerns were not misplaced; there was unquestionably a broad departure from evangelical Christianity amongst the English nonconformists of his day. His mode of waging the campaign, however, seems to me to have been very unfortunate; even he acknowledged that he was drawing a divide not between the faithful and the apostate, but through the middle of the faithful camp, as he separated from those who, whilst remaining committed to Scriptural faith, did not agree with his response to ‘the down-grade’. Further, as the example of the focus on the theatre shows, his illustrations of what constituted apostasy were sometimes rather eccentric, and often enough very poorly aimed. He knew that the central points were the authority of Scripture and the necessity of the new birth; why not stand there, rather than seeking proxies? Of course, in every age, including our own, the church has been very energetic in seeking out...

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‘Home for Good’

Home for Good began life as a campaign started by the UK Evangelical Alliance to promote church involvement in fostering and adoption. It has continued as a movement jointly sponsored by EAUK, Care for the Family, and CCPAS. It is now becoming a charity in its own right, to have a permanent existence. I’ve been on the council of the EA for about four years now, and a member of its board for the last couple; I’m honoured to be involved with a great organisation doing many wonderful things, and I’m proud of most of the things to which we, as a board, have been able to give permission, funding, prayer, and encouragement. But Home for Good is probably the one thing we’ve started that I am most inspired by. I remember the lightbulb moment when Krish Kandiah first showed us the number of children in care in the UK, and then the number of evangelical churches, and offered the simple comment that if every church could encourage, equip, and release its members to adopt or foster one child, we could shut down the UK care system. It was a vision so simple, so audacious, and yet so achievable, that it was impossible not to be inspired by it. I remember reading Krish and Miriam’s Home for Good book in draft, checking for theological comments; after I’d read through the stories of how the lives of vulnerable children can be transformed, I wanted to add a comment about interpreting 1 Peter, and had to wipe tears off my keyboard to type it. I remember our collective excitement as we saw the vision begin to catch, and began to hear the stories of people and churches becoming motivated to do something, to make a difference to the lives of the most needy children in our society. The time has now come for EAUK to let go, and for Home for Good to become something separate and permanent; we did the same with Tearfund back in the day. To get established, H4G needs some start-up costs quickly; there is a fund raising campaign running; this is an excellent cause and well worth...

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