Call to the North

Churches Working Together in Mission

John Gaunt Hunter

• Verlag: Sacristy Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789590319
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Christian Denominations

Call to the North was a unique initiative of Evangelism in the North East of England in the early 1970s. Against the background of increasing secularization of society and the gradual breaking down of historical barriers between denominations, it was of its time but also ahead of its time. Written by the Secretary to the group, this book is an important contribution to the study of the history of Christianity in England.

Part 1

The Time is Ripe

Chapter 1

Soundings

A child of its time or a child of the future?

This question is bound to be asked about a “movement” which, against all expectations either within the churches or without them, actually happened. The pioneering nature of this event, together with a sense of unpredictability, gave to those associated with its conception a sense of incredulity and apprehension. However, below this and driving it forward was also a note of Christian hope and commitment in the lives of a small group of able Christian leaders.

The apprehension sprang from the fact that such a visionary endeavour had never been attempted before. Indeed, those concerned with the movement came from traditions which for centuries had represented opposing, even competing, points of view. The commitment and hope came from the Christian faith which now united lives in a common vision. The new and unique fact about Call to the North was that those who until now had been divided in history and religion, sometimes bitterly, were proposing to join forces. This was at a time when Britain itself was engaged in combating terrorism in Northern Ireland and when property, indeed life, in England and also in Ireland was being destroyed daily before our eyes.

In Northern Ireland, Republican and Loyalist, Catholic and Protestant were locked in a savage religious and political conflict which was taking lives and destroying communities. This was a conflict that spilt over into Britain itself, wracking London with savage destruction, violence, and death, and spreading to the Midlands and the North.5 Television coverage brought this terrorism and conflict into the living rooms of everyone, not only in the British Isles but across the world.

Surprisingly then, this was the very time that the North Country church leaders, Protestant and Catholic, chose to call their people to engage together in mission. They asked their members to study together, to walk together through the streets of their towns and villages, and to witness together to the gospel which, as they reminded their flocks, was their common heritage.

The pace of church relationships suddenly quickened. Evangelistic action in the face of a doubting world came to the fore as a focus of union, rather than doctrinal debate or social concern which had hitherto been the main, somewhat tentative, points of contact between the churches. For the first time ever in modern times, leaders and people of a historic Province were preparing to enter the front line of Christian mission together. Among many in leadership positions across the North this prospect caused unease. There were many who counselled caution. None lacked apprehension, yet few, when faced with the challenge of this opportunity, were prepared to be actively hostile. Together, despite uncertainties and doubts, this is how positive, clear-headed, and faithful leadership by a godly and prayerful ecumenical group of church leaders won the day.

This was true for all the churches. However, an example might be drawn from the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop Joseph Gray, then Auxiliary Bishop of Liverpool, an Irishman, was both conservative and very proper. He was a canon lawyer, trained at Maynooth, normally dressed in clerical black, solidly built, his pectoral cross gleaming with Catholic authority.6 Unexpectedly, he found himself required by his Archbishop to join a group of Baptists, members of the Free Churches, and Anglicans to discuss mission. Then he found himself listening to Protestants considering apostolic witness and being expected to pray with them. This was quite the reverse of all his Catholic traditional upbringing, practice, and belief; he appeared stunned. Gray remained silent throughout the first meeting, but afterwards, once the spell was broken, he gave of his best, bursting with ideas and insights. This experience was completely new across the North in the late 1960s.

Chapter 2

How It All Started

The genesis of Call to the North could be attributed to a small group of laity and bishops meeting in 1968, in London, at the time of the tenth Lambeth Conference. The Conference had drawn Anglican Bishops from across the world to Church House, Westminster, where the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, chaired the gathering. Church House is the administrative centre for the Church of England. Its Great Hall had served as the first meeting place for the United Nations after the Second World War, and is now the home of the General Synod of the Church of England.

The Lambeth Conference was meeting under the title, “The Renewal of the Church in Faith, in Mission, and in Unity”. The conference also gave an opportunity for a number of fringe groups of bishops to pursue specialist concerns. Given that the title of the current Lambeth Conference focused on mission, it was at one such group that the idea that the Church of England should take the lead in world mission was mooted.

The occasion was over lunch at the English Speaking Union, where three bishops met with a Roman Catholic layman and one of their own clergy. The clergyman, author and historian John Pollock, had written to the Bishop of Liverpool to suggest that this Lambeth Conference might offer an opportunity for the Church of England to take the lead in mission.7 In this he had been joined by John Todhunter, a distinguished Roman Catholic layman, who also wrote and appealed to the bishop to think in terms of a national mission, believing that “the wider the scope of a mission, the greater the likelihood of success”.8

Stuart Blanch was the new Bishop of Liverpool and a known Evangelical. In responding to the invitation to lunch at Pollock’s club to discuss the proposal, he suggested that he be joined by the Archbishop of York, Donald Coggan, and the Bishop of Coventry, Cuthbert Bardsley, as Blanch knew that both were committed to evangelism.9 During lunch, John Todhunter suggested that the Southern Baptist evangelist Dr Billy Graham might be invited to head up such a national mission. He commented that Graham was “exceedingly effective as a preacher . . . like a Redemptorist preaching mission, only better than the best I have ever heard”.10 Both letter writers believed that for such an enterprise to be successful, bishops, both Anglican and Catholic, together with the Free Church Federal Council, would need to issue the invitation, organize the campaign, and commend it to their people. This, they suggested, might initiate a national campaign supported by all the churches.

The time, they urged, was ripe: the country appeared to be ready to listen. The Jesus Movement was capturing the ears of young people; others appeared to be searching for “the Guru”, some indeed now turning to eastern religions. Moreover, the churches were experiencing dramatic change, and none more so than the Roman Catholic Church. In England and Wales, Roman Catholic membership had experienced vigorous expansion during this century. Prominent conversions together with immigration from Europe had led to strong growth and a heady optimism, when suddenly and quite unexpectedly, towards the end of the 1950s, this growth slowed and then reversed into a sharp decline. The decline now matched continental Catholicism where decline had been, as it had with English Protestantism, long-term.11 Even overseas traditional bastions of Catholicism such as South America had, by the rise of the new Charismatic Movement, seen a falling away from the practice of the Catholic faith.

In 1962 a new Pope, John XXIII (1958–63), quite unexpectedly called an assembly of Roman Catholic bishops from across the world, the Second Vatican Council. He sought to address the alarming decline with the aim of making Catholicism fit for purpose in the twentieth century. Under his benign leadership, a door in the high and inflexible wall that had thus far surrounded the Roman Catholic Church was opened towards the Protestant churches. They were now no longer to be regarded as schismatic bodies, rejected for their heresy, but as “separated brethren”.

The Church of England’s position in the nation was still strong, but perilous. From the publication in 1962 of Facts and Figures about the Church of England,12 it was apparent that the national church had been losing ground since the late nineteenth century, although most of the Anglican leadership appeared to overlook—or at least not publically acknowledge—this uncomfortable truth. Other statistics showed that Free Church membership had also moved into decline since the end of the First World War.

Despite this evidence of a national decline in Christian practice, the concept of all Christian people engaging in an ecumenical movement of mission was novel. Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century the suggestion of a united endeavour in mission by the Christian churches appeared to many to be both impractical and unreal; its failure, they believed, would be inevitable. Thus, once the idea from the meeting at the English Speaking Union was dropped into the episcopal pool of the Lambeth Conference, despite the bishops now discussing “The Renewal of the Church in Mission”, it floated but briefly before sinking from sight. It was helped on its way by the suggestion—which acted like a lead balloon—that an American evangelist be invited to take on the campaign leadership. Although the waters closed swiftly over the suggestion, it was not before one of the younger English diocesan bishops caught a glimpse of how the idea might be developed.

How about the North?

The Bishop of Liverpool, Stuart Blanch, wondered if this vision might become a practical proposition if concentrated in a smaller area. Although hailing from the South of the country himself, he was now in Liverpool; with great sensitivity he caught the atmosphere of the ancient Province of York, united as it was by history and culture. Might such an ecumenical mission inspire the whole Northern Province, he asked himself.

Stuart Blanch came to his See in 1966 on the retirement of the much-loved Clifford Martin. Blanch was tall, gentle, and retiring, with modesty, charm, and a reputation for biblical scholarship. The new bishop demonstrated his leadership by giving vision to his people. His brilliant speaking gifts (never the same sermon twice) always offered a new insight, they were biblically based and grounded in the contemporary world, and thus he won people’s hearts and minds. He had no need to direct or command; people appeared anxious to understand and to follow. Such were his voice and mastery of the English language that it was said he could read from a telephone directory and his listeners would be agog. When this was allied to an incisive idea, the experience proved convincing for many who heard.

Stuart Blanch, however, was concerned not only for the people of his Diocese of Liverpool, but also with the importance of mission for the Church of England, the national church. The Church, as he saw it, had been created for mission. Not a flash-in-the-pan campaign, which left a parish hopeful, its incumbent overwhelmed, and the world unmoved. Rather he looked to the mission of the Church’s Lord, which would transform that world and make all things new. The task of the Church was not the maintenance of its structures but the proclamation of the truth of Jesus Christ.

Now it was not a commonplace for Bishops of Liverpool to receive letters about mission from Roman Catholic laypeople. Indeed, given the ecclesiastical colour of the Liverpool Diocese, John Todhunter’s letter was something of a wonder. Liverpool was reputed to be one of the most evangelical, if not Protestant or Low Church, of the dioceses of the Church of England. This was a product of history and perhaps of sociology. The great Irish famine of the mid-nineteenth century led to the flight from Ireland of vast numbers of Roman Catholics, with the resulting establishment of a large Catholic settlement in the north of Liverpool. In turn, this produced its low-church mirror image in the existing local churches. This was a fact church leadership could not afford to ignore.

Liverpool, moreover, was a community with a recent history of economic deprivation and suffering. Its greyness, nevertheless, was tinged with a remarkable sense of spontaneous humour,13 together with a love of football. Its magnificent commercial Victorian architecture, moreover, had brought it world fame.14

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a combination of piety and Protestant defiance had produced the largest of all English cathedrals, set on the splendid eminence of St James—a mount above the heart of the city. The great table (high altar) of the cathedral, set below a reredos of the Last Supper with its stone chair for the clergy at the north end of the table, was a visible and defiant rejection of the Roman Catholic sacrifice of the mass where the priest stood with his back to the congregation, offering the sacrifice on behalf of the faithful. It was here that Stuart Blanch was enthroned, following the Liverpool diocese’s Reformed tradition, without a mitre.15

The nineteenth century had dealt harshly with the Church of England on Merseyside. Up to the end of the eighteenth century the church had been well placed, with a Tory Town Council, which had allowed Liverpool, perhaps better than many, to cope with the population explosion associated with the Industrial Revolution. Parish church building expanded with the growth of population. However, when the Whigs, as pillars of Dissent, gained political control and sold off the advowsons,16 a slow decline set in as the church then failed to keep pace with the continuing swift growth of population.

Clergy, therefore, found the numbers of people in their parishes growing to levels quite beyond their capacity to serve effectively. The Revd Dr Abraham Hume, vicar of a slum parish in Vauxhall of some 13,000 people, wrote in the 1840s of a visitation he had made, house to house and court by court, as was customary in those days of Victorian piety.

Fewer than one hundred families come to church regularly, yet these people are neither Dissenters nor Papists they are all lost sheep of the Church of England, who call themselves Protestants but should rather be called pagans.17

The Liverpool diocese had been created in 1880, by the detachment of the northern part of the Diocese of Chester. Since then, under a line of distinguished evangelical bishops, it had displayed immense energy. Churches had been built to serve the expanding and predominantly working-class Merseyside population. Social outreach was emphasized, but evangelism lay at the heart of many parishes. Under its first and vigorous new bishop (J. C. Ryle) the Church of England’s membership on Merseyside recovered and its role in the community was revived.

However, the low-church Protestant nature of the diocese in the nineteenth century had the effect of limiting the bishop’s relationships with the new Anglo-Catholic Movement. As the swift growth of Church of England membership developed, a series of Tractarian parishes were planted by wealthy supporters of the movement, to bear witness to the Catholic tradition. These, in this field of militant Protestantism, were greeted with open hostility. As a result, the early years of the diocese were not without tension. Slowly, over the years, the leadership was able to be more accommodating to the new thinking. Thus by the time Stuart Blanch arrived, it was possible for real relationships to be developed at all levels, not only within the diocese but between the separated denominations. The fires of controversy had died down and there was a new awareness between the churches of the contribution each could make to their common witness in the face of increasing secularism.18

A further factor making for inter-church harmony in the post-war world had been the effect of the intensive bombing during the Second World War. Whole areas of poor terraced housing towards the centre of the city of Liverpool had been destroyed. Although devastating, it had the benign effect of breaking up Catholic and Protestant ghettos, centres of traditional loyalty and mutual hostility. Their membership had now been distributed indiscriminately to the outer suburbs and to new towns. After the war the effect was further enhanced by the slum clearance programmes which moved the remains of these communities to the new towns, so producing a communal mix where ancient animosities could no longer be sustained. The old, vicious, internecine strife of the pre-war days thus became a thing of the past, but it was a memory slowly forgotten as pockets of prejudice and sectarian housing remained. This was the background against which Stuart Blanch was to prepare his initiative.

Would the bishops agree?

Following the 1968 Lambeth Conference, Stuart Blanch had to represent his diocese at the Northern Convocation of the Church of England. This body met in York and was the traditional governing institution of the Northern Province. Chaired by Archbishop Donald Coggan, this venerable gathering, dating back to AD 784, was the nearest thing the North of England has ever had to its own parliament. The Convocation meeting on 9 October 1968 now presented the Bishop of Liverpool with a useful occasion for flying a...