Empty Pews, Full Spirit
ANGLICANS (See Cover)
Outward, for centuries, flowed the tide of British Empire; back, in hurried decades, it ebbed. On every foreign strand that it touched, the receding tide has left a church uniquely English, yet catholic enough to survive in any climate. It is grand and symbolic that as a typical consequence, there should be in the South Pacific a bishop who follows the ancient Church of England custom by styling himself Norman New Zealand. Empire is gone; the church remains.
This week and next, more than 1,300 bishops, priests, deacons and laymen of the Anglican Communion are gathering in Toronto to measure and discuss the health of their church. They find it in an ironically precarious state: it is prospering almost everywhere except in England.
In worship at St. James' Cathedral and in discussion at the Royal York Hotel and the Maple Leaf Gardens, a primacy of honor during Toronto's Second Anglican Congress* will be accorded to the purple-cassocked archbishops of Canterbury and York. But delegates from English dioceses will be lost in a sea of faces from Nigeria, Tanganyika, Japan, the U.S. and elsewhere. Today the 18 branches of the Anglican Communion exist in 80 countries--a greater geographical span than that of any major church but Rome's. The world's 42 million Anglicans worship God in 170 languages, from Swahili to Cantonese to Japanese.
"A Godly Sermon." Yet the Anglican Communion is more a byproduct of history than a purposeful propagation. Unlike Methodists or Roman Catholics, the clergy of England's post-Reformation church at first followed the empire around the world not primarily to win the heathen for Christ but to provide spiritual solace for the colonial conquerors. One of the earliest recorded appearances of English ways of worship overseas, in August 1578, was on solitary Baffin Island, where one Master Wolfall "preached a godly sermon, which being ended, he celebrated also a Communion upon the land" for the sole benefit of Explorer Martin Frobisher and his crew. The Anglican chaplains of the East India Company were interested in ministering only to Englishmen abroad; in the 17th century, apparently, just one Hindu was baptized.
By 1700 a wider outlook began to prevail. The church's first official missionary branch, the Society for Propagating the Gospel, was chartered in 1701. In the 19th century, Anglican evangelizing got valuable assistance from the U.S. Protestant Episcopal Church. At the first Lambeth conference of Anglican Bishops, in 1867, there were 68 prelates from outside England and Wales. At the next Lambeth conference, in 1968, more than two-thirds of the 350 bishops will represent countries where English is not the mother tongue.
"The church's mission to the world" is the misleadingly bland theme of the Toronto Congress. Evangelism--on the religious, political and cultural frontiers of the world--will not be the delegates' only concern; they will be deeply involved with inner searching and selfcriticism. "This is a desperately difficult time for Anglicanism," warns the Rev. Roger Lloyd, a canon of Winchester Cathedral. "The historic definition of Anglicanism needs renewing."
Nondefinition. Redefinition, when and if it is done, will have to come out of what some puzzled outsiders regard as nondefinition. Anglicans proudly regard their faith as a middle way between the rigidities of Rome and the Reformation, a unique and vital bridge between Protestantism and historical Catholicism. But Lutheran Theologian Einar Molland describes Anglicanism as "the most elastic church in Christendom"--and with some justice. The essential Lutheran faith is contained in the Augsburg Confession of 1530; the Church of England's 39 Articles, far from being an authorized confession of the faith, are mentally rejected in whole or part by nearly every Anglican cleric who "assents" to them when he assumes church office. The Anglican faith encompasses Evangelical missionaries as fundamentalist as any Southern Baptist and such subtle, sophisticated minds as San Francisco's Bishop James A. Pike, who questions the virgin birth and speaks of "demythologizing" the Resurrection.
The late Bishop of Durham, the Rt. Rev. Henley Henson, once acknowledged that "under the description of 'the Anglican Communion,' there are gathered two mutually contradictory conceptions of Christianity." The Anglican Benedictine monks of Nashdom Abbey use the Roman missal and monastic breviary rather than the Book of Common Prayer, and countless Roman Catholic tourists have queued up before the confessionals in Manhattan's St. Mary the Virgin Church only to discover belatedly that they were not in one of Cardinal Spellman's parishes. The ceremony-conscious Anglo-Catholics seem oddly yoked in brotherhood with low-church "Anglo-Baptists," who frown on stained glass and statuary as Biblically forbidden graven images and celebrate austere Communions on plain wooden tables free of candles or crucifix.
Heritage from History. That the Anglican Communion can be both high Catholic and low Protestant is its heritage from history. Despite the break with Rome under Henry VIII, Anglicanism preserved the ecclesiastical government of bishops in the apostolic succession and the central place of corporate liturgical worship. But the Church of England, with the Continental Reformation, accepted the Bible as the final authority for faith, and recognized only two Christ-instituted sacraments, baptism and Holy Eucharist. Yet if churchmen find it hard to describe a specifically Anglican theology, there is no doubting the reality of a modern Anglican theological manner: not the brain-numbing abstractionism of Germany's sages but an urbane lucidity spiced--`a la C. S. Lewis--with literate Oxbridge wit.
Two bonds help keep this family of churches together. One is a superb order of worship: the Book of Common Prayer, used in different versions by different Anglican churches but always echoing the symmetry of ritual and the stately, pure English prose of the reformed liturgies composed by Thomas Cranmer for King Edward VI. Cranmer's 1549 Prayer Book has had almost as great an influence on English prose as the King James Bible, and its stately collects remain one of man's finest efforts to address his Creator reverently. Last Sunday's collect, for example:
"Grant to us, Lord, we beseech thee, the spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful; that we, who cannot do anything that is good without thee, may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will; through Jesus Christ our Lord."
The Anglican Communion also has a living link: every church represented at Toronto is in communion with the see founded in A.D. 597 by St. Augustine of Canterbury. After a centuries-long struggle for precedence between the two sees of Canterbury and York, Pope Innocent VI (1352-62) made the Archbishop of Canterbury Primate of All England. The Archbishop of York was granted the lesser title Primate of England; the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Donald Coggan is the incumbent. Primacy does not make Canterbury head of his church (the Queen is). Yet as first bishop of England, he ranks, in protocol, next to the royal family and ahead of the Prime Minister; as much as anyone, he speaks the mind of the Church of England.
Beyond the Fringe. At first glance, the Most Rev. and Rt. Hon. Arthur Michael Ramsey, 100th to govern at Canterbury, may seem like something left out of Beyond the Fringe. "He's one continuous anecdote," says a clerical friend. "He looks like a character, and he knows it."
At 58 he is said to be "the world's youngest octogenarian." With his wigwagging ginger eyebrows, gaitered waddle and "rah-ther"--studded speech, Ramsey is a ripe continuation of England's tradition of clerical eccentrics. He is the type of man who finds mud puddles appearing mysteriously in his path; his bulky purple cassock always seems ever so slightly askew. No one laughs. For warmhearted, avuncular Archbishop Ramsey also exudes the wisdom of a scholar and a deep-rooted faith, and seems every inch what he is in fact if not in name: patriarch of his arm of Christendom.
It is hard now to imagine Ramsey as anything but an archbishop. Yet as a student at Cambridge's Magdalene College, where his father, a mathematics don, was president, Ramsey was an articulate Liberal and toyed with the thought of a political career. He was graduated with a first in theology and a disappointing second in classics--possibly because so much of his energies went into extracurricular affairs. One of them, he told a startled dinner gathering on his U.S. trip last year, was membership in a club "which met once a year for dinner. The high point of the dinner was eating white mice picked up by the tail, dipped in honey, and dropped wiggling down the throat."
After Cambridge, Ramsey entered Cuddesdon College, a theological seminary near Oxford, and began his rapid and seemingly effortless rise to the top rank of the Established Church. He served for two years as a deacon and priest in a Liverpool slum parish before moving on to more gracious livings in Lincoln, Boston, Durham and Cambridge. His first theological writings--The Gospel and the Catholic Church, The Resurrection of Christ, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ--earned him applause in churchly reviews and a promotion to Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. Then 45, he already looked so venerable that his students used to joke about old ladies helping him to cross streets and climb stairs. A High Churchman, Ramsey was chosen to be Bishop of Durham in 1952; he was well liked by the clergy of this ancient diocese, but one layman who recalls his sermons there admits that "he wasn't always very clear." Ramsey was translated to the archbishopric of York in 1956.
During his placid career, Ramsey had gradually earned a reputation for spirituality as well as theological scholarship. Two years ago, it fell to Harold Macmillan to choose a successor for the retiring Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher. Although some Englishmen suspected that Ramsey was picked because he looked the part, the Prime Minister had his mind set on getting a "religious" primate, and Ramsey was his personal choice.
"A Man of God." It was not a uni versally popular appointment. Low Churchman Fisher himself preferred another man, and one British publisher summed up: "He went to a second-rate public school, got a second at university, was an indifferent Archbishop of York, and therefore he'll make a perfect Canterbury." Today, many of his critics admit that Ramsey has grown into his job, and could well retire as the best-loved Archbishop of Canterbury of the 20th century. Says the provost of one English cathedral: "He's a deeply committed man of God."
In office, Arthur Michael Ramsey has blessedly proved to be not primarily an administrator or church politician but a pastor, a father-in-God whose task is less to change the world now, and more to prepare men's hearts and minds for Christ's coming. Although he reads and absorbs such radical theo logians as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Ru dolf Bultmann, he preaches an oldfashioned, timeless spirituality that echoes the language of the Authorized Version. "By sophisticated attempts to be contemporary at all costs," he said once, "we blunt the force that lies in the universal imagery of the Bible: bread, water, light, darkness, wind, fire, rain, hunger, thirst, eat, drink, walk."
Study After Evensong. Ramsey and his wife Joan (they have no children) live weekdays in Lambeth Palace, the archiepiscopal residence in London across the Thames from Parliament. His life at Lambeth is an almost monastic blend of work and prayer. His day begins with private prayer and Holy Communion in the palace chapel (the archbishop, in Eucharistic vestments, is the celebrant on Tuesdays and Thursdays, receives the Host and chalice from the hand of one of his chaplains on other days) and ends after Evensong and dinner with a long night of reading and study. Most of his archiepiscopal work takes the form of correspondence and discussions with the endless stream of visitors he receives in his book-lined study. Every once in a while he pops out to a nearby bookstore, where he is known as the best customer.
The archbishop spends more time at Canterbury than any other primate in recent memory; he makes the 70-mile trip to his cathedral almost every weekend to preside at Sunday Matins and Communion. Ramsey loves to visit country parishes, and often startles passers-by with his opening conversational gambit: "I'm the archbishop. Who are you?" He takes his honors lightly. When a U.S. newspaper photographer last year asked, "Archie, could you look this way, please?", Ramsey equably answered: "The name is Mike."
Ramsey enjoys worldwide renown for his lack of small talk. When Ramsey was subwarden of Lincoln Theological College, recalls Canon Herbert Waddams of Canterbury Cathedral, he had occasion to receive a young man seeking admission to the seminary. Outside, the clock struck 2:45. Silence reigned: awed youth, shy priest. Presently the clock struck 3. At last Ramsey spoke. "I think you'll find Lincoln a rather quiet place," he said.
In spite of his retiring ways, Ramsey has already made considerable impact on the English Church. Like his predecessor, now Lord Fisher of Lambeth, he is a convinced ecumenicist, and serves as one of six co-presidents of the World Council of Churches. Last year he visited Moscow and Istanbul for theological discussions with Orthodox prelates on the prickly question of intercommunion. A close personal friend of Liverpool's Roman Catholic Archbishop John Heenan, who is the odds-on favorite to become the next English cardinal, Ramsey last year became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to lecture at Belgium's Catholic Louvain University. He hopes to visit Pope Paul VI in Rome after the Vatican Council ends.
Greater Liberty. Within the Church of England, Ramsey has chosen to achieve his goals by conciliation and diplomacy rather than blunt attack. Many of his clergy favor a complete separation of church and state. But Ramsey supports antidisestablishmentarianism, although he wants the church to have "greater liberty to order its own affairs." Recently, Parliament passed a Ramsey-inspired measure that frees church courts from final appeal to the Privy Council. He hopes now to get parliamentary approval for a revision of canon law, which was last codified in 1604, and for the right of bishops to experiment with new liturgical services. His long-range goals: selection of bishops by the clergy, rather than by the Crown, and a revised Prayer Book.
Such measures may help the Church of England gird for spiritual battle--and it must. "It's not a question of the Anglican Church's losing ground," says the Rt. Rev. Edward Ralph Wickham, Suffragan Bishop of Middleton. "We've already lost it." Of 27 million Englishmen baptized in the church, only 3,000,000 receive Communion even once a year, and cathedral deans hollowly conduct their stately services before a silent few.*
The Church of England in the 18th century has been justly described as "the Tory Party at prayer"; clerics still sigh over the Anglican failure to preach effectively to the city workers of the Industrial Revolution. Now even its impact on members of the Establishment seems minimal. The upright men among England's Top People live morally because a gentleman should do so, and not, so it seems, because the church tells them to. And among the passionate playboys of Mayfair--as the Profumo case suggests--a mention of the ethical teachings of the Church of England would seem an astonishing irrelevancy.
Archbishop Ramsey argues that "there are plenty of people in the country who are determined to go on making a fight for right moral standards, and these recent troubles have stirred us to do it." Many of England's clergymen seem to have a more flexible attitude toward the fight than the archbishop does. Almost every week London's press can headline the words of an Anglican cleric seeking to make his faith "relevant" to modern life, who jovially expresses toleration for homosexuality, divorce or adultery. An Anglican bishop recently suggested that "we stop using the word God at all for a generation." It is perhaps a consequence of such seeming weakness that except for weddings, christenings and burials, even fashionable London churches are almost as empty on Sundays as the 8,000 country churches left over from the Middle Ages.
Bishops & Butterflies. Along with Commonwealth and Crown, the Church of England thus seems to have become a relic of history, unsure of itself and its future. Says Yorkshire Novelist John (Room at the Top) Braine: "The church needs to make up its mind. Its trouble stems from the fact that nobody seems to know exactly what it stands for." The vacillations of modern-minded Anglican theologians and moralists are a prime target of satire--as witness Punch's recent capsule description of a fictional "Bishop of Bulwark": "Advanced churchman. Believes the word 'not' to be an interpolation in several commandments. Makes Marxist speeches in Lords. Dislikes being called a Christian. Collects butterflies."
Like Spanish or Italian Catholicism, the Church of England may have been lured into slumber by the comforts of establishment, but it is still nonetheless an ineradicable part of the landscape: England without its "C. of E." is as unthinkable as Rome without a Pope. Seldom as Anglicans attend church services, they proudly troop through their historic cathedrals and abbeys on vacations and holidays, and the dazzling new cathedral at Coventry is one of the nation's best-attended show places.
Vitality & Concern. A new generation of questioning clergy is now trying to build on this residual national memory. The church may have only 3,000,000 attentive faithful, but, as one observer points out, "they are active in church because they want to be." Many of these laymen want a more decisive role in the government of the church, and take a keen interest in stewardship; private donations to the church have risen 50% in the past decade. Seminary enrollment is currently running ahead of clerical retirements and deaths, and many Anglicans believe that the caliber of new priests is higher too. In part this may be due to the incentive provided by the church commissioners, who through shrewd investments in the stock market* have since 1948 doubled the amount of income available for ministerial salaries, which in some cases have risen from $1,400 to $2,800 yearly.
In parish after parish across England, many of these young clergymen are experimenting liturgically with "kitchen Communions" in homes and midmorning family Communions on Sunday followed by parish breakfasts. "I could take you to 30 parishes in this diocese," says one Birmingham priest, "where church is a going concern and people are aware that something is going on."
The search for meaningful forms of worship has gone in company with a search for meaningful faith. A current debate among Anglicans concerns the merits of the radical interpretations of Christian doctrine proposed by theologians known as "the Cambridge group" --principally Alec Vidler, Harry Williams and Hugh Montefiore. One of England's bestsellers of the year (280,000 copies) is Bishop John Robinson's Honest to God, which attacks the "religiousness" of Christianity and rejects the idea of God as a transcendent Being somewhere "out there" in space. Rectors who promise a sermon on Honest to God can be almost certain that they will have a standing-room-only congregation. "I've been a priest for over 50 years," says Dr. J.W.C. Wand, former Bishop of London, "and never has it been easier to talk theology from the pulpit."
Around the World. Ramsey is not concerned only with the sickness within the Church of England. He heads some scattered missionary outposts overseas, and as chief primate of the communion, keeps close watch on the pulse of all its daughter provinces. Much of the liaison between Canterbury and other churches is handled by the Rt. Rev. Stephen Bayne, 55, executive officer of the Anglican Communion. A former bishop of Olympia, Wash., Bayne travels more than 150,000 miles a year coordinating everything from missionary work to seminary needs for the churches, says, "There isn't a church that doesn't have a nickel's worth of me." Both Bayne and Ramsey agree that the communion at large seems in good health. Some specifics:
sb THE U.S. Oldest and richest of Anglican spiritual daughters, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. (3,344,000 members) still suffers from its public image as an "English church" for the well-to-do. Yet today, argues Father Bruce Ravenel of St. John's Church in Boulder, Colo., "the Episcopal Church is no more the society church than any other." Under its ailing Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Arthur Lichtenberger, 63, Episcopalians have one of the best civil rights records of the mainstream Protestant churches, and nearly every U.S. city can claim one or more alert and talented Episcopal slum priest (TIME, April 5). Less creditably, the Protestant Episcopal Church has produced only a handful of good theologians, and still has too many "doughnut-shaped" dioceses, with strength in the suburbs and a gaping hole in the city center. Warns the Rt. Rev. John Hines, Bishop of Texas: "The church's virtues tend to become its vices. It depends heavily on a well-educated clergy, who in turn require a high standard of living, and thus are fairly immobilized as to the areas they can serve."
sb SOUTH AMERICA, writes the Rev. Howard Johnson in a new one-man survey of the Anglican Communion called Global Odyssey (Harper & Row; $5.95), "is the continent Anglicanism decided to skip." The stiffly Anglo-Catholic West Indian Province (980,000) has few priests but crowded churches, and the Episcopal mission in Haiti boasts a cathedral with walls that are a museum of dazzling folk-art murals. Elsewhere, Anglicanism suffers from the 19th century no-conversion agreements signed by the British government with Roman Catholic regimes. Today there are fewer than 300,000 Anglicans in all of Latin America, and only the feeble, understaffed Episcopal churches of Brazil and Mexico--supported largely by U.S. church funds--have done much in the way of missions.
sbAFRICA. Anglican hopes are brightest on the continent where the church's chances of survival might in theory seem slim. The five African provinces of the Anglican Communion coincide with the old limits of the Empire, and thus the church bears the stigma of having been the white man's religion. Nonetheless, the faith has deep roots. In West Africa, 90% of the province's priests are native. In Tanganyika and Uganda, missionary liturgists are experimentally incorporating syncopated native drumming and dance forms into the Sunday service of worship. Nowhere has Anglicanism more to boast about than in South Africa, where a generation of Christian statesmen--notably Cape Town's Archbishop Joost de Blank --has spoken out implacably against apartheid. About one-third of the province's communicants are black, and the church is steadily gaining Afrikaaner converts from disillusioned, liberal-minded members of the Reformed Churches.
sb MIDDLE EAST. The Cambridge-taught Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Most Rev. Angus Campbell Maclnnes, governs a 3,500,000-sq.-mi. archdiocese of 150,000 Christian Jordanese, Lebanese, Turks, Iranians, Egyptians, Sudanese and Greeks, and operates one of two seminaries which expressly seek to serve all branches of the communion--St. George's College in Arab Jerusalem. Maclnnes' church is in communion with one branch of Christianity involved in an unedifying project: the zenophobic Arab Evangelical Episcopal Church, which plans to drop 50 psalms from its revised Prayer Book because they mention Israel.
sb ASIA. In the days of the British raj, Anglicanism made most of its Indian converts from the untouchables, eager to escape the horrors of the Hindu caste system. The church now has extensively Indianized its services--psalms are sung not in modes but in droning Indian ragas--but survives largely because of its excellent schools. In Hong Kong, the only free diocese of the captive Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui (Holy Catholic Church in China) is a classic missionary model of how to do much with little. Sprightly Bishop Ronald Owen Hall has only 55 priests and 25,000 members, but his schools educate 50,000 Hong Kong Chinese, and other churches admit that his relief and welfare services are the colony's most efficient and imaginative. Anglicanism in Japan has a flock of 44,000, and one of the world's best universities to come out of modern missionary work: St. Paul's, in Tokyo. Its mission roots first established by U.S. Episcopalians in 1859, the church has had only a tiny impact on the country--in large measure because Japanese cannot comprehend such Western theological notions as sin. "A sea of good material," mourns one priest, "and yet we can scoop up so little."
sb DOWN UNDER. Healthy in New Zealand, Anglicanism in Australia is a faith gone limp and slack with too much success. In New Zealand it is by far the nation's largest church, and in Australia it can claim a healthy 33% of a growing population. Yet Australia still looks back to England for its archbishops, and has been sluggish in ministering to postwar waves of non-British immigrants. Now Anglican hegemony is threatened by immigration-fed Roman Catholicism. Admits one Aussie priest: "We've been lazy, resting on our oars. But the nasty things that will be said about us at Toronto will undoubtedly give us impetus to do more."
River to the Sea. Some doomsayers argue that the Anglican Communion is dying. In a sense, nothing would please its leaders more. For by virtue of its doctrinal comprehensiveness, Anglicanism has also been traditionally an exceedingly ecumenical faith--even willing to surrender its own independence for the sake of God's "Coming Great Church." In the pursuit of spiritual brotherhood, many Anglican churches have ironed out some form of intercommunion with a faith outside the fellowship of Canterbury--the Church of England with the Church of Sweden, for example, and U.S. Episcopalians with the Philippine Independent Church.
It may be, argues Bishop Wand, that it is the destiny of Anglicanism to disappear into new forms of Christianity, "just as it is the destiny of a river to merge with the sea." Sixteen years ago, four Anglican dioceses left the communion to join with a number of Protestant groups in the new and lively Church of South India. Other Anglican provinces are considering the possibility of similar united churches in Ceylon, Pakistan and North India, Japan and Australia. In the U.S., Episcopal leaders are continuing to discuss the Blake-Pike proposals for a new superchurch encompassing six major Protestant bodies. The Church of England has before it a plan for reunion with English Methodists.
All such ecumenical exploration has the hearty approval of Michael Ramsey. "No one can even hint at what the timetable for Christian unity will be," he said last week. "But of course I believe it right that all of Christianity should one day be united. And I feel sure that reunion with Rome will one day come, though it is fair to say that both we and Rome will be a good deal changed by then."
* The first: at Minneapolis in 1954. * The once vital Nonconformist churches do no better: during the past 50 years, membership in English Congregationalist churches has declined 50%, and in the Baptist churches 25%. Thanks to Irish immigration, Roman Catholics have increased rapidly since World War II, now number 5,000,000. But Sunday attendance at Mass is depressingly low. * When Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd. tried to take over Courtaulds, Ltd. in 1961, records showed the church to be second largest shareholder in both corporations. The church currently owns 2,600,000 shares of the British Motor Corp.
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