Dramatic Choice for Canterbury

By Richard N. Ostling

The Church of England nowadays draws half its new clergy from the growing Evangelical wing, but men of more liberal stripe dominate among the bishops and power brokers. Thus it was a dramatic step last week when an amiable Evangelical named George Carey, Bishop of Bath and Wells, was named to be the 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury. Carey was one of two candidates that a 16- member commission proposed to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Queen Elizabeth made the formal appointment. Carey next year will become the spiritual leader of both the English flock and 70 million Anglicans and Episcopalians in 164 countries. At 54, he could look forward to 16 years in office before obligatory retirement.

Carey told a press conference that he felt "dazed and unworthy" when he learned of his selection. He was not the only Englishman to be dazed. The unusually rapid appointment, a mere four months after incumbent Robert Runcie announced plans to step down, apparently indicated that the commission reached a strong consensus in favor of Carey. But the choice caught everyone from bishops to bookies by surprise. Most speculation had centered on more prominent figures, among them Archbishop of York John Habgood, a favorite of the intellectual left who confessed to some disappointment at being bypassed, and Liverpool social activist David Sheppard.

Besides being the most forthright figure among the handful of bishops from the church's Evangelical side, Carey is a remarkable choice for three other reasons: as a pastor and educator, he has been closely associated with the charismatic renewal movement, which practices speaking in tongues and other gifts of the Holy Spirit; he has been a bishop for just 2 1/2 years; and he is a product of the working class, whereas Archbishops are traditionally upper- crust men bred in elite boarding schools and polished at Cambridge or Oxford. Raised in publicly subsidized housing in London's hardscrabble East End, Carey will now take a seat in the House of Lords and the Privy Council, which advises the Queen.

The humble origins of this "rags to purple" churchman should help him in reaching out to the alienated masses at a time when only 15% of English youngsters go to Sunday school, contrast to 50% in the 1950s, and when church attendance runs to a pitiful 2.4% of the populace. Carey himself was unchurched as a youth. Interviewed in June by the Church Times, he recalled, "I did not encounter living Christianity until I was 17 when, through my brother of 13, I went along to the local Anglican church, found the worship appallingly boring but the fellowship and preaching riveting. There I found Christ, or, should I say, he found me."

By then, the hospital porter's son had long since quit school and was working as an office boy. While serving as a wireless operator in the Royal Air Force, Carey felt the call to the clergy, entered King's College of the University of London and, says a friend, "suddenly realized he was quite bright." Carey eventually earned a Ph.D., specializing in the early church fathers. He has taught at three Evangelical seminaries and was principal of Trinity College, Bristol, when he was named a bishop. He also served two stretches as a parish priest, and advocates an innovation giving bishops the power to weed out lazy and incompetent pastors. Carey is chairman of the important Faith and Order Advisory Group, which deals with church doctrinal issues.

Theologically, Carey is not on the right wing of Evangelicalism. For instance, he rejects a literal interpretation of the creation and Adam and Eve in Genesis. He has also vexed low-church hard-liners with his increasing friendliness toward Catholicism. As bishop, Carey has taken Anglo-Catholics in his diocese on a pilgrimage to a shrine to the Virgin Mary at Walsingham. In 1985 he declared that Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, though longtime adversaries, now "stand firm together for a historic faith against the insidious bloodletting which extreme liberalism perpetrates on the body Christian." Arthur Leggatt, the general secretary of the Anglo-Catholic Church Union, said last week, "We welcome his orthodox stand on the Scriptures and the creed."

The ever vocal Anglican left too appears ready to accept the new Archbishop. After all, Carey has raised $900,000 in his diocese for inner-city aid and has written, "I have never found it easy to believe in God." Moreover, Carey strongly supports priesthood for women; he has even asked priests in Bath and Wells to consider resigning if they oppose women's ordination. His appointment, in fact, is read as a signal that church leaders and Thatcher's Tory government assume that women priests will get the go-ahead during the new Archbishop's reign. On the other hand, Carey counts as a traditionalist on homosexuality, but he has no objections to gay clergy who remain celibate.

Though no social gospeler, Carey is willing to speak occasionally on political issues. A staunch environmentalist who once said, "God is green," he scolded Thatcher this year when she took a swipe at the ecology movement, and he also criticized the Prime Minister's disputed poll tax. Thatcher nonetheless had no hesitation in giving him the nation's spiritual primacy, no doubt because she agrees with a preappointment editorial in the Economist that declared, "What is needed is an inspiring missionary leader for a church that has lost whatever grip it had on an increasingly pagan country." No bishop has been more enthusiastic in promoting the church's desperately needed "Decade of Evangelism" in the 1990s, and none seems better equipped to give it a go than Carey of Canterbury.

With reporting by Anne Constable and Helen Gibson/London