By Adrian Worsfold
Today a new group will be launched in the UK called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA). It is the organisational expression of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in the UK.
It is a group that without doubt intends to legitimise some bishops in the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish Anglican Churches and attempt to delegitimise others. A parallel group, the Fellowship of Confessing Churches, using the Jerusalem Declaration’s words as relevant, has already got to work on the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. Combined with the self-selecting Primates Council, and the decision making that takes place behind that, this FCA is a grouping that is not just another Anglican pressure group (of which Anglican Evangelicals have plenty) but one with the potential to provide international oversight. In other words, entryism always leads eventually to replacement. Replacement is what has happened in the US and Canada, rather too quickly, in terms of a province of GAFCON, but entryism comes as a threat and the threat is realised in institutional difference – usually by the effective collapse of an institution and its decision making centres into the entryist’s arms.
Entryism needs to be explained. It comes from Trotsky and his French turn in 1934 when he dissolved the ineffective Communist League to join into the more successful French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO). In other words, a small, unrepresentative and otherwise unsuccessful group burrows itself into a more moderate and broader successful organisation, and its own leadership acts to bend the larger host in its direction. A few ‘Intellectuals’ choose the strategy that ought to influence the ballast of workers’ organisations. The best example is more recent in the political memory of the UK. Militant Tendency was a hardline Trotskyite group that placed its people wherever it could throughout the Labour Party in order to influence its policy direction. Militant was never going to attract support openly for itself, so it hoped to draw on the habitual popular Labour vote and manipulate expressions of socialism towards its own purist brand. However, despite always the need for tactical flexibility, its inevitable confrontational tactics both within the party and in society meant that a Labour Party wishing to moderate itself to be re-elected had to root out Militant and expose them to their own political existence. Once it was removed from the host it soon died.
Incidentally, the entryist group, despite the need for secrecy, deception and flexible footwork, often makes howling errors, and the most obvious is the leaking of actual intentions around all the presentation.
Conservative Evangelicals have been a small part of US Episcopalian life and they are also small in the Church of England (and smaller still in the Church in Wales and the Scottish Episcopalian Church). In order to raise their power and influence they have essentially gone abroad; they have used the idea of the Anglican Communion, but selectively: going south and then part of that south, that is within Africa for their ballast. Inventing international oversight and criticising ‘Anglican nationalism’, they have intended to start directing the Evangelical traffic their way. They have also co-opted, temporarily, the most strident (and transient) end of traditionalist Anglo-Catholicism. This is a grouping already defensive and marginal that will have nowhere to go but out when the British Anglican Churches start ordaining women bishops. It adds weight – adds the appearance of breadth despite consisting of two extremes. Such a sharp division is there in the rushed US/ Canadian replacement strategy.
Back in 2006 a leading British Conservative Evangelical made a defining speech of the Religious Trotskyite entryism that is now being launched in the UK . Richard Turnbull was clear that Evangelical identity had to be made correctly defined before it could be successful, and this of course was in the context of continuing divisions in UK Anglican evangelicalism between what are called Conservative and Open Evangelicals. Turnbull was clear that the first target had to be what he called Liberal Evangelicals, and this means Open Evangelicals (they don’t themselves use the term ‘liberal’ for fairly obvious reasons). He talked about the “strategic nature” of theological colleges. Indeed, as a new Principal of one of them, he was active in staff replacement when many Open Evangelicals found themselves going elsewhere. Only when the Open Evangelicals are marginalised will the real enemy be tackled, the Liberals proper. He gave this view in typical reverse-speak or mirror language that the skillful political operator used in groups like Militant (that is, accuse the other of doing what you need to do):
I need, also want to warn against the nature of liberalism within our own midst. What I mean by that is this whole idea of what it means to be evangelical being broadened so that it encompasses everybody and everything. If the liberals seek to capture the theological colleges in order to exercise strategic influence, the first step will be to encourage liberal evangelicals to capture the evangelical colleges. And I just want to draw that challenge to your attention and not overlook it and not to think all is well.
He said as well:
I view the post [of Principal] as strategic because it will allow influence to be brought to bear upon generations of the ministry. Now, you put yourself in the shoes of the liberals and you capture the theological colleges and you have captured the influence that is brought to bear upon generations of future ministers.
Recently leading Open Evangelicals have been writing much more definitely on their opposition to the stance of FCA. Their question is why the FCA should be set up now, when (from the viewpoint of Open Evangelicals) the Church of England is not like The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. There is something naive, even deliberately naive in the question, because they already know the answer. GAFCON happened and the FCA is intending to frame the evangelical agenda!
Two articles have recently appeared on the Fulcrum (Open Evangelical) website that are clearly opposed to the FCA despite the apparent shared headline evangelicalism. One is by the new Bishop of Sherborne (promoted by an Affirming Catholic diocesan bishop and with a fascinating consecration sermon given by a theology textbook theologian) and another by one of those ordained theology teachers who left Richard Turnbull’s theology college, Andrew Goddard. In my view, one of the best articles on this division with Open Evangelicals has come very recently from a certain Rev. Charles Raven, one of the Conservative Evangelicals who represents the potential nature of the entryism/ replacement to come. It is a very good explanation of why FCA will want to spread its tentacles into the UK from the Western Conservative Evangelical ‘intellectuals’ and the ballast in Africa and pick people off into its own membership who might now be at the more conservative end of Open Evangelicalism – in other words to make Open Evangelicalism more institutional, more liberal and therefore to be opposed, and move towards becoming an evangelical rump.
Charles Raven himself is a most interesting character. The previous Bishop of Worcester was opposed to the manner and result of George Carey’s badly-handled and over-excited Lambeth Conference of 1998 and the resolution that was Lambeth 1:10. This evangelical priest and his church decided to dissociate from his variant bishop, at which in all effect he was told to go. His congregation did not take the property! This now independent Anglican is fully part of FCA, and of course he would be inside any replacement Church ACNA-style. Note how he writes (and does so consistently) against ‘Liberal Evangelicalism’ and the stance of Fulcrum, the Archbishop of Canterbury and even the Evangelical Bishop Tom Wright. I think this most recent of articles is one of his best and is as revealing as the Turnbull lecture of 2006.
Let’s be clear. This all-guiding ‘Jeruslalem Declaration’ was prepared and leaked before the GAFCON conference made it apparently its own. The plan was ready and unfolded, and a small number of people take the real decisions. The FCA is not going to be another pressure group, or seek to engage in another split. It won’t take in members to divide it or change its agenda. It aims first and foremost to weaken away Open Evangelicalism. With the Catholic traditionalists gone (leaving those Affirming Catholics that are anyway regarded as ‘liberals’) the FCA intends to be an organisation to take on the liberals proper, whatever their institutional position, to divert funds, to move people, and to undermine a whole Church. If you don’t replace a Church by a parallel one, and then try and suck people over, you do it from within, weakening and dislodging until the rot you intend to bring about falls into your hands, and then it is all yours.
As GAFCON said about itself, these folks are revolutionaries and they mean business. Anyone with any sense would do all they can to stop them. That’s what the Labour leader did with the Militant Tendency, but the Archbishop of Canterbury has compromised with them and grinds on with the cold “glacier” of the Anglican Convenant proposal, about which the GAFCON people have blown hot and cold as it suited them – making the surface as slippery as possible for all these institutional people
Adrian Worsfold (Pluralist), has a doctorate in sociology and a masters degree in contemporary theology. He lives near Hull, in northeast England and keeps the blog Pluralist Speaks.