On 25 March Dame Sarah Mullally was enthroned as the Archbishop of Canterbury in Canterbury Cathedral. In her sermon the Archbishop declared: 

‘In the Incarnation, we see God becoming one of us, and this gives me such hope for the church. In the ordinary and the extraordinary life of the church, we see God’s hand at work, the church rolling up its sleeves and getting stuck in where God is already at work, in the local and the global. 

‘The church through the ordinary lives of its people continues to do so many extraordinary acts of love. God’s people, offering a listening ear, a word of encouragement or a prayer of healing, offering food, shelter, sanctuary and welcome in a world that so often seeks to divide us, tables to sit at, conversations to be shared, and being a simple loving presence, like the salt of the Earth, a light on the hill, the treasure of the kingdom, a church for the whole nation and for the world, which looks for ways of joining in with people of all faiths and of none in acts of service which will transform, a church which extends around the world with our sisters churches in the Anglican Communion, as part of the one holy, catholic and apostolic church to embody Christ’s love.

‘God is at work in the good news of the Gospel and in the hearts and lives of ordinary people who, like Mary, have the audacity to believe that with God we can do extraordinary things.’ 

This passage struck me because it is typical of the kind of description of the activity of the Church that we find time and again in the statements made by bishops and others responsible for talking about the work of the Church of England. 

For example, an article in the Daily Telegraph published the day before the Archbishop’s enthronement reported on a poll showing that a majority of people believe the Church of England should lose its right to run state schools. The article quoted people who supported this idea and finally a ‘spokesperson for the Church of England’ who said: 

‘At the heart of the Church’s purpose in the nation is Christian service. That’s what shapes our presence in national life, and it’s what continues to guide our work in neighbourhoods up and down England. Every day, churches across the country provide support that people rely on.

‘Church of England parishes support or run more than 31,000 social action projects, with 60 per cent of churches involved in food banks, alongside warm spaces, community cafés, lunch clubs, toddler groups, school and hospital chaplaincy, and the quiet pastoral care offered to anyone who walks through the door

‘Through our schools we invest in the education and flourishing of over a million children in different communities across England – irrespective of faith background

‘Thousands of volunteers and ministers respond to this calling to serve our communities and the common good, wherever people are and whatever they believe.’ 

What the two statements I have just quoted, and numerous others like them which I could have cited, implicitly offer is an apologetic for the Church of England based on all the good things that its members undertake that those in society as a whole will generally recognise as worthwhile. 

I have no reason to doubt that those in the Church of England engage in all the good works described in the two statements I have quoted. I also accept that it is proper that those in the Church of England should do the things described for the simple reason that they are ways of fulfilling the second of the two great commandments given by God ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 19:19, Romans 13:9). It is necessary that Christians in the Church of England do these things because, as James insists in his Epistle, faith has to be manifested in good works:  

‘What does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead’ (James 2: 14-17). 

I further accept that if you are going to communicate the Christian faith in today’s world it cannot be presented in a disembodied fashion but has to be shown to be something that has positive effects in practice. This is because as Graham Tomlin explains in his book The Provocative Church: 

‘… contemporary culture in the West (and far beyond, if the prophets of globalization are right) has become very wary of disembodied truth. Where truth is suspected of being a mere front for power games, what lies beneath the surface of truth becomes a critical issue. In other words, the connection between the truth claim, and the kind of living that emerges from it, comes under very close scrutiny. Is this truth just another bid for power and mastery over others, just like Fascism and Marxism were, the discredited ideologies of the 20th century? Evangelism that proclaims the gospel of truth yet pays little attention to the kind of community it creates or the quality of life of the people it shapes, is unlikely to be listened to for very long by those who have imbibed the postmodern suspicion of disembodied truth with their mother’s milk.’ 

Given all this, why am I still uneasy about the kind of apologetic for the Church of England found in the Archbishop’s sermon and the quotation from the Church of England spokesperson above? 

Read it all in Christian Today