Teenage murderers —going up?

Readers may recall an item I posted back in June, where I speculated that the commission of murder in the UK was becoming more prevalent amongst the young —specifically amongst teenagers. At the time I was taken to task over the use of ‘Google news’ trends to back up what I admitted was “a hunch”, arising out of a sense that the number of news stories concerning teenage victims or perpetrators of murder was increasing.

I did also mention that I’d tried, but failed, to obtain some statistics on this from the Ministry of Justice under the Freedom of Information Act. Somewhat frustrated that my hunch remained just that, I therefore decided to try again. I accordingly contacted the Ministry of Justice, asking them to provide the figures for “how many people under the age of 20 were convicted of murder between 1969 and 2008 on a year-by-year basis”.

Once again, the answer was not easy to obtain! I submitted the request in early July, and by law the response ought to come within twenty working days. Despite an immediate acknowledgement of the request, however, by mid August I still had not heard anything. To cut a long story short, I put in a formal complaint last week, and yesterday the information arrived, having been delayed by an administrative error. (I have duly withdrawn the complaint.)

It did come with some caveats, explained in a covering letter. In particular, the figures only go back to 1979 (and also omit 1983). Prior to that, the information is not broken down into the category I requested and is therefore not held. This means I cannot apply these figures to my suggestion that the steep increase in young murderers may have begun as long ago as 1975.

Notice also that the figures are only for England and Wales, but I don’t think this matters for the basic thesis. (Indeed, including Northern Ireland over this period may have created its own distortions.)

The figures are also based on the principle that “the offence selected is the one for which the heaviest penalty is imposed,” which I take to mean that if the individual were found guilty of, say, burglary and murder, they would show up as a ‘murderer’ if the penalty imposed was greater than that for the burglary (which I imagine would always be the case).

The figures for 2008/9 have also not been released, on the basis that they are covered by “a qualified exemption” and are therefore “subject to a public interest test”. This, however, seems to be a formality and relates to the (understandable) need to get the figures right before they are made public.

What we are left with, then, is a simple table for ‘the number of persons aged 10-19 found guilty of murder at all courts in England and Wales, 1979-2007’ (omitting 1983). This is reproduced as a chart below.

The first thing to say is that the figures are obviously limited in what they can tell us. In particular, there is no way of telling the extent to which they may include multiple convictions for the same crime —in cases, for example, of a gang attack which resulted in a single death. The figures for murderers do not correlate directly to those for murders.

The second thing is that I was admittedly surprised by the number of teenage murderers already being convicted in the late seventies and early eighties, which was higher than I expected. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that the figures are not available earlier than this, as my initial hope was to look at how the trend changed in the 1970s.

Thirdly, however, there is clearly an increase, which seems to begin some time in the mid-to-late 1990s, and seems to confirm the tentative conclusion I offered at the end of my previous article. Although it may not show up very well, behind the bars of the histogram is a trend line, based on a three-year average, which begins to climb around 1997. (If you click on the image, you will see a much larger version.) Nevertheless, it is impossible to say whether or not this is part of an overall increase in the murder rate in the same period.

Beyond that, I’d rather sit and think about what these figures might be saying. Between 1979 and 1996, the average number of young people convicted of murder remained at about twenty-five a year. Before that, we cannot tell anything. Over the following decade, the figures rose, and peaked in 2007 in the mid sixties. After that, again, we cannot tell anything —indeed my intuitive impression is that the figures are substantially down for this year (2009), but only time (and the FOI Act) will tell. Nevertheless, within the range of figures provided, there is a trend, and it is, sadly, upwards.

Revd John P Richardson
30 September 2009

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You're not the boss of me now —or are you?

Teaching on the Wisdom literature yesterday, I was struck by how in Proverbs the foundation of the good life is the godly family. The book opens with several chapters addressing the young man (person) in need of wisdom who is urged to listen to his father’s instruction and not forsake his mother’s teaching.

We may note that this itself builds on another ‘foundational’ principle, enshrined in the Ten Commandments: “Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” As St Paul observed (Eph 6:2-3), this commandment has a special quality in that there is a promise attached to it. It has consequences, not just for the individual but for society, and these are spelled out: “you will live long, and it will go well with you in the land.”

Similarly, the Proverbs have social consequences. They are, according to 1:3, “for ... doing what is right and just and fair.” And this is also the basis for God’s blessing of the world through Abraham’s descendants: “I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him” (Gen 18:19).

All this depends, in the first instance, on the parent-to-child communication of God’s ways. Abraham is to direct “his children and his household”. The subject of Proverbs is to “listen to a father’s instruction” (4:1).

The Christian reader of Proverbs, moreover, is in the privileged position of knowing that the human relationship between parent and child is a mirror of the divine relationship between two of the three members of the godhead. The Son is constituted as ‘son’ because, as Jesus is recorded as saying in John 5:19, he does “only what he sees his Father doing.” Obedience is inherent in the son-to-father relationship. What is often overlooked, however, is that the converse to this is trust: “the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father” (5:22-23). Here is not just a lesson about the Trinity but about parenthood: parents may expect children to obey them, but ultimately they must honour this by their absolute trust of their children.

Yet it is part of the lesson of the Wisdom literature (and its fulfilment in Christ as the Wisdom of God, cf 1 Cor 1:24), that this is not universally understood or accepted. That parents may expect obedience from their children, and have the right to direct them as to how they should live, is itself a theological proposition, based on the principle that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (Prov 1:7).

Where there is no such ‘fear of the Lord’, however, we may expect Wisdom to be in increasingly short supply. We must thus be ready to question much of the agenda of our society with regard to children and their upbringing.

At the same time, however, we may challenge the assumptions of our society, both collectively and individually, about not merely education but procreation. A question worth asking, it seems to me, is what people think gives them the right to have children in the first place.

Having a child involves bringing another person into existence — yet we do not (indeed, of course, we cannot) ask that person whether or not they want to exist. Most of the people thus caused to exist will experience life as, to a greater or lesser extent, a struggle. They may, of course, have happy times as well as bad, but they will have to come to terms with their own existence, and, perhaps most difficult of all, they will eventually have to face the inevitability of the termination of their life which, in the view of many, means their consequent non-existence. (The book of Ecclesiastes is replete with material which reflects that particular struggle!)

Yet parents —even atheist parents —assume they have the right to do this to someone else: to cause them to exist and therefore to face the angst of existence itself. They do this without question and, moreover, they unquestioningly impose their authority on them, beginning with naming the child. Yet what gives anyone the right to say to another person something as dramatic as, “Everyone will call you ‘Joel’ or ‘Ziggy’,” or whatever takes their parents’ fancy?

I have no doubt that somewhere in the dark recesses of some department of sociology or social policy unit exactly these questions are being asked. And I suspect that the answer is precisely what we would expect in a society where there is no ‘fear of the Lord’: that there is no right to do this —or rather that any rights there may be are to be defined in law and regulated by the State. Once it was thought to be a privilege that schools, colleges and so on could act in loco parentis. Today, one suspects, we are moving to the position where the parents will be allowed only those privileges that the State grants to them.

But that, of course, begs another question: what gives them the right ...?

If the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, it is also true that the lack of such fear is the beginning of the unravelling of reason.

Revd John P Richardson
27 September 2009

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Reaching Africa from here

I spent an enjoyable but exhausting day in London yesterday, teaching for the Philip Project. This takes its name from the incident with Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, and aims to train students from Africa to become effective Bible-teachers when they return home.

The students themselves are very aware that much of what passes for Christian teaching in Africa, whilst well-intended by the preacher, bears little relationship to what is in the biblical text from which they purport to be preaching or teaching.* None of them are studying theology, but all of them will be involved in Bible studies or church leadership, and one of them has even helped set up a Philip Project offshoot in Africa itself.

My given topic was the Wisdom literature, and in the time available we managed to cover a Bible overview for the context, then Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and Job, before finishing with a brief consideration of Christ as the Wisdom of God.

One thing that struck me, in preparing and presenting this material, is that Christians have a golden opportunity to preach and demonstrate wisdom in societies where God is ignored or rejected, since the result is that life simply doesn’t work as it should. In Africa we have widespread corruption and inefficiency, in the West we have the ‘credit crunch’ and the vacuousness (Ecclesiastes would say the ‘vanity’) of daily life for many people.

Before we preach, though, we have to learn, and I am determined to go back and do a bit more thinking about and reading of the Wisdom books, and especially Proverbs.

This morning, meanwhile, we are trying something new in church, instead of the standard sermon. Whether it will work, I don’t know. I notice it is also ‘Back to Church’ Sunday. We did it a couple of years ago, with mixed results. We’re not taking part this year (my slightly cynical comment was, ‘Why spoil Christmas?’), but I’d be interested to hear from those who do.

Revd John Richardson
27 September 2009

*Actually I don't think this is just an African problem.

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Sacked dinner lady - not me, guv'nor!

Or should that be "me not guv'nor"?

I would just like to make clear, having been accused of this once already, that I am not the Revd John Richardson referred to in a story about a dinner lady sacked for a "breach of pupil confidentiality".

I have no idea whether this action was warranted or not, but it took place at Great Tey, not Ugley, and concerns my namesake, not me.

Revd John P Richardson
24 September 2009

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Your choice for the next Bishop of Chelmsford

So what if you didn't get along to the public consultation about the next Bishop of Chelmsford? We can hold one right here on the interweb.

The Crown Nominations Commission invites people to put forward names, so who would your choice be, and what qualities should the next bishop have? Post your suggestions and comments here.

Please note: no negative comments about any individuals will be allowed, not least because of libel laws. If you can't think of something nice to say, don't say it!

Also, for the purposes of this exercise you must give a full name (Christian or initials and surname) and your location.

Let the comments commence.


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'When we get behind closed doors': more on the selection of the next Bishop of Chelmsford

A picture is emerging not only that the consultation process regarding the appointment of the next Bishop of Chelmsford has been rushed and inadequate, but that decisions have already been made about the possible profile of John Gladwin’s successor.

A correspondent from the Barking and Dagenham Deanery writes,

... the only people who knew anything about the consultation process at Deanery Synod last night was someone on the Vacancy in See committee ... and the Clergy Chair , who like others was contacted in a rush last minute.

[The Vacancy in See representative] had a good deal to say ... that would add to our [evangelical] dismay but there isn’t space here to pass it all on. The committee has already created a profile of the person they want. Apparently Caroline Boddington said that the purpose of correspondence with her is to see whether the profile corresponds to what folks are saying, i.e it is beyond the stage of creating a profile (that happened in August).

[The representative] said that all this was originally scheduled for November, ... [and they have] not yet received an explanation of why things were suddenly brought forward with very little notice.

Conspiracy or the other thing? Or maybe a bit of both?

John Richardson
22 September 2009

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The next Bishop of Chelmsford: your views welcome (sort of)

In July 1859, John Henry Newman published an article in The Rambler, a Catholic journal of that era, titled, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’. This was something which apparently the bishops of the time were loath to do, and it landed Newman in considerable hot water.

I am beginning to think, however, that someone should write a similar piece on consulting the clergy in matters of replacing the Bishop of Chelmsford, for again there seems to have been some reluctance about this.

It gives me no pleasure to say so, but I am one of those who found the time under Bishop John Gladwin’s leadership ‘challenging’, particularly with regard to his position on human sexuality. With several others I had a number of face-to-face meetings with the bishop, where concerns were expressed and some sort of compromise sought, but to no avail. Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream, of which I was a founding member, has also given a great deal of its time and energy to these issues.

As the time for Bishop Gladwin’s retirement approached, however, there was a perceptible lessening of tension with the hope that better times might be ahead, and one of my personal intentions was to take an active interest in the appointment consultations, just as I had when Bp John Perry retired.

Imagine my shock, then, to discover that the public consultation has been and gone (on September 9th), and that the deadline for writing to the Archbishops’ and Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretaries was today (September 21st).

I am still asking myself how this happened. There was an article about the meeting in the Chelmsford Weekly News, and I am told that there were advertisements in the church press. Some clergy were ‘in the loop’, as were some of the deanery lay chairs.The diocesan newspaper for October contains a short article saying that the consultation process is ‘under way’, and refers readers to the diocesan website for more details. And there is a link at the bottom of the current diocesan website which takes you to a page about the public consultation and the letters deadline. There is also an item on the current ‘news’ page of the website which speaks about the consultation. However, this is dated 5^th September, just four days before the event, so not much notice was given there. Once again, this takes you to the same page about the publication consultation as the previous link.

However, the consultation was not mentioned in the diocesan e-bulletins for June, July, August or September. Personally, I found out about it from a clergy friend who phoned me this morning. To my knowledge (and no one I’ve have spoken to so far has cast any doubt on this) the clergy were neither specifically told about the meeting, nor asked for their opinion. And yet the facilities to do so clearly exist. Just a few weeks ago, we all received an ad clerum by e-mail from the Bishop’s chaplain warning us of the dangers of swine ’flu. Why, then, was a similar e-mail not sent about the appointment consultation?

Of course, some might say, “Everyone ought to have known. It was on the diocesan website calendar, and the website itself.” Maybe, but I cannot help contrasting this with the requirements to consult which are laid on PCCs considering passing ‘Resolution C’. These go far beyond what the ‘letter of the law’ (the Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993) requires, and expect a deliberate seeking of the opinions not only of church members but of the non-churchgoing local community. There is a clear indication that a dim view would be taken of things if the PCC simply replied, “It was on the notice sheet.”

In fact, the views of some clergy were specifically sought, but in what seems to be a not-terribly-well-organized way. One correspondent has already replied to me as follows:

On 9th Sept [the day of the ‘public consultation’] I received a ’phone call from the Diocesan Office inviting me in for a ‘consultation’ that afternoon (about 4 hours’ notice). I thought maybe I'd been asked to represent a certain constituency or something, but when I got there it turned out that Paul Britton [the Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretary] and Caroline Biddington [sic, the Archbishops’ Appointments Secretary] were seeing clergy in random pairs.

He continued,

The questions Mr Britton asked were very simply “What do you think are the needs of the Diocese?” and “What kind of bishop do you thin[k] it needs?”. [...] I asked Mr Britton how many of these interviews they were conducting (between them) and the answer was about 70.”

So someone knew how to get hold of clergy —albeit at short notice. I would observe, however, that those consulted did not, for some reason, include the honorary assistant bishop, the Rt Revd John Ball.

Anyway, I have sent an e-mail to the Archbishops’ Secretary and hope it will do some good. If you want to try a last-ditch approach, her e-mail is caroline.boddington@c-of-e.org.uk. You may also like to contact Revd John Dunnett of CPAS, who is on the Crown Nominations Commission. His e-mail address is jdunnett@cpas.org.uk.

Revd John P Richardson
21 September 2009

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New Bishop of Chelmsford: WRITE TODAY!

I have just discovered that the last day for writing to the Archbishops' Appointments Secretary about the appointment of the next Bishop of Chelmsford is today, 21 September.

Details about the public consultation (which has already happened) and this deadline can be found here, on the Chelmsford Diocesan website.

There is still time to contact Caroline Boddington for the Archbishops and Paul Britton for the Prime Minister by e-mail, but it must be done TODAY.


John Richardson



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Totalitarian Britain

totalitarian >adjective (of government) centralized, dictatorial, and requiring complete subservience to the state.

I was going to post something about the growing totalitarianism of the British state, but Pete Sanlon has done a good job of it here.

Comments should be posted on his site.

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The breastplate of righteousness, the fist of Chuck

Should the whole armour of God include Chuck Norris?

In the midst of all the serious things of life, I was just delighted to find this list of facts - and they are all true.

(Hat Tip to the Daily Telegraph for this.)

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Evangelism and baptism (again)

I want to pick up on my suggestion that there is something not right about evangelical evangelizing with this lengthy quote from Jens Christensen’s The Practical Approach to Muslims:

38. [...] The work of the Church should be like a fire thrown upon the earth. Then every fire department the devil has in that area would be put to quench it. Then, and only then would our Lord’s warning ring in our ears: ‘He who denies Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father’.

[...]

40. Now in our Utopian dream Church, which is the Church of our faith as opposed to the Church of our experience, the personal witness of the believer is like all else: inside the context of the Church, the Corpus Christi. There, in the Church, the very first and fundamental witness is baptism. Please don’t misunderstand this. Baptism is NOT the witness of the individual that he now has faith in Christ. If it were it could never be a Sacrament, and it could have no more value than that which is put into it by each individual. Baptism, considered as a witness, is the testimony of the Church to an act of God. Baptism proclaims to the world that God has a pact with mankind, mediated through the body of Christ, the Church. Baptism is a witness to the fact that God claims His own, and that in each particular baptism, God has claimed this very person being baptised. In this connection it is immaterial whether the recipient of baptism is two months or eighty years old; baptism is still a witness to the fact of God’s pact with mankind, in the Church.

41. Experience in all countries where Christianity is not the accepted religion goes to show that people seem to be aware of the fact that it is baptism that makes the real difference to a man’s standing in the community.

Now notice that when Christensen says that God’s pact with mankind is “mediated through the body of Christ, the Church”, he is not ‘institutionalizing’ or ‘clericalizing’ the work of the gospel. He is not saying that only the clergy, or ecclesiastically sanctioned individuals or groups, may spread the gospel. He is certainly not saying that provided we baptize people, the gospel has been spread!

However, in speaking of baptism, he puts “the personal witness of the believer ... inside the context of the Church”.

By contrast, evangelicals are sometimes actually encouraged to leave any consideration of the church out of their evangelism. Thus, in student ministry we were repeatedly told that “the Christian Union is not a church”. True, the Christian Union existed for the purposes of fellowship and evangelism —but it was not a church. No wonder, then, if those evangelized through the initiative of the Christian Union saw ‘gospel’ and ‘church’ as two different things. ‘Gospel’ was the thing by which you became a Christian and was the focus of fellowship and life in the Christian Union, ‘church’ was the (comparatively dull and hidebound) organization you joined after becoming a Christian.

In the same way, for many people baptism is what you do after becoming a Christian, to show you’ve come to faith —and even, in some cases, to qualify you for membership of the local church ‘club’.

This, I would suggest however, is not what we see in the Bible. There, the Apostle Peter can speak of the ark coming through the flood, and then write, “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you ...” (1 Pet 3:21). New Testament baptism is not a testimony to an earlier event —becoming a Christian —it is the embodiment of the event.

Of course this does not justify an ex opera view of baptism, as 1 Corinthians 10:1-5 makes clear:

For I want you to know, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, ² and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, ³ and all ate the same spiritual food, ⁴ and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. ⁵ Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.

Like any saving ordinance in Scripture, baptism which does not meet with faith (cf the Law in Heb 4:2) will not save anyone. This is why I have suggested that baptism needs to be seen as an act of faith (not a sign of faith). Baptism holds out to us the gospel: if we will die with Christ, if we will be buried with Christ, if we will rise to new life with Christ, then we shall be saved. When we are baptized, we take hold of the gospel by faith.

I think something like this is the way that we should present baptism in our evangelism —by telling people that Christ died for their sins and was raised from the dead, and that by faith in him we are baptized into his death and raised with him to newness of life.

That might also help us address a situation the Apostles would surely have found incredible, namely that there are tens of millions of people in this country (and more being produced every week) who are baptized but who live as if they had no awareness of the gospel. To these people we must say, “You are baptized, yet you live as if God meant little or nothing to you. It is time to repent of your unbaptized ways.”

In this respect, I think the Federal Vision Movement is right —in that we cannot speak to the baptized unbeliever in the same terms as we should speak to the unbaptized unbeliever. To the former we can speak more as Paul did to the Athenians at the Areopagus, reassuring them that ‘the times of ignorance God overlooked’ (Acts 17:30). To the latter we must say, “Someone somewhere decided that you should receive something very precious —God’s promise of salvation. It is surely time for you to decide now for yourself whether to accept this or reject it.”

At the same time, though, those of us who are happy ‘paedobaptists’ should nevertheless be questioning our present policy of a baptismal ‘free for all’, wherein promises are made on behalf of children too young to speak for themselves which those making these promises neither understand themselves, nor intend that the children should be made to keep. That is also an evangelistic problem area!

Revd John P Richardson
9 September 2009

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The future for evangelicalism

(This is a reworking of the previous piece I did as my 'third' Ireland talk, which I wasn't entirely happy about. I'm still not wholly thrilled, but I have to get a plane in a couple of hours! Those who read the other might scroll down to 'No desire for division'.)

The future for Evangelicalism

Introduction

What, then, do we need to be doing to strengthen evangelicalism, and where does the future lie for evangelicalism as a movement and for evangelicals within a denomination like the Church of Ireland?

One of the things impressed on me by my old friend Canon Harry Sutton was that evangelicalism needs to be a theological movement. And so if we are to strengthen evangelicalism, we need to start from our theology, and specifically —as we are evangelicals —our theology of evangelism.

I want to tell you a story, or rather to read you a story from Scripture, and to ask you if you can spot the difference between this and most contemporary evangelism. Its from Acts 9:26,

“Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Rise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ This is a desert place. ²⁷ And he rose and went. And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure. He had come to Jerusalem to worship ²⁸ and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. ²⁹ And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” ³⁰ So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” ³¹ And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. ³² Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. ³³ In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.” ³⁴ And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” ³⁵ Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.”

Now let me pause there and ask how many of us would have done the same. My guess is, we all would have done. We would have seen it is a golden, God-given opportunity to proclaim the gospel.

But now let me ask, how many of us would then have got the response Philip got:

"And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, ‘See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?’"

Why the difference?

My guess is none of us. On the contrary, the way gospel was presented to us, the way we present the gospel to others and the way we teach others to present the gospel, would not lead anyone to ask, “What is to prevent me being baptized?”

Yet compare that with Acts 2:41, “So those who received [Peter’s] word were baptized ...”, or 8:11, “when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women,” or 9:18, “Then Paul rose and was baptized,” or 16:32-33, “And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night and washed their wounds; and he was baptized at once, he and all his family.”

What I want you to notice is not ‘that they were baptized’, but how baptism follows naturally from the gospel in Acts, and then to ask why it doesn’t follow naturally —in fact doesn’t even get a mention —in most contemporary evangelical evangelism.

No need for baptism?

The first reason, I would suggest, that we do not lead people to baptism is that we still live within a ‘post-Christendom’ culture where many people —perhaps even most in Ireland —are already baptized.

We therefore identify the key issue as belief, not baptism —and to a certain extent we are right. The Bible is clear, and my understanding is that Anglican doctrine since the Gorham judgement upholds, that we are not saved simply by being baptized.

On the contrary, we must take proper account of St Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1:17, “For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel ...”

Nevertheless, we again see here our pragmatism —most people are baptism, many don’t believe, let’s focus on belief, and not worry about baptism.

It also reveals, however, that we have not yet come to grips with the growing difference between the Church and contemporary culture. Society is no longer divided into the baptized and the unbaptized.

However, that difference is going to confront us more and more, and a sign of that difference will be fewer and fewer people getting baptized. When that happens, baptism will mark the transition from one culture to another as emphatic as the current difference between Christian and Muslim or Hindu or Jewish cultures.

No desire for division

Another reason I would suggest is that we are rightly afraid of division. We experience evangelical unity across denominational divides as a good thing —better, then, to stay away from debates which might destroy that unity.

Once again, we are revealed as pragmatists, and there is much to be said for our pragmatism.

However, we must seriously ask whether it is always justifiable. How strong is a relationship (for example with other Christians) that does not confront real disagreement?

And how helpful is an attitude which means that we ourselves don’t think through our position on a core issue because we are afraid that if it became too explicit is might disrupt our unity?

The problem with this habit of mind is that it spills over into other areas —what about the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, for example? How strong can this be if we do not confront our differences? And does it just become a flag of convenience against homosexuality?

And this is not just a question of working with Anglo-Catholics, but also Charismatics. I was very struck by an interview Nicky Gumbel recently gave for the Guardian in England where he refused to describe himself as ‘an evangelical’.

At the heart of this is the Alpha movement’s commitment to institutional belonging and ecumenical cooperation. But must this be bought at the price of deliberate doctrinal ‘fuzziness’? Can we be ‘all one in Christ’ and yet indifferent on core issues? And can any Christian organization thrive which fails to agree on something as basic to the New Testament as the outcome of evangelism?

As far as I am aware, incidentally, the Alpha Course is typically evangelical in that it doesn’t mention baptism at the point of bringing people to conversion.

No effect from baptism?
The fourth reason I would suggest, however, why our presentations of the gospel leave out baptism, is that many evangelicals are unclear what baptism does, and many of these evangelical ‘don’t knows’ are also ‘don’t really cares’.

Indeed, I have heard of Anglican clergy who have said at an infant’s baptism that ‘we are doing nothing here —just making the baby’s head wet’.

Now I have no doubt that those who take this view of baptism believe that in their daily ministry they are fulfilling the Great Commission. And yet they regard one key element of this —baptizing people —as almost an ‘optional extra’.

Once again, though, I want to emphasize the problem is not first of all in what we are doing —baptizing or not baptizing —as in what we are thinking about the gospel itself: why does our presentation of the gospel not have a New Testament outcome?

A detachment from tradition
And here I would like to consider the effect of this on the people we lead to Christ. When Paul found a funny group of disciples in Ephesus, as we read in Acts 19, and was trying to work out what was the problem, the question he put to them was, “Into what then were you baptized?” (19:3). Where do you fit? Where do you belong? How did you get here?

Now of course this is not a question about liturgy. It is not a ‘mechanistic’ question about the process of Christian induction. Rather, it looks to how they received the faith, from whom they learned it, and what they had learned.

We see this from the way that the answer, “Into John’s baptism” results in an explanation about Jesus. Nevertheless, notice, v 5: “On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.”

There may be interpretive disputes about what this actually meant —was it ‘by hearing this’ or ‘subsequent to hearing this’? But it is there: the gospel leads to baptism and thence incorporation into the Christian mainstream, which is to say, into the Church.

By contrast, the typical evangelical presentation of the gospel privileges the individual in relation to the Church. So Norman Warren, in telling you how to “grow strong as a Christian”, writes,

"The Bible is the Christian’s food. It is a living book and through it God will speak to you. Read it every day."

This reading is clearly, however, on your own. And on praying, he writes,

"Talk to Jesus Christ naturally as to a close friend, yet respectfully remembering who he is. Spend time alone with him every day."

Here, praying is explicitly ‘on your own’: “alone with him”. God speaks to you in the Bible, you speak to God in prayer, but essentially you do this alone. True, he adds, “never miss being with Christians in church on Sunday.” But that is point three, not point one.

And it is my suggestion that this individualization of the gospel sows the seeds for later problems for evangelicalism as a movement because it has created problems within the individual evangelical.

Correcting the problem
It is my conviction that evangelicalism needs to be strengthened in three specific areas: in understanding tradition, in developing theology and in engaging with culture. And this can and ought to apply from the point of delivery of the gospel —it ought not to be something added on afterwards.

The key to this is not baptism. The key is our understanding of the gospel. It is the gospel, not the liturgy, which saves people.

At the same time, however, we need to see that in the New Testament the call to ‘repent and be baptized’ is the same as the call to ‘repent and believe’.

Baptism is not a sign of belief but an act of believing. And as such, it is also an act of obedience to something outside and beyond ourselves which brings us immediately into a relationship with others, not least because we cannot baptize ourselves, and indeed would not naturally think of baptism as a first expression of our faith.

If we preach repentance and faith as merely inward experiences and personal decisions, we privatize the faith. Then, when the individual is confronted by the church —by the lives and beliefs of other Christians —there is a fresh challenge: “What has my faith got to do with these people?”

Baptism, however, confronts us immediately with the reality of the church and shifts the centre of gravity from us and our faith to elsewhere, and that must be good for the development of our understanding.

What I also received
In 1 Corinthians 15:3 the Apostle Paul declares that faith in the gospel involves a chain of transference: 2For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received ..."

And it is his declared intention that this chain should be unbroken. In 2 Tim 2:2 he writes, "... what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also."

Of course, we know the importance of selecting ‘faithful men’ to pass on the tradition. What we seem less quick to recognize is that we ourselves are part of that process —or should be— that we are to pass on what we have received.

Faithful teaching does not start with us! We are neither the originators nor the arbiters of what is true. We are indeed to discern what is true —but not to decide what is true, and the difference is fundamental, for it puts us in a position of learning.

The people of God
Now there is clearly a danger here of creating a false ‘Apostolic succession’. Yet that is itself forbidden by Christ: “Call no one ‘teacher’”. But it is important for us to understand that we begin the Christian life as learners.

Paul has no problems in reminding the Colossians that they first learned the gospel from Epaphras. And although Paul received the gospel from Christ, those whom Timothy selected received it from him.

Indeed, when we read the New Testament it is clear that in the Church the ‘learner-teacher’ relationship was basic to the community. God’s people were ‘disciples’ — yes, of Christ, but through those whom Christ had given to the Church as apostles and prophets, evangelists and pastor-teachers.

The gospel calls us —or should call us —into a community of teaching and learning, of admonition, exhortation and edification in God’s word. That is the vision in the Old Covenant and it is the vision in the New. In Deuteronomy 6:6-9, we read,

2And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. ⁷ You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. ⁸ You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. ⁹ You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."

And in Colossians 3:16, we read,

"Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom ..."

The Christian community —the Church —is to be literally a community of learning. But that is not what we find in many evangelical circles. Rather, we find diversities of opinions, and if you’re wondering where you’ve heard that phrase before, it is in the preface to the Thirty-nine Articles in the Book of Common Prayer, which are given “for the avoidance of diversities of opinion.”

The shocking thing is how far Anglicanism has departed from this notion. Indeed, it is now an article of faith that Anglicanism exists to embrace the diversities of opinions.

But are evangelicals any better? I suggest we are not, because we have individualized belief and therefore, in the end, enthroned personal opinion about the faith. And we do this as the point of conversion.

Reestablishing our theology
One of the challenges I would present to evangelicals, then, is to present the church as a learning community within which the tradition is discerned and by which it is passed on.

John Chapman once said that if you heard a preacher or a minister say from the pulpit or platform, “I am not a theologian,” you should shout out “Boo!” And I suspect he would.

Evangelicals have got to get over their fear and suspicion of theology. I could quote at some length what men like Luther, Wesley and Spurgeon have all had to say about the need for learning in ministers of the gospel. But let me just quote Jonathan Fletcher speaking about John Chapman’s early influence in England:

"We didn’t need to be encouraged in evangelism —we’ve always been flat out at that. We needed to be rescued for reformed theology."

And here are equally telling words from Dick Lucas: “When [Chappo] first came to us he did a series on God and his sovereignty, and so on. I remember then being amazed at the theological nous of this man. After all, he’d come across to do evangelism and we weren’t used to travelling evangelists quite like this!” (Chappo, p202)

Again, we see our evangelical pragmatism. The focus of many evangelicals in the middle of the last century on evangelism rather than theology lives on, and it is not helped by our institutions, where such theology as is taught is often bad theology.

Rather than despair, however, evangelicals should begin by creating ‘communities within the community’. As monks and monasteries once preserved Western learning, so evangelicals, in societies, colleges, symposia and seminars should seek to establish and preserve the truth of ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3).

We can see, however, that we sit light to the church by the way that our evangelism leaves out the things of the church, such as baptism. It is not the cause of our problems —it is a symptom —nevertheless, attending to the symptom may lead us to both the cause the cure.

Counter-cultural engagement
And then, finally, evangelicals need to resume (for it was there in previous generations) their engagement with human culture and the development and deployment of a truly Christian culture —a culture which is developed from a gospel understanding of life, humanity and the human calling.

Too often, being an evangelical has meant abandoning notions of culture. Alternatively, we have sought to rule over the culture from a position that owes nothing to the gospel and much to traditional understandings of power.

Today, we are becoming like refugees and scavengers on our culture. We feed from the scraps of the media and television —criticizing it sometimes, but generally simply absorbing it.

We emphatically do not live as ‘the baptized’. Indeed, the world not only seeks to force unto into its mould, it has largely succeeded in overthrowing Romans 12:2 (do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind).

This was brought home to me recently by a request from the Guardian to write a short piece on how the conservative Christian attitude to homosexuality has been a defeat for them in the wider culture.

What is truly bizarre about this —and at the same time very revealing —is that the commissioning editor apparently thinks that the rest of conservative Christianity could pretty easily be absorbed by our prevailing culture.

But isn’t that true? As we engage with our non-Christian friends and colleagues, are we different from them? Are our attitudes and aspirations different from theirs? Certainly they are at the level of believing in God. But are they different in what we believe about life? Above all, are we different in the way we think: are we transformed by the renewal of our minds.

You might think it is a long stretch from here to baptism, but as I have indicated, it is not for a Jew or a Muslim. The Muslim, especially, knows that in baptism he is leaving not a religion but a world —an entire culture which permeates everything: food and shopping, sex and family life, finance and politics.

The Christian leaves what? The Christian enters what? We have hardly begun to realize the difference this ought to make.

To give just one example, I was listening on the radio yesterday to an item about troublesome youth and one of the key problems identified was lack of a father figure in many boys lives, especially.

But the premise for dealing with their problems was that, ultimately, the choices they make for themselves must be sacrosanct.

Now I would suggest that the Christian view of fatherhood rejects the notion that the choice is sacrosanct, because it introduces the idea of ‘sonship’ and obedience, exemplified in the obedience of the Son of God to God the Father.

So in this apparently small way, Christianity conflicts with one of our core cultural assumptions.

Christians need to know they are different. But more than that, they need to know they are different together, as the community, Luther called it the gemeinde, of the baptized in the Church.

Of course there are dangers in this, not least of tribalism. That is where the rôle of pastor-teachers is so important. We must ourselves challenge the culture of tribalism, which is of the world, not the gospel. We must teach and preach the faith.

But we will increasingly do it in a world which stands apart from us, and from which we must ourselves stand apart. Evangelical compromise with the culture has always been an issue. But then evangelical awareness of the community of God’s people has never been a strength.

As we become what we are meant to be, so we will be equipped to face the challenges. And in the end, both evangelicalism and evangelism will be the stronger.

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Who wants to be ... my boss?

This morning (5th September) we had our meeting to consider the necessary matters under Section 11 of the Patronage (Benefices) Measure 1986. Once the patrons have been notified of the outcome, we will be in a position for them to move forward in suggesting possible candidates for the post of Vicar of the United Benefice of Henham and Elsenham with Ugley.

If you think you might be interested, or know anyone who might be, the patrons are Christ's Hospital (for Ugley), the Bishop of Chelmsford (but see Colchester) for Elsenham, and Church Society for Henham.

Meanwhile, we could do with your prayers.

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