The Right Method

"Laying two or three corpses side by side does not turn them into a living body." So said one of the Church of England's most prominent Conservative Evangelicals to me a few years ago on the subject of reunion with the Methodists and the URC.

By incorporating this country's mainstream Methodist body, as such, what would be gained by the Church of England, as such? Methodism's traditions of Biblical preaching and sacramental spirituality, of missionary zeal and musical excellence, of scholarly rigor and high moral standards, of practical social concern and radical political action, all held to derive from the righteousness of Jesus Christ imparted, and not only imputed, by means of Word and Sacraments? Would the people running the Church of England even want these things? This scheme looks like a device for kicking out those, on either present side, who adhere to anything much like them and who therefore will not subscribe to whatever document the committee system churns out as a basis for unity.

In point of fact, the Anglican Communion has received at least one such suffusion, in South Africa, when those of precisely such Methodist missionary provenance, spurred thereby to a high ecclesiology and sacramental theology, organised themselves into the Order of Ethiopia and then sought Anglican Orders, though always with a parallel structure. At least two thirds of them, including Thabo Mbeki, are now in the Traditional Anglican Communion, and they, with the Torres Strait Islanders and with the Indian heirs of opposition to schemes just like the present English one, are set fair to become the three thriving Personal Ordinariates. Their missionaries, like those from the Catholic Church throughout the developing world (and from Eastern Europe), cannot possibly arrive too soon on these shores.

Biblical preaching and sacramental spirituality, missionary zeal and musical excellence, scholarly rigor and high moral standards, practical social concern and radical political action: these do indeed derive from the righteousness of Jesus Christ imparted, and not only imputed, by means of Word and Sacraments. They therefore find their plenitude only in the full visible communion of the Petrine See of Rome.

Moreover, in the impending realignment of British politics, the re-emergent heirs of the mostly Methodist Labour MPs who fought tooth and nail against deregulated drinking and gambling belong with the re-emergent heirs of the mostly Catholic Labour MPs who fought tooth and nail against abortion and easier divorce, not least including both Thatcher's introduction of abortion up to birth and Major's introduction of divorce legally easier than release from a car hire contract, as well as defending Catholic schools, and thus all church schools, over successive decades. Admittedly aided by mostly Anglican rebels who were Tories in the full sense, such a coalition organised against Thatcher's and Major's attempts to destroy the special character of Sunday and of Christmas Day, delivering the only Commons defeat of Thatcher's Premiership. Not for nothing did and do trade union banners depict Biblical scenes and characters, behind which people have marched and do march to defend the secure, high-wage, high-skilled, high-status basis of paternal authority in the family and in the wider community, a basis always guaranteed and frequently delivered by the State.