UK: A Response from a Layman to the Rev. Julian Mann and the AMiE

I am a layman and I am an Englishman. Both are wonderful callings which open to me many privileges, including a marvellous range of avenues for service of the everlasting gospel.

Nonetheless, I remain a layman and one of the reasons for that is my English nationality. My twin status means that in the two decades since I graduated from university, I have found myself in something of a bind. On the one hand, despite not being a, “cradle Anglican”, I have become increasingly convinced, as an adult, that Anglican theology is indeed the best (although, inevitably, not the perfect) expression of the principles of the Protestant Reformation. On the other hand, since at least 1994, I have been wholly unconvinced that I wished to seek ordination in my national Anglican church: the Church of England.

In March 1994 I was serving on the staff of a large Anglican church in the delightful English city of Bristol. The Diocese of Bristol was the first English diocese to ordain women to the presbyterate. As a result and as a very young man I had a front row seat at that most revisionist of projects. I did not like what I saw. Even as an Anglican ingenue it was not difficult to identify the corrupted theology and scrambled ecclesiology that drove the process. In particular it was evident that this “innovation” was driven by a general lack of confidence in the revelation of Holy Scripture. I was left in little doubt as to where this trajectory would take us; I recall too well lunches around the vicarage table where we discussed where the Church of England was now headed, including on issues of identity and sexuality. Twenty years on those prognostications have proved depressingly accurate.