Angela Tilby’s strange attack on evangelicals: a response
by David Baker, Christian Today:
There is a somewhat surprising article in the latest edition of the Church of England’s biggest-selling weekly newspaper, the Church Times.
The item is entitled ‘Deliver us from the evangelical takeover‘ and is written by Angela Tilby, a canon emeritus of Christ Church, Oxford. It quickly became the most-viewed feature on the paper’s subscription-based website. The article starts with a recent report which described doctors in the UK as the country’s ‘new clergy’ attending to people’s spiritual needs. Tilby then goes on to remark that this situation has arisen despite the fact that there is ‘no shortage of talk about mission and outreach’ in the Church of England. The implication is that such ‘talk’ has plainly failed to affect the country – otherwise, why would people be taking spiritual needs to GPs?
She continues by highlighting the archbishops’ prayer initiative ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ as an example of the sort of ‘talk’ she has in mind. ‘The underlying theology,’ she writes, is ‘that of individuals letting Jesus into their hearts and lives one by one. There is nothing wrong with that, of course; but it worries me that the Church of England is being driven by the assumption that there is simply no other way of speaking of the Christian faith.’ She adds: ‘The culture of Thy Kingdom Come is that of transatlantic Evangelicalism filtered through the public-school system, HTB, New Wine, and the other familiar networks… It will soon simply be the Church of England, thanks in part to the mixture of innocence and gullibility which characterises its appeal.’ And so she concludes by saying that her participation in this prayer initiative will consist of ‘praying for an escape from the Evangelical takeover of the Church’.
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