by Julian Mann
The arrogance of the Church of England hierarchy in pontificating against the Unite the Kingdom carol service, aided and abetted by lefty media, is unfortunately no surprise for an old lag like me. It was during my time as a parish vicar from 2000 to 2019 that the C of E turned into the captured neo-Marxist institution that it now is.
The Church Times report on the event portrayed a low turnout:
‘A carol service on Whitehall organised by the anti-Islam campaigner Tommy Robinson passed without incident on Saturday, and with a turnout much lower than at a previous Unite the Kingdom (UTK) event.’
This report was uncannily like the Guardian’s which stated: ‘The far-right activist Tommy Robinson led a carol service to “put Christ back into Christmas” on Saturday in an event that had a huge drop-off in attendance from his last rally in London.’
The Church Times reported 1500 present while the Guardian quoted the Metropolitan Police estimate of 1000 people at the service compared with the 110,000 who turned up to the UTK rally in September.
But if these newspapers or the Metropolitan Police want to see a real low turnout, how about dropping in on an average C of E service on a usual Sunday where the attendance will be around 36 people?
That figure is arrived at by dividing the 2024 all-age average Sunday attendance of 581,000 across the C of E by its 16,000 churches. But, with the larger churches generally concentrated in affluent areas, in many parts of the country congregations are barely getting into double figures. That was certainly my experience in Sheffield Diocese where the large churches were in the wealthy Hallamshire district of the city (essentially former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s constituency) but most of the diocese was made up of small congregations across South Yorkshire, particularly in the more deprived areas.
Before the UTK service on December 13, the Church Times reported a warning from the C of E’s co-lead bishop for racial justice, suffragan Bishop of Kirkstall Arun Arora, that ‘populist forces’ were ‘seeking to exploit the faith for their political ends’.
Working-class populists at a Christmas carol service? Pass the smelling salts! As it happened, the ‘populist forces’ the co-lead bishop for racial justice was so sniffy about turned out to be ethnically diverse. The sung worship at the service was led by black women.
The paper quoted a breathtakingly patronising comment from the bishop about Tommy Robinson’s conversion to Christianity:
‘Referring to Mr Robinson by his real name, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Bishop Arora said that he was “delighted” that he had “recently come to faith in prison”, but suggested that “having embraced and accepted God’s welcome he can’t now restrict it from others who may be equally lost. Nor does he have the right to subvert the faith so that it serves his purposes rather than the other way round”.’
Is it any wonder that the established Church, dominated as it is by leftist middle-class clerics, is so ineffectual at reaching the British public with the core Christian message, proclaimed so powerfully by Tommy Robinson at the service, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners?
Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire, UK.
Read also: Tommy Robinson: faith, nationalism and the quiet revival by Graham Tomlin, Seen & Unseen
Whose Christmas? Which Christ? by Tim Wyatt