Does the Church of England Want You?

Oct 16, 2021 by

by Daniel A French, The Mallard:

Nothing is more enticing than an organisation which is hard to join or mysterious from the outside. Groucho Marx famously said he refused to join any club that would have him. Even the rabbis are known to employ reverse psychology. A postulant would have to do a lot of knocking at the synagogue door before they were taken seriously for conversion.

By contrast inclusiveness has been the hip buzzword in the Church of England for thirty years. Everything has to be ‘inclusive’ and more recently the archbishops opined for how they longed for ‘radical inclusiveness’ – presumably inclusiveness on steroids . Yet for all this jolly openness, Anglicanism and its mainstream liberal Protestant cousins remain in freefall. Perhaps it’s time  to rip up this tired and worn out mission strategy and put it into reverse gear.

Is the opposite of an inclusive Church and exclusive one? Maybe there is a type of exclusion, or elusiveness, which the Church could learn to find its own “reverse psychology?” By this I don’t mean a church for the rich, white and educated. Anglicanism has already cornered the market for the middle classes. The Episcopal Church in America for all its woke fanaticism and quasi-new ageism, remains the preferred choice of the upper establishment. No, the kind of exclusiveness we should work toward is along the lines of personal holiness. A faith that demands nothing bar “niceness” and joining the tea rota is hardly compelling and magnetic, compared to a saint making factory that is tough and bruising. “Many are called, few are chosen.” Matthew 22.14.

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