There’s a future for the Church if Evangelicals put the poor first, Bishop North tells New Wine

Aug 7, 2017 by

by Madeleine Davies, Church Times:

FOCUSED primarily on the needs of the wealthy, the Church of England is “complicit in the abandonment of the poor” and models the social inequality that it so often condemns, the Bishop of Burnley, the Rt Revd Philip North, told an Evangelical gathering last week.

“Unless we start with the poor, the gospel we proclaim is a sham, an empty hypocrisy,” he told the New Wine meeting in Shepton Mallett, in a talk unsparing in its criticism of the Church’s structures, language, deployment, and culture.

“The simple and hard truth is that, in the poorest parts of the country, we are withdrawing the preachers,” he said. “We are seeing the slow and steady withdrawal of church life from those communities where the poorest people in our nation live.”

New Wine, a network of Evangelical churches, attracts thousands to its annual summer gathering. Bishop North has also spoken this summer at the Keswick Convention and will address the Walsingham Youth Pilgrimage this week.

Noting “two decades of Evangelical ascendency”, he argued at New Wine that, despite the “vast and ever-growing industry” of evangelism, numerical decline had continued and even accelerated. “I want to suggest that the answer is quite a straightforward one. It’s because we have forgotten the poor.”

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