wfn.org | ACNS3589 Opening address by the Rt Revd James Jones, Bishop of

["Anglican Communion News Service" <acnslist@anglicancommunion.org>]

ACNS 3589     |     ENGLAND	|     22 SEPTEMBER 2003 

Opening address by the Rt Revd James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, at
NEAC4

[ACNS source: Diocese of Liverpool] Your Grace - I say this hesitatingly
for I know that you are not entirely comfortable with these honorific
titles. My Roman Catholic colleague in Liverpool, Archbishop Patrick
Kelly, shares the same view, not least because he'd rather not be
addressed as: "Your Grace Kelly"! As a Jones to a Williams: "Mae'na
croeso e chwi yma - 'There is a welcome for you here'. Actually I'm only
half Welsh, the other half being Scottish!
I once did Thought for the Day when Scotland was playing Wales at
Cardiff Arms Park. I decided to end the piece with "May the best man
win" and to say it in Gaelic and Welsh. When I rang a man at Cardiff
University to find out the Welsh for "May the best man win" he told me
"There is no such phrase in the Welsh language!"

You are here among us as our Archbishop, as Primus inter Pares in the
Anglican Communion and most importantly as our brother in Christ. We
thank you for greeting us, we thank you for praying for us and our
gathering, and in return we assure you of our prayers for you that the
Lord will sustain you and your family in this office to which he has
called you; and that through your ministry he will bless the whole
church as she responds to the Mission of God to the world.

As a teacher of the faith you have lectured widely and have written many
books and know the feeling of every author that immediately after
sending in the manuscript you think of something new to say - some
qualification, a different emphasis, but too late the deadline's passed.

Sometime ago I wrote a book called "Why do People Suffer?" When the
proofs came back from the printer they had left out the Question mark so
the title of the book ran "Why do people suffer James Jones" which is
what the Diocese of Liverpool has been thinking for the last five years!

Yet no-one reading your books could fail to notice that your primary
text is the Bible, your primary passion is the cross of Jesus Christ and
your primary concern is the Mission of God. That is why your presence
here is so valuable not just because you are our Archbishop but because
both personally and episcopally you share with us a deep commitment to
the three grand themes of this Conference - the Bible, The Cross and
Mission.

In this conference we renew our obedience to the Great Commission to go
into all the world in the power of the Spirit to enable others to become
learners of Christ with us and to teach all that he commanded. This is
no easy task. The complexities of today's world could never have been
imagined by the Biblical authors of yesterday. Learning the mind of
Christ and discerning God's will for our modern moral dilemmas calls for
patient study and humility and a global perspective.

We do this with reference to the authority of Scripture, to the lessons
of tradition and to the voice of reason which is informed by the
experience of contemporary culture. As evangelicals we hold that in this
three-fold reference there is a primacy to the Authority of Scripture.

I hesitate to use the world 'evangelical'. This is not because I do not
associate myself with the tradition unashamedly but because I am so
aware of the negative way in which the word is used today.

Recently a woman of evangelical faith was being interviewed for a
teaching post in one of our church primary schools. She was, as it
happened, the best candidate. However, the LEA representative in
approving the appointment reported "she was not an evangelical, her
faith just flowed from her so naturally and joyfully."

I remember in the previous Archbishop of York's staff meeting listening
to another bishop describe the merits of an able Vicar then adding "He's
an evangelical but he's very nice!" 

There are all sorts of reasons for this negative public perception. Some
of it may be deserved but some of it we have no control over. Yet
conscious of our critics we do well to hold fast to the Scriptures and
the Lord's timeless message:

"What does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God?"

Humility is not an optional virtue. It is a divine imperative that must
mark our gathering. It must shape our relationship with God, our
relationships with each other including other Christian traditions and
our relationship with the world at large.

Ever since I was a student William Wilberforce has been my hero. He was
an evangelical Christian whose radical political action was inspired by
the Scriptures. One of the joys of becoming Bishop of Hull was
discovering that Wilberforce had been its Member of Parliament. 

Wilberforce was able to read the Bible, uncluttered by the cultural
baggage that blinded others to God's mind, and to see the biblical
principles that led to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery
itself. He swam strenuously against the tide, culturally and
economically. He was told he "would ruin the empire", but he persisted
with principles inspired by evangelical faith and prevailed. Not because
public opinion changed or because fellow members were persuaded. But
because in God's providence MPs from Ireland were added to Parliament
and gave the abolitionists the majority necessary to change the world.

The historian Kathleen Heasman has estimated that three quarters of the
social reform of the 19th century was directly attributable to
evangelical Christianity. That is our heritage.

The world has, of course, changed. Yet that determination to connect the
Word and the World in both the private and public domain remains, or
ought to remain, a hall-mark of evangelical faith. When critics belittle
the evangelical tradition I want to remind them that we stand not in the
same frame as transatlantic televangelists but in the noble tradition of
Wilberforce and Shaftsbury and Cranmer.

There are some who would argue that evangelicalism is an aberration on
the canvass of English Christianity. Yet the protestant and puritan
emphases on the Word had a dramatic effect not just on the church but
upon the politics of England and consequently the English-speaking
world. Jeremy Paxman in his book "The English" writes, "the power of the
Word extended much further. By offering a direct relationship with God,
unmediated by popes or bishops, the common language of devotion gave the
individual all sorts of rights he might never have otherwise thought he
had." Paxman adds that the Reformation with its iconoclasm also changed
the culture of England. "Here was the replacement of the visual with the
verbal ... The English not only came to a new way of appreciating the
Word, they came to an appreciation of Words."

The English are a people of the Word which is why even in the face of an
audio-visual culture evangelicalism defies the media obituaries of
Christianity and continues to grow.

Yet as we grow, we acknowledge the diversity of Anglicanism and value
the biblical insights of other traditions.

For a large part of the twentieth century, while evangelicalism had
forgotten the 19th century heritage of Wilberforce and Shaftsbury, it
was the liberal tradition that upheld the biblical principles of social
justice in the Kingdom of God. And in the same period it was the
Catholic tradition that saw more clearly than most of us (with the
exception of Colin Buchanan!) that liturgy is the defining expression of
theology and doctrine.

With humility we need, notwithstanding our present differences, to
recognise when other traditions have read and acted upon the Scriptures
more faithfully than we have. My hope for this conference is that we
will engage in three conversations. With each other - we are a much more
diverse company than people outside our tradition imagine. And rightly
so, for throughout the world-wide Anglican Communion we are engaging
with different cultures and this will be reflected necessarily in our
different emphases.

With other traditions - listening and learning, testifying and teaching
with humility what God has revealed.

With the world at large - engaging privately and publicly in debates
about values and vision, structures and strategies on the future of the
earth.

NEAC4 is not about defining a sect; it is about engaging with a
continually reforming church as we respond to the Mission of God in the
World.

In all of this our primary text and authoritative script is the Bible,
however incomprehensible that may be to the outside world. 

One of our confidences in the Scriptures is this - and it is a
reformation principle - that you do not need a special caste of people
to interpret it. Put it into the vernacular and let the Bible speak. It
is my testimony and that of many that reading the Scriptures has brought
us heart to heart, mind to mind with God. Sometimes in a dramatic way,
touching our deepest emotions. Through the Spirit we have been changed
by the encounter. Not all the time, not often so dramatically but
sufficiently to know, with the apostle, here are "the words of eternal
life".

As we study the Bible we must be open to what further truth may break
upon us from the Scriptures. Speaking personally, during my study leave
last year I took the theme "Jesus and the Earth - a rereading of the
Gospels with an environmental awareness." I approached it with the
question: if the environment is so important why do Christians go mainly
to the Old Testament? Is there nothing in the Gospels about the earth?
Well, I now believe there is! Except that we seldom see it because of
the baggage that we bring to the text. For example, like many
evangelicals I preach often on the cross and as often on the Temple
Curtain, torn from top to bottom. But I hardly mention the earth and its
quaking. Nor the earth quaking again at the Resurrection. Yet the earth
is more eloquent than the curtain.

It gladdened my heart when I went to see John Stott about what I might
say today. He urged us as evangelicals, "to be open to what further
truth may break upon us from Scripture". I love the scent of creativity
and the sense of adventure in such a humble attitude to the authority of
Scripture. Hopefully, our gathering here in Blackpool will be marked by
such creativity and adventure as we engage seriously with the Bible.

The second great theme of the Congress is The Cross. Michael Ramsey, at
the Keele Conference in 1967, spoke of the Lordship of Jesus and here I
quote him "So the crux of the ministry of Jesus...is that Jesus must in
obedience to the Father's purposes concentrate not upon those beneficent
works, which are of course near to his heart of compassion, but upon the
paramount theme of sin and the forgiveness and conquest of sin. It is
here that the supreme battle of the Kingdom of God must be fought."

Now this doctrine of an objective atonement is not the preserve of
evangelicalism but it is one of the essentials of evangelicalism.
Archbishop Ramsey touched on something else of importance "Our power so
to serve God is always rooted in our status as men and women who receive
the miracle of divine forgiveness. Without the centrality of the Cross
the Church may misunderstand its doctrine, its own life, and the secret
of its power."

The secret of its power! As we engage with the Bible and the Cross in
this conference this is not to be some stagnant pool or some sterile
clinic - this is to be a place of God's presence and power, where we
ourselves are changed by the Spirit through our own encounter with the
Word - the Word written and the Word crucified, risen and ascended.

Within the evangelical tradition this transformation has been most
eloquently expressed in the call to Holiness. My predecessor J C Ryle
wrote the classic evangelical treatise on "Holiness". I read it on my
ordination retreat alongside Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory".
In Greene's novel there's a haunting phrase "There's a moment in
childhood when the door opens and lets the future in". Our tradition's
noted work with children and young people echoes that Jesuit saying
"Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man."

The encounter with Christ, the Word incarnate, is the opening of a door
onto a path that leads steadfastly to personal holiness. I love J C
Ryle's images of sanctification

"When an eagle is happy in an iron cage, when a sheep is happy in the
water, when an owl is happy in the blaze of noonday sun, when a fish is
happy on the dry land - then, and not till then, will I admit that the
unsanctified man could be happy in heaven."

Ryle's sights were clearly on heaven but his focus was very much on the
earth as he engaged in the contemporary political and social justice
issues of Liverpool such as child poverty and unemployment. This part of
his heritage is not as well remembered. 

My own experiences in Hull and Liverpool, immersed in the realities of
urban mission, have informed and transformed my reading of the
Scriptures. I believe there is an inextricable link between the doctrine
of justification by faith and acting justly in God's world. How can a
person be reconciled through the Cross to the God of justice and mercy
without at the same time being caught up in the dynamic of God's action
in the world to do justice and act mercifully.

How does God act in the world? What do the Scriptures say? With justice
and mercy. What is required of God's people? What do the Scriptures say?
"To do justice and to love mercy". Whenever the evangelical tradition
has allowed a wedge to be driven between justification by faith and
acting justly, between personal salvation and social justice, it has
become sub-biblical.

Never has this biblical connection between the personal and the social,
the private and public been so timely to affirm.

The earth faces challenges the magnitude of which are unique in its
history. Previously human actions were but the trifles of flies ranged
against the forces of nature. That is all now reversed. Human actions
are literally changing the balances within creation. An Indian
theologian, R L Sarkar, has written

"In the remote past, human actions were trivial when set against the
dominant processes of nature. No longer is this so. The human species
now influences the fundamental processes of the planet. Ozone depletion,
worldwide pollution, and climate change are testimonies to our power."

The Scriptures tell us that the earth is the Lord's and everything in
it. The Scriptures tells us that all has come in to being through and
for Christ. Never has so much theology hung upon two such small
prepositions!

The Environment, Biotechnology, Global poverty, International
Governance, Human sexuality, the nurture of children are all raising
fundamental questions about how we should then live. Into these debates
the Bible speaks. As evangelicals we must read the scriptures and distil
from its pages moral principles. 

The Bible, inspired and with authority, urges us to walk humbly and to
approach the world with a sense of moral awe. It is this which seems so
lacking in our contemporary world where irreversible decisions are taken
without due care and attention to their ethical quality and long-term
consequences., We urgently need to recover to our public debates the
sense of moral awe which is characterised by four hall marks. First, all
our actions spring from and shape our characters. Secondly, all our
actions have consequences, individually and socially. Thirdly, all our
actions will be judged by future generations. Fourthly, we are all
responsible for our actions to the source of our moral intuition. 

I believe that this sense of moral awe can be a bridge, rather like
Paul's Areopagan altar, with our culture, enabling us to enter into
dialogue and public debate with those beyond the boundary of the
Christian faith.

As we engage in this debate, the Bible is foundational, for here God has
spoken. From what reason does God speak? From love. For what purpose
does he speak? For salvation.

You see, 'The Bible, Cross and Mission' are not just three conference
themes dreamed up - albeit after much discussion! - by a planning
committee.

Bible, Cross and Mission are the signs of God's love in and for the
world. They form a unique trinity. The Bible he communicates because he
longs to draw us into communion with himself
The Cross he himself makes the atonement, the communion which we are
incapable of making
Mission his own self-sending, the model of our being sent, is compelled
by his love for the world.

"Bible, Cross and Mission" - Trinitarian tokens of the love of the
Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. These are themes to capture our
imagination, to stir our heart and to engage with the world globally.

In conclusion, I quote from Matthew Parris' autobiography. He grew up in
Africa and witnessed the work of Christian missionaries. Although an
atheist he writes:

"I began to understand why eyes looked brighter and steps lighter in
those areas where a missionary was at work. Because Christianity teaches
a direct personal relationship, bypassing hierarchy and tribe, with God
it can represent a release to those oppressed by their tribe and its
panoply of brooding and often vengeful spirits. I do not myself believe
in God but can still see how Christian monotheism can act to liberate."

One of the greatest challenges that Christians face from our
contemporary culture is to demonstrate by the quality of our being and
doing that this spiritual and liberating transformation is not simply a
subjective and psychological event, but is real, objective and rooted in
the God of love who has spoken to us through his Son and reveals himself
to his beloved world through the Bible, by the Cross and in Mission.

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