St Botolph's Aldgate - 02/05/08

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee saying: This is the way, walk ye in it.

1658 after hurricanes devastated southern England in the worst storms for centuries, Oliver Cromwell, millenarian and persecutor of the Church of England, died. On the other side of the world the Vatican mission fleet was approaching Vietnam. The Roman Catholic Church was by the far the best reformed of the fragments of the Old Western Church which had imploded in the early sixteenth century. As yet Protestant Europe had shown little interest in mission.

This was the year in which Thomas Bray was born or at least I hope it was and that even now on the basis of more certain knowledge officers of the societies founded by Thomas Bray are labouring to correct entries in reputable reference books like the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church not to mention Wikipedia where 1656 is given as the date of his birth.

We are on certain ground however in that May 2 the festival of St Athanasius contra mundum was the date of his baptism.

Bray lived in contentious times. He was 30 when King James fled before the forces of William of Orange.

But as well as domestic turbulence the horizons of the world were opening up and England a middle ranking peripheral European power when Bray was born was embarked upon a course which would bring it world domination within a century.

The Church of England had been energised by a struggle which had nearly seen its distinctive form of Christian life extinguished. It was re-born in Bray’s lifetime as the Church of Richard Hooker’s vision not ashamed to adore the majesty of God but not afraid to reason. A Church keeping not to risk averse leaden mediocrity but to “the golden mean” between [as Bishop Patrick put it], “meretricious gaudiness and the fanatic sluttery of the dissenting conventicle.” You might not agree but they were clear.

This was a church that valued learning and was in touch with the latest science. A bishop was among the founders of the Royal Society and the position of the Church of England did much to ensure that the English Enlightenment which preceded that in France was not anti-Christian.

With such recent experience of violent sectarian conflict and cults of unreason Bray exuded both a confidence in the Church and a sense of urgency

He was passionately committed to the work of education both at home and abroad. He was especially concerned for the growth of the Church in the Americas especially after he was approached by my predecessor Henry Compton and invited to become the Bishop of London’s Commissary for the Church in Maryland.

SPCK was founded in his words “in general to advance the honour of God and the good of mankind by promoting Christian knowledge both at home and in the other parts of the world by the best methods that should offer.”

Note that last phrase he was very modern in his search for the “best methods” on offer. May be we have spent too much energy on the communications of yesterday and not paid enough attention to the new possibilities opening. It is good to record and celebrate not only the continued value of publishing books like Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion which has sold over 50,000 copies but also the very valuable School Assemblies website. The foundation of SPCK Diffusion seems to me to be precisely in the Bray spirit of seeking the “best methods” on offer.

His global vision is also very appropriate in today’s circumstances. His ambition was “not to intermeddle where Christianity under any form has obtained possession but to represent the deplorable state of the English colonies where they have been in a manner abandoned to atheism …..for the want of a clergy settled among them.”
[1701 memorandum on the state of religion in America]

USPG, the direct descendant of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel founded by Bray and his friends, works with the fruits of earlier energetic missionary effort with a proper humility that we have as much to receive as to give in our relations with the world wide church.

Anniversaries like this one should not just retail gossip from the muniment room but rather by inspecting the beginnings gain fresh clarity about the essential charism of our Societies and deepen our sense that there are decisions to be made and necessary initiatives to be taken in our own time.

We also live in a time of spiritual turbulence. In a way that bewilders member of yesterdays Anglo-American avant garde it is clear that the four to five billion people in the world who follow some kind of spiritual path are not going to conform to the pattern that has shaped North Western Europe over the past three centuries, where modernisation and secularisation have seemed to be inextricably intertwined.

Mark Thompson the DG of the BBC gave an interesting talk on Faith and the Media in Westminster Cathedral a couple of week ago. He described the firm consensus that there was when he began his career 20 years ago: that Nietzsche was right; that there had been an Entzauberung – a breaking of the spell; that God’s funeral was imminent and that religious practice would be confined to the leisure sector.

He then explained the process by which this consensus had evaporated.

Here in London we experience at first hand at a global crossroads the spiritual turbulence which is far more evident in other parts of our interconnected world.

Because of the inadequate character of the spiritual education on offer over the past twenty years young minds are very vulnerable to the appeal of cults of unreason and the allure of lethal exclusive religion.

Every child facing the challenge of the 21st century has the right to be offered an education in religious literacy [schools are not the place for proselytising of any kind]; ethical clarity with an accent on common values and spiritual awareness.

I stress ethical clarity with an accent on common values because experience of talking to some young converts Islam mainly young women convinces me that President Bush is in error when he says that “they hate our values”. Their experience has been largely of a vacuum of values; a loss of a moral compass; the fragmentation of relationships especially in families and the elevation of consumer choice in goods and morals into some kind of post modern beatitude.

Our great task is to re-connect with the people of England – all the people whatever their particular cultural tradition with confidence in Jesus Christ in whom there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free but also with confidence in a church which is not ashamed to adore but not afraid to reason.

“The belief of the Divine existence and providence, the foundation of all religion as well natural as revealed being in these days most fiercely attacked by atheists and libertines [apostles of consumerism], it is very necessary in such an age as this, abounding with both and wherein the very foundations of all that is sacred are tore up that every pastor of a flock should not only be fully persuaded in his own mind of these most important truths but be also very able to give the most convincing evidence to all others of the same.”
[Bibliotheca Parochialis 2nd edition 1707]

In some ways our own church has been bewildered by the social and intellectual challenges of the past forty years. This has led to a certain degree of introversion. We have been tempted to fidget with structures and other in-house matters and to elaborate our defensive bureaucracy but for such a time as this it is vital that we change the thermostat of church life from comfort to challenge and draw some courage from the energy and non exclusive confidence of Thomas Bray.

I was visited not so long ago by someone who had been responsible for the focus groups and nightly interviewing for one of the three great political parties during the last General Election. He said that the country wide results were remarkably uniform and that the major concerns expressed did not really have any quick legislative solutions. People were worried by the loss of a moral compass, by a disconnect between generations by the breakdown of families and other relationships. They were bewildered about how and what to pass on to their children.

They were also clear who was to blame and in the dock were the judges and the police; the teachers and the schools but above all the politicians and the media. Nobody blamed the church; in truth although the agenda is one which is peculiarly our own - nobody mentioned the church.

In so many ways the Spirit is calling to us in the turbulence of our own time to recover confidence in Jesus Christ the way the truth and the life but also to assert that in an age of credulity and anxiety the witness of a church not ashamed to adore but not afraid to reason; a church with a non sectarian gene and a tradition of service which embraces the whole of society not just the pious element of it as well as being global in its ambition; that the witness of such church has never been more relevant.

We give thanks for Thomas Bray, for his confidence in the gospel and its compatibility with reason. We give thanks for the life of the Societies which he founded and pray for all who serve them now. We give thanks for his non exclusive but profound conviction that the Church of England is called to serve and challenge a world misled by atheists and libertines and to be an effective agent of “the mystery of God’s will and purpose to sum up all things in Christ the things in the heaven and the things upon the earth”. Amen.