Evangelicals tomorrow?

I’ve been visiting Athens annually for the last eight years to speak in various Greek Evangelical churches and lecture at the Greek Bible College.

It’s always a fascinating cross-cultural experience, and it’s not unwelcome that the weather in Autumn is always much nicer there than it is in Cambridge. My last trip was the strangest yet, however, as I had also been invited to give a lecture to a large audience containing the Papal Nuncio, the Catholic Archbishop, Jesuit priests, lots of nuns, some Reformed Presbyterians, and the odd Anglican.

An ecumenical matter

The occasion for this eclectic gathering? It was a celebration of the life of Henry Daniel Leeves (1789–1845) and his daughters, particularly Sophia. Henry Leeves was a solid Anglican evangelical, described by Hannah More (of the Clapham Sect) as a young divine of very serious piety. He left England for health reasons (see above re. weather!) and settled in Athens. While there, he planted St Paul’s Anglican Church, and translated the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into modern Greek. It’s an inspiring story of evangelical mission in an Orthodox country.

After his death, Leeves’s daughters, however, became Roman Catholics. As a Carmelite nun, Sophia Leeves lived such a life of ‘heroic virtue’, according to Pope Francis, that she is now well on the way to sainthood in the Roman Church.

So the Reformed evangelicals amongst us celebrated Henry Leeves’s magnificent work with the British and Foreign Bible Society. The Roman Catholics cherished the memory of his devout religious daughters. And the odd Anglican was assumed to stand in the middle.

I was asked to speak about the so-called Oxford Movement, which had inspired the honoured ladies in their crossing of the Tiber. I did let the organisers know that the constituent parts of Church Society which existed at that time had been founded in order to oppose this movement, and that I live in Cambridge. But this did not deter them from inviting me. I think my Greek Evangelical friends were amused at the prospect of watching me attempt to handle this diplomatic minefield!

Evangelical declension

Henry Leeves wasn’t the only 19th-century evangelical whose children went to Rome after his death. William Wilberforce’s sons Robert and Henry also famously did so. The doyen of the Oxford Movement himself, John Henry Newman (1801–1890), was converted under the ministry of an evangelical school chaplain, but found Anglicanism as he came to (mis-)understand it an unstable ‘middle way’. He submitted to the Pope, eventually became a Cardinal, and was canonised as a saint in October 2019.

My lecture on this subject seemed to go alright: the Papal Nuncio smiled at the attempts at humour, and didn’t walk out when I extolled the virtues of the Reformation solas and spoke of the Oxford Movement as a ‘new wind of apostasy’! However, it led me and my evangelical friends there to ask ourselves some searching questions afterwards.

Why do solid evangelicals such as Leeves and Wilberforce end up with children who become convinced Roman Catholics after they are dead and gone? Is there anything we can do before we shuffle off this mortal coil, to prevent this from happening? What can we do to instill in our children a loyalty to and an abiding love for evangelical doctrine and practice? How can we ensure that our evangelicalism is not only true, but also attractive and sustainable and nourishing?

These are questions which should rightly occupy our minds. To bring our children up in the training and instruction of the Lord is a primary goal of parenthood. But it is a failure of evangelical spirituality if our children decide that it is too shallow and insufficient to sustain a life of devoted service to the Lord we introduce them to.

Can we help them understand and embrace our doctrinal distinctives, and inhabit the inspiring narrative of evangelical history, the way that they need to? What do we need to do in terms of our catechism and example to ensure that after we die, our kids continue in our footsteps – not just to be evangelicals now but also evangelicals tomorrow?