Our dear brother John Richardson went home to glory this year. As a writer, he is a loss to this column, but his ministry has myriad legacies. Not the least amongst them is the annual Junior Anglican Evangelical Conference (JAEC) which took place in September.
The ‘Junior’ refers to the delegates – they are all people with less than seven years in ordained ministry, with some who are only just embarking on that path. It was wonderful to be there to see men and women from all over the country gathered to explore together their future ministry, in pursuit of John’s oft repeated goal – nothing less than the evangelisation of England.
Lee Gatiss (Director of The Church Society) gave a rousing John Richardson Memorial Lecture – propounding the view that ministry with a ‘single-minded’ commitment to the Church of England would secure the place of conservative evangelicals in the national church and serve to advance the cause of the gospel in England.
Church planters
A few days after JAEC, the Crosslinks Church Planters conference took place. The day was suffused with the understanding that we might be but simple sowers of the ‘mustard seed’ of the Word and that the ground might often be unpromising, but the Lord promises a super-abundant harvest. From Dagenham to Belgium, Sheffield to Cambridge, men spoke of the Spirit of God doing the work of God by the Word of God to bring grace home into people’s lives. There is a gritty realism about these men alongside the absolute conviction that this country urgently needs more healthy local churches. In many situations that now means starting a new work and that is what these true missionary pioneers are doing.
ReNew
Those themes will be taken up at the second ReNew conference (September 22 – 23). The Anglican Mission in England (AMiE), Reform and The Church Society joined forces for the first time last year in order that conservative evangelical Anglican leaders could consult with each other concerning the future of Evangelical Anglicanism. Eleven leaders were tasked with coming back to the 2014 conference with a clear plan for the years ahead. The document that will be presented runs to over 60 pages, but it can be summarised simply as the strategy to ‘pioneer, establish and secure’ an ever-growing number of healthy local churches.
Many of those churches will be fully within the present structures of the Church of England, some will be less so and others outside the existing structures altogether, but they will all be confessionally Anglican. Some readers will disagree, but the three organisations behind ReNew are united in the conviction that the 39 Articles, The Book of Common Prayer, the Homilies and the historic creeds collectively remain the best theological expression of the Protestant Reformation.
ReNew exists to ensure that the great inheritance of this nation of Anglican thought and belief is preserved, refreshed for future generations by whatever means is necessary. It is a vision that has attracted around 200 incumbents along with 120 other representatives to attend this year’s much enlarged conference. We’ll miss John being there too but the ‘Ugley Vicar’, as he styled himself, would have wanted nothing more than to know that the causes in which he toiled so diligently are safe in the hands of another generation. He ran the race and the good deposit he guarded so jealously is as powerful as ever. Thanks be to God!
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