Analysis: what sort of bishops do evangelicals want anyway?

Many British evangelicals basically want a bishop who will agree with them and then keep out of their way.

Or at least that’s true among the older ones, like the advocates for a nationwide ‘third province’ where a handful of bishops can turn up on occasion from some remote Oswestrian corner of the country and pronounce the magic words at ordination. But aligning with the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans under its current chair Archbishop Justin Badi Arama would be subscribing to a much more demanding version of a bishop specifically and Anglicanism generally. Have we got the stomach for it?

I recently spent time in South Sudan with Archbishop Justin Badi as he taught a series of SEAN facilitators a course on Anglican identity in the Episcopal Church of South Sudan. It struck me that, for him, Anglican is a vibrant identity: a badge you can unite around; a glorious consistent Biblical vision. In the UK, at best we laud the ‘breadth’ of the Church of England – but that has reached its elastic limit as its multiple religious systems pull it too far; or we say ‘it’s the best boat to fish from’ – but that establishment compromise is also nearing its natural ‘no-one can serve two masters’ conclusion.

For Badi Arama, Anglicanism is prayer-book Anglicanism fuelled by the spirituality of the East African Revival. He explains with a passion how the prayer book, plus daily lectionary readings, anchors us in the Bible in a seasonal pattern that feeds our very souls. He believes in all the rubrics of the prayer book – holy orders, vestments. He expects parishioners to engage in private silent prayer, daily office at church and the Eucharist weekly. And he wants the whole enterprise to be on fire with the Spirit of Holiness that marked the East African Revival to the point that an adulterer who was convicted and repented would come out and burn their mattress publicly in community.

This is an inspiring vision as I listen, but a million miles from ‘agree with me and keep out of my way.’ This archbishop has appointed nine internal archbishops and more than 60 bishops (one woman so far) so that they can really have an area-by-area oversight of what is going on. The local clergy are often unpaid volunteers. Power is not in the parishes. It is in the hierarchical system pointing back to a prayer-book Christianity inherited from CMS missionaries.

Younger evangelicals I meet have grown up in a school system that constantly appraises them (usually positively) and when they enter the church workplace they want access to their overseers too. (Hence so many intergenerational clashes on church staff teams). They often quite like clear parameters of what they should do and teach. I told one older Millenial about this and he said: ‘I love the idea of clearer, cohesive, coherent vision and a recapture of the disciplines of prayer (private, family, public), or cross-carrying (going to start advocating that, I think!), Bible reading (with a verse of the day in your pocket for conversation – so it could lead to personal witness to others during the day), a fresh call to integrity and holy living (not getting rid of the prohibitions of issues, etc).’

But the question for the Anglican evangelicals is, do we want bishops at all, or are we in a place where we just want to do whatever is good in our own eyes? If it is the latter, you’d better avoid the oversight of someone who has actually read the book of Judges and seen it as a warning.