Dear Editor,
I read Roger Curl’s letter (en November 2024) with genuine bemusement. My thanks to him for his kind opening words. I wouldn’t normally respond to a view expressed simply because it is different from my own, but I feel I must here. Let me make two points.
First, It’s easy to read things too quickly: In my piece on Timothy Dudley-Smith (TDS), I didn’t actually refer to a ‘revival in the evangelical wing of the CofE’ (en September 2024), but to a ‘sense of spiritual renewal in schools and universities’ – too long a story to tell here. Having been at school and university in Scotland in the late sixties and early-mid seventies, I wasn’t following CofE news, so can’t comment on it. The two churches of which I was a member, both with a throng of school and university students, were very different from the ones Roger describes. Ah, yes, the vibrancy of the Jesus Revolution! It reached Edinburgh, as did Arthur Blessitt.
Secondly, I must question the notion that the ministries of the men whose names I included in my piece alongside Timothy Dudley-Smith were in any sense ‘shallow’ or ‘flippant’ – Michael Baughen, Richard Bewes, Tom Houston, Dick Lucas, Michael Green… Much of their legacies, including that of TDS, are easily available in print and open to scrutiny. Good News for Modern Man (NT of the later Good News Bible, Bible Society, 1966) was a game-changer, as were the CPAS Falcon publications. Youth Praise and Psalm Praise (also CPAS) were gifts to a new generation. We witnessed an unusual work of God at that time.
There will be PhDs to come on that period; and then, if the Lord has not returned, analysis from a longer perspective by church historians. A succeeding generation will need to pick up this conversation then, and judge how these men built (1 Cor. 3:12).
Yours sincerely,
Julia Cameron, Oxford
