It could be worse... and it could get batter

Post-millenialists and other may be heartened by this from Jonathan Fletcher's talk at the recent Reform conference:

In the middle of the eighteenth century the state of the Church of England was far, far worse than it is today. In the mid-1750s on Easter Day in St Paul’s Cathedral there were a total of six people. Six undergraduates were sent down from Oxford for reading the Bible. The celebrated lawyer, Blackstone, early in the reign of George III went out of curiosity from church to church to hear every clergyman of note in London. He says that he did not hear a single discourse that had more Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero and that it would have been impossible for him to discover from what he heard whether the preacher was a follower of Confucius, Mohammed, or Christ.

Yet over the next century things changed dramatically so that by the middle of the nineteenth century a third of the clergy in the Church of England, it is estimated, were evangelical, the great missionary societies had been founded, the Clapham Sect was achieving great things, and at least three-quarters of the societies that were trying to ameliorate the situation were of Evangelical foundation.

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But those men did make a change - slowly - it took several decades - when the Church of England and the nation was in a far worse state than conceivable today. They stood by their evangelical convictions, they preached the Word, and the situation changed.

We have got an enormous battle on our hands. The situation is not as bad as it was in the eighteenth century, but we are campaigning for the reform of the Church of England and our sights are set on the evangelisation of our nation: that is where we are heading. The lesson from the past is that we must hold fast to our theological convictions; we must continue to strive for that holiness without which no-one will see the Lord; we must have a loyalty to the Church of England and remember that this is the place to be; there must be a boldness as we think outside the box with principled irregularity.

Lastly, an appeal that we maintain unity. For example there is going to be disagreement over what we advise bishops to do about Lambeth. Similarly, there are secondary issues where we will disagree: creationism; limited atonement; annihilationism. I am not suggesting that every position is equally valid on those issues, but we need to trust one another more and have a greater humility towards one another.

A version of the talk has been published in booklet from and is also available on the Reform website.There's also a mini-version (from which the above is taken) that is specifically designed to be reproduced in church magazines and the like.