The last thing the disciples are recorded as saying to Christ on Earth: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
After all they’d been through, they still didn’t get the point. They were looking for an earthly realm founded on their values – which of course were God’s, and therefore would usher in an era of justice and peace – and missed so much about the Crucifixion and Resurrection they’d experienced first-hand. Doubtless too, they missed the subtle point that all earthly kingdoms, political, theological, or otherwise, are prone to corruption and subverting their own principles.
Why should we be surprised? After two thousand years, we are no different.
As a Liberal Catholic, I can understand Angela Tilby’s pain and sense of loss: for we were the future once. Our tribe had once controlled the kingdom – or at least that small part of it that is the Church of England – and, while we had our faults, it was broadly a time of enlightenment and faith, liberation and not a little courage. It is wonderfully captured in a photo from the mid-1980s, I think in Dean’s Yard, of a smiling Desmond Tutu and Robert Runcie. This was the future of the Church – Catholic and reformed, deeply faithful yet open to asking hard questions, confident in its calling while open towards others, sacrificially committed to justice and peace. This was just thirty years ago.
But His Kingdom is not of this world. Like the disciples at the first Ascension, we keep missing that this must have practical application for us, even though we can rattle the words off pat in a sermon or a blog.
We High Church Liberals built an Anglicanism in our own image: and then the Spirit seemed to catch somebody else’s sails. It doesn’t mean we were wrong. It doesn’t mean that seeds sown then won’t yet develop into new plantations of Christian faith. For in the Kingdom of God, seeds must go into the ground and die, and branches must be pruned to bear still greater fruit. Pruning. Death. These are not pleasant processes to undergo: whatever the Kingdom of God is, it is certainly not a Diet Coke advert.
So, now there has been what Angela calls an ‘Evangelical takeover’. It would not be so had the balance of churchmanship in the pews not shifted so dramatically in the past generation.
Perhaps that would not be the case had a generation of young men and women sensing a call to the priesthood not been told too often (at least outside evangelical circles) to ‘get some life experience first’. And what hope was there for the ‘slow nurturing of the person through unconsciously memorised texts’ during half a century of constant liturgical revision, when many were taught three different versions of the Lord’s Prayer at school?
“She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal.” Lamentation has its place. Honest lamentation inevitably involves a movement from complaining about the faults of others to reflecting on what one might have done differently oneself. Then one must move beyond that too: if this strange new Church of England feels like an exile sometimes, then it must be time to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare”.
Perhaps in embracing something outside our comfort zone over the next ten days, we might find that Charismatic Evangelicals are not the brainwashed bigots of our worst imagining. There is surely no more central insight for liberals than that Christ calls the strangest basket of incompatible deplorables to drop everything and follow Him – Zealots and Levite tax-collectors, mystics like Mary Magdalene, strangely committed doubters like Thomas, and people with the pungent certainty of Paul.
They might in turn encounter something of the depth of faith and trust required by liberal scepticism, and the strength of ritual in carrying us Godwards in the dark times when we can no longer carry ourselves.
For they too might soon have to look back fondly on the days when they were the future. Anglicanism’s pendulum has swung continually, in at least two dimensions, for nearly five hundred years and there is little sign of it coming to rest. The only thing predictable about the next renewal movement in the Church is that it will come from an unpredictable direction.
Last of all, I would appeal for a little generosity towards the staff on the Thy Kingdom Come team. They don’t deserve their efforts to understand traditions outside the normal experience of many of them to be reduced to ‘clever marketing’. They have, in my experience, responded warmly and generously to suggestions of how to make the initiative more accessible to people from the full range of Christian traditions, including my particular hobby horse – how to encourage people who already pray the Daily Office to weave Thy Kingdom Come into their prayer lives. (I’ll be using the daily prayer intentions designed for Catholics, myself: simple and humble).
Little good happens in the world without generosity. I do hope that God is a bit more generous in his assessment of us than we too often are of one another.
