There is a strong argument for reforming the Church from within rather than through schism and we have a practicable model for pastoral care and social action. In closing, permit me to highlight three areas of Simeon’s ministry which have greatly challenged me in my reflections and which, if we were to follow them, would have the potential to rejuvenate our ministry.
1 Giving priority to an effective devotional lifestyle, with a commitment to spending ”˜quality’ time in Bible study and prayer.
2 A commitment to living a holy life, recognizing the need of the renewing and cleansing power of the Holy Spirit in our daily lives.
3 That, along with Simeon, our understanding of the purpose of our preaching would be: ”˜Sir, we would see Jesus’ (John 12:21).
An excellent article by Paul Carr, on an outstanding Evangelical Anglican, published originally in 2000 in ‘The Churchman’.
Hugh Evan Hopkins, in his biography ‘Charles Simeon of Cambridge’ (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), p. 213-14, has summed up Simeon’s attitude to church order:
[blockquote] No one could have been more loyal to his bishop, as witness his last visit to Ely. The fact that Bishop Allen was not a man of any special eminence or spirituality (of his sermons when published the Christian Observer commented ‘We are unable to discover a single reason why they should have been dug out of their obscurity’) in no way lessened Simeon’s respect for his office. No one did more than he to retain within the established church those evangelical enthusiasts whose zeal for preaching the gospel tempted them at times to ignore its rules and regulations. It was his love of his own church, his satisfaction with its liturgy, and his belief that the reformers in the 16th century had faithfully brought it back to the Bible, that led Simeon to pray that his own magnus opus might be used ‘not to strengthen a party in the church, but to promote the good of the whole.’ His enthusiastic loyalty was so infectious that most of the ‘serious’ young men who gathered round him, and who could so easily have been carried away by the extremists of the day, were retained to make their full contribution to the very needy national church. [/blockquote]
This quotation shows Charles Simeon’s key influence as well as his loyalty to his bishop and concern for church order.
Do readers of TitusOneNine think it more likely that Charles Simeon, in the current context, would advise following the route of the Camp Allen Windsor Bishops or the route of the Common Cause Partnership? I, for one, think he would choose the former.
Re #1 – The “false equivalence” argument is getting tiresome. I have also seen it used by Methodists to argue that Wesely would be just fine with what the United Methodist Church has become. The theology and doctrine preached today by TEC would be so alien and foreign to Simeon that he would run in the opposite direction. And it is not due to his lack of modern (or post-modern) 21st century sensibilities. This is another false argument used by the situational ethics/theology crowd. The heart of humanity, absent the timeless, unchanging precepts of Christianity, is just as dark and hard as it always has been. Technology changes, but the human heart remains.
The current situation is more akin to what Luther faced. An institutional bureaucracy so entrenched and enamored of its own ego gratification that it cannot be reformed within the current institutional processes.
Unless God intervenes, stick a fork in the current incarnations of TEC and the Anglican Communion, they’re done!
I agree with Daniel.
#3 Ah, then in that case, I think you disagree with the legacy of Charles Simeon. Have a read again of Paul Carr’s article and my quote from Hugh Evan Hopkins’ biography, and then try to argue your case – rather than just asserting it – for splitting from your bishop without departing from Simeon’s legacy.
I think the difference between the church of Simeon’s day and ours is that his was a dormant church, apathetic to a lively faith. Ours is a heretic church hostile to orthodoxy and trying to snuff it out.
On a side not: is it just me and my computor? I have to get a new password every day, it seems. The old one never stays valid. What’s up with this?
#5 Christopher, thanks. However, it is worth remembering that many parts of the Church of England of Simeon’s day were indeed hostile to his evangelical tradition.
He was not accepted at Holy Trinity Cambridge for several years and the Church Missionary Society, of which he was a key founding member, was subjected to many vituperative attacks in its early years after its foundation in 1799.
Daniel Wilson gave the CMS Annual Sermon in 1818 and it ran into 15 editions very quickly. It is entitled, ‘A Defense of the CMS against the objections of the Rev. Josiah Thomas by a Clergyman.’ The Yale Divinity School copy has ‘Daniel Wilson’ written in longhand underneath the title of the first edition, but the 7th, 8th and 15th editions in the YDS all have Wilson’s name printed as part of the edition.
So in weighing up the choice I mentioned in my comments #1, it is important to take Simeon’s context into consideration. He was attacked from both sides – from members of the Established Church who did not like his ‘enthusiasm’ and from zealous evangelicals who wanted to split off from the Church of England. He remained a loyal member of his Diocese of Ely. I still think he would advise, in the current context in the USA, that the way forward shown by the Camp Allen Windsor Bishops, like John Howe and many others, is more authentically Anglican than the way of what I have termed elsewhere ‘splitters united’ in the Common Cause Partnership.
http://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=168
Christopher – yes it is just you, or at least it’s not me. I never need to re-enter my password here or at standfirm.
Don’t know what the problem could be. I don’t know enough about Simeon to comment too much, but the camp Allen bishops (are they still a coherent group) don’t appear to have anywhere near the same ‘heft’ as the man. Witness the New Orleans ‘collapse’.
Daniel,
We are always tempted to think that ours is the worst time and the most unbearable. The fact that many Evangelicals in Simeon’s day were or became Methodists, suggests that they believed this to be the case of the CofE in their day. And yet, Simeon rejected that option.
Is there any reason to expect that schism this time around will end in anything different from what Methodism has become with the United Methodists? Or for that matter, from most Lutherans? Or do we just expect that somewhere down the road the descendants of whatever might – might – come of “Common Cause” will in its turn become so unfaithful as to require yet another schism?
Graham Kings is surely right that Evangelicals, Simeon (and even Wilberforce) among them, were not universally popular in their own time. But Christopher Hathaway makes an even better point about the distinction between a dormant church and a heretical one.
Simeon’s opponents had at least a common adherence to the Prayer Book and Articles, even if they took their meaning in a different way.
I am reminded of the words of an Evangelical of a later generation, J.C.Ryle, in his ‘Wants of the Times’:
So long as the Church of England sticks firmly to the Bible, the Articles, and the principles of the Protestant Reformation, so long I advise you strongly to stick to the Church. When the Articles are thrown overboard, and the old flag is hauled down, then, not till then, it will be time for you and me to launch the boats and quit the wreck’.
Ryle was foreseeing (I’m sure as something he thought would never happen) what has indeed happened, at least in parts of the Communion. And it makes the difference between a basically orthodox but neglectful church and an outright heretical body.