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Church and State in the New Millennium

CHURCH AND STATE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
By David Holloway
HarperCollins. 257 pages. £16.99
ISBN 0 00 274059 1

I found it hard to put down this riveting book. Here is the pugnacious little boy announcing loudly that the Emperor has no clothes. Secularism, evolution, humanism, relativism, abortion, gay rights, liberal clergy in general and bishops in particular, are all stripped bare. Europe escapes with a caution.

We want to say: 'Hush, hush, they're wrong of course, but there is no point in stirring them up.' Yet, as we read on, our consciences are stirred. We remember our Lord's hard words about the religious and political establishment of his day and wonder why we put up with this outrageous social experiment which is breaking half today's marriages, and leaving people with nothing to live for but money.

We in the Free churches forget the Anglicans' other agenda, their prophetic duty to fight for the Christian moral order, in the parish, the town and the country. As the Sovereign Lord said to Ezekiel: 'Whether they will listen, or fail to listen, they will know that a prophet has been among them . . . do not be afraid . . . you must speak to them.'

The author had a special sense of outrage in finding himself under a Bishop of Durham who did not believe in the virgin birth or the resurrection, and, with the lively vigour of the book, we can see why (then and since), the media have used him so freely.

But he has clearly given up on the established Church. He is still an Anglican and still believes in its founding creeds; but he does not see why flourishing churches like his, with nearly 1,000 members, should pay subsidies through the national bureaucracy to maintain the liberals whose views have emptied their churches.

His church within a church is the Evangelical Anglican grouping known as 'Reform' and he sees no reason why Reform should not have their own bishops. Leaving the 'establishment' is no loss, because its leaders have ceased to fight (which may not be quite fair to some remaining evangelical bishops). But the need for a strong Christian witness to the country is still there. So he and others in Reform are looking for a way of joining together with the evangelical Free churches, and the first meetings of 'Essentially Evangelical' have made very tentative steps in that direction.

The other day I watched videos of two TV interviews with my late father-in-law, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and saw again the familiar gleam in his eye when he could see his opponent driven to his point of view. If he is watching from heaven, I am sure that gleam will be there today.

Fred Catherwood