Moving on - Philip Hacking looks back over his experiences in the ministry

Philip Hacking of Christ Church, Fulwood, Sheffield, has stood for biblical evangelicalism within the Church of England for more years than he would care to remember. As he approaches retirement, we asked him to look back over the years and, with the light of experience, to assess the future.

'Forty years on', thus ran my grammar school song back in Blackburn, plagiarised from Harrow, I believe. Now I look back at rather more than those 40 years of ministry. The Editor asked me to focus on some of the highlights of my ministry. It would not be difficult to pinpoint a number.
It is always an enormous privilege to preach at the Keswick Convention or Word Alive in front of thousands of expectant people. To be in the chair when Billy Graham came to Sheffield for those stirring days in 1985 was a privilege I shall never forget. Travelling in many parts of the world encouraging Christians both expatriate and local, and even standing in front of well over 100,000 people in a great convention in South India at Maramon is a staggering memory.
But if I were to choose a highlight, it would be none of these. To me, the greatest privilege is to have been a parish minister in St. Helens, in Edinburgh and Sheffield. There is no greater joy than expounding the Word of God week by week in the local church, and to share in people's homes something of their joys and sorrows. I deem it an enormous privilege that I have been able to be both a parish minister and an itinerant preacher. Given a choice, I would always have opted for the first. In retirement from parish life, I expect to carry on with the latter, but I know how much I am going to miss the pastoral thrill of local church work.

Local church ministry

One of my greatest concerns is that all too often the local church ministry has been downgraded. Nonetheless, I would be less than honest if I did not admit that I have gained by being involved with a wider ministry. From my earliest Christian days, particularly at Oxford with the Christian Union, I have been involved in interdenominational activity and always find it strange that anyone should ever consider denominational allegiance to be a primary virtue. I am quite unashamedly an Anglican Evangelical, with a stress on the noun. But I also care deeply about the Church of England, hence my involvement in recent years in the ministry of Reform, with its great concern to help the Church of England back to its evangelical foundations and to steer it away from compromise in matters of doctrine and morality.

Crossroads

In all these ways I believe that the church in this country is at a crossroads. Within the Church of England, this is a very obvious moment of truth. I guess that the Lambeth Conference next year could be very significant. With other members of Reform, I have been thrilled with the great statement from the Anglican Church in the Southern hemisphere, meeting through its delegates at Kuala Lumpur and making a very firm statement on matters of sexuality. They could almost have been reciting the Reform Covenant! That gives us hope but we do see a collision course almost inevitable with very differing views coming from across the Atlantic.
In the wider evangelical world, the Evangelical Alliance is also at a crucial stage with the move of Clive Calver to the United States. It has been a joy to be involved with the Evangelical Alliance in so many ways. I fear that there is a danger, exacerbated by the Toronto Movement, that evangelicalism has become so wide a concept as to be meaningless. Whether or not a group like the Evangelical Alliance can hold together remains to be seen. With a confidence in the work of the Holy Spirit, I can still hold on to my natural optimism but it must be tinged with a great deal of realism, strengthened by much prayer and a willingness for all who hold the faith to stand up and be counted.

Keele

I fear that when, at Keele, the Evangelical Anglicans decided that the Anglican was rather more important than the Evangelical, things began to go wrong. The effect has been far from what was hoped. Instead of evangelicals infiltrating the Church of England and transforming it, there has been a movement in the other direction. Many of our evangelical friends of other denominations could never quite understand how an Anglican could make his loyalty to the Church of England seem to be more significant than his evangelical convictions. Whether looking at the Church of England and its evangelical constituency, or at the wider evangelical grouping seen in the Evangelical Alliance, it is possible to argue that power has not altogether been a blessing within the evangelical world.

New alignment

These have been exciting days in which to minister. They have often been bewildering days. In my early days of Christian experience, the Keswick Convention stood supreme. I believe it was for the good of the church that a movement like Spring Harvest came into being, helping to galvanise Keswick into a rather more modern approach to its methods without any change of message. This was all part and parcel of the Charismatic Movement which has come to life in my ministry. There have been many blessings because of it. I have many friends within the charismatic framework and whose lives have been a challenge to mine. The greater freedom in worship and the renewed awareness of biblical teaching on the Spirit are some of the blessings they have brought. But of course there have been many problems and increasingly this is true. In the early days of the charismatic movement, I could very happily debate certain issues with charismatic friends, knowing that we both stood firm on the final authority of Scripture. That is less true today. I do see a new alignment coming between those within the charismatic movement and outside of it who stand firm on Scripture, who can agree to differ on peripheral matters but always bring everything to the bar of the Word of God.
I have been thrilled with the coming into being of Proclamation Trust and the new thrust that it has brought to younger men and women, giving them a desire to expound Scripture in context. There is always the salutary warning that it is possible to be sound in exposition but lacking in passion. I believe it is vital that there should be accuracy and integrity of Scripture but with it warmth, enthusiasm and a deep love for people. I have noted many revolutions in church life. Much has been fresh and invigorating, but I am concerned that the centrality of preaching is not what it might be. I fear that I do believe, on the whole, the level of biblical preaching is low in the country and desperately needs to be recovered.

Hearing God's Word

There are all kinds of reasons for this. In the first place, the great popularity of the Family Service has sometimes weighed against any in-depth preaching. The over-emphasis on Holy Communion has led some people to minimise the importance of the Word. In our mid-week fellowship, it is much more the popular concept to have as many small groups as possible and the whole idea of a central meeting for prayer and Bible study has rather waned. Much of this has been positive but all of it can tend to move away from authoritative teaching. Just as in my early Christian experience I was taught that a daily quiet time was absolutely essential to spiritual progress, so it was assumed that I would go to a mid-week Bible study and sit at the feet of a good expositor, learning all the time. It may be that this can create a passive attitude to life but, from my own personal experience, nothing has stimulated me more than hearing God's Word expounded by a man of God and sending me out with a new concern for service and for holiness of life.
One of the aspects of losing out on the centrality of Bible teaching is that we can easily lose perspective in some of the issues that now concern the church. The urgent one at the moment is on matters of sexuality, and when we move away from believing that what Paul writes in Romans 1 is absolutely central to Christian orthodoxy on this matter, we shall inevitably go the way of compromise and see a church where homosexual practice is accepted as the norm in spite of the teaching of the Scripture. I happen to believe that we began that slippery slope when over the ordination of women within the Church of England, we did not take the teaching of the New Testament seriously, but rather looked at the culture of our day and the understandable concern of women to have positions of leadership within the church. I recollect saying at many meetings that the hermeneutic which allowed us to interpret Scripture in a cavalier fashion on this issue would eventually lead to similar tragedies over sexuality. My only surprise is that we have moved so quickly from one to the other. I do believe fervently in the ministry of women. I do accept that the issue of headship is not simple and that it does depend on interpretation within the context of the church in our age, but ultimately we are bound by the teaching of Scripture for the health of living in church and in society.

Not ashamed

In all the churches where I have had a settled ministry, I have begun by preaching Romans 1.16 with its conviction that Paul was not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God for salvation. I want to say that I have never been more convinced of the truth of those words. I rejoice where there is evidence of that gospel bearing fruit in so many ways in our society and, therefore, I must remain hopeful for the future. Often nowadays, I link together Paul's teaching in Galatians 1 and Philippians 1. In the latter, Paul in prison can rejoice that Christ is being talked about, even though people do it out of a spirit of envy. All that matters to him is that the Lord Jesus is being honoured. I repent of times when I have been more concerned about peripheral matters than concentrating on the heart of the gospel. But equally, in Galatians 1, the apostle states that even if an angel from heaven were to preach a gospel other than the one that Paul has preached, he must remain anathema, cursed of God. I believe we must not lose sight of that.
Increasingly over the past few years, I have been challenged by Hebrews 13.13 which speaks of going to Jesus outside the camp. I suspect that in the future, it will be more costly to be a Bible-believing Christian. It may be purely at the level of greater insecurity. As one just about to move into retirement from parish life, I have been hedged around with security and, therefore, I do owe it to the next generation which may have to pay a greater price, at least to stand with them in encouragement. Happily in that same last chapter of Hebrews, we have that memorable verse about Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and for ever. That is no simple text for a Christian calendar. It is a reminder that in the inevitable changes of society and even within the church the Jesus we serve and worship does not change. His Word remains powerful, his standards are unchanging and his victory is absolutely assured. In the light of that, who can be a pessimist?