1. Church Society reports there was overwhelming support for the merger of Church Society with Reform and the Fellowship of Word and Spirit (FWS) at the Church Society AGM on 12 May.
At a packed meeting, former Reform Chairman Bishop Rod Thomas was elected President of Church Society to succeed Wallace Benn. A new Council was elected unopposed, with members from both FWS and Reform, including Rob Munro, the Chairman of FWS and Mark Burkill, the Chairman of Reform.
It’s sometimes wrongly asserted that Church Society (CS)is committed to staying in the Church of England ‘at all costs’. I’m not a spokesman for them, but clearly this has never been the case and it is mischievous to suggest otherwise. As the CS book The Effective Anglican states: ‘There is a place for contingency planning. There may be cases where we will need to plan for the employment of extraordinary measures… In some situations it may even be necessary for the sake of the gospel to work outside the established structures. Though if there is no plan to re-enter them, then this only saps strength away from our reforming effort – and we mustn’t let our church-planting denude our denomination, such that our church planting strategy works to undermine our church reforming… It is sensible to look ahead and take a realistic view of future difficulties.’
