Lessons from Little Rock

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[SPREAD] 13 Mar 2009--On the 6th April 1998 TJ Johnston, an Episcopal priest and senior pastor of an unofficial church plant in Little Rock, Arkansas, became a missionary priest of the Province of Rwanda under the oversight of John K. Rucyahana, Bishop of Shyira. St Andrew’s Little Rock had been formed only some two years previously out of a sense of calling to start a faithful missionary congregation in a revisionist diocese and now Johnston was within days of being deposed by Larry Maze, the Bishop of Arkansas.

Though growing, the church was small and did not have much in the way of financial or social muscle, but this courageous stand set off a chain of events which was to lead to the formation of the Anglican Mission in America and create the precedent for other African jurisdictions which are now coming together in the emergent Province of the Anglican Church in North America with over 100,000 regular Sunday worshippers. At an early stage, Chuck Murphy, later to become the lead bishop of the Anglican Mission in America, saw clearly what was unfolding, saying “David took on Goliath with – a little rock! In God’s hand, that little rock was all he needed.” (1)

It is now increasingly clear that the same struggle for the gospel is being played out on the other side of the Atlantic, in England itself. In a recent post ‘Suddenly it’s all over for the Anglican Communion’ John Richardson has persuasively argued that the old Lambeth based Communion is essentially finished and the main question still to be resolved is which way the Church of England will go. Will it, like Wales and Scotland, move towards TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, or does it have an orthodox future?

Unlike John Richardson, I think the answer to that question is important for more than just England itself. The fact that the old Anglican Lambeth based Communion is clearly dying on its feet could more optimistically be seen as a necessary stage in the transition to a confessionally based Communion and the moral momentum of history means that what happens here in England can very significantly help or hinder that transformation.