http://ugleyvicar.blogspot.com/2009/10/richard-bewes-bad-and-good-news-of-50.html
[The Ugley Vicar] 21 Oct 2009--And our own operation needs to be kept razor sharp, if it is to make any lasting contribution to the general scene. Years back, while I was CEEC chairman, we invited Nick Page of Radio 2 to interview on video David Hope, former Bishop of London. The video was played at one of our larger conferences. At one point, Nick put the question, “Bishop, would you agree that anglican evangelicals would do well to take into their account and thinking the findings and emphases of the various other viewpoints within the Church; Catholic, Liberal and so on?”
The bishop’s reply was interesting. “Not at all,” he remonstrated. “Right now you evangelicals are not nearly evangelical enough. You seem, if anything, to be departing from your earlier roots. What has happened to your doctrines – and to your preaching of them? And why are you slipping from your Quiet Times? What has happened to your prayer meetings and to your former great missionary drive? We need you to be faithful to your own true evangelical identity if you are to have a hope of challenging and building the rest of us in the church!”
My long-time next-door neighbour John Stott puts it in a different way. Every generation of Gospel men and women, he insists, has to go through the same operation repeatedly – namely to fight afresh all over again for the unchanging apostolic truths that remain the platform for the church, in every age and crisis that it inevitably faces; we cannot opt out.
Note: Richard Bewes' own blog, Pocket Bible Thoughts with Richard Bewes, can be found at http://www.richardbewes.com/.
1 comment:
If only the Ugly Vicar would take the bishop's advice! Sadly, I cannot see it from what I have read at his blog. Evangelicalism in general is weak because no one is willing to be called a fanatic, a fundamentalist, an evangelist.
Charlie
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