I am a cradle Anglican, baptised in to the Church when I was three months old, and confirmed at the age of thirteen. Since then I have been a regular churchgoer and communicant for nearly all my life. I say these things, not because I am any better than anyone else - churchgoer or not - but because I want to set in context where I stand over the mess that the C. of E. has got itself into in the last twenty or thirty years.
Those of us, committed church people, who have given any serious thought to the direction in which the C. of E. has moved in the last few years, took for granted the claims of its leaders that it was above all a reformed yet catholic church. After the Reformation it had shed all the medieval excesses that had been accumulated, for instance the sale of indulgences or the use of false images to hoodwink unlettered believers.
We were able to belong to the Church, at one with the explicit claim made by Geoffrey Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury, that the Church of England held no doctrines of its own, only those of the Early Church. All the excess doctrinal baggage accrued by the Western church since those ancient times had been stripped out and dispensed with in the sixteenth century. When it came to determining what biblical knowledge was needed to know in order to achieve Salvation, the Anglican formularies, laid down in the Thirty Nine Articles, were perfectly explicit. They stated that "Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to Salvation". The full message was in the Bible.
In going to church week by week, we enjoyed the norms of worship offered up to God in the incomparable words of the Authorised Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. So many of the words of the lessons, collects and other prayers, psalms and canticles were taken from Holy Scripture that our familiarity with them reinforced our belief that our worship was indeed centred on God's written Word.
In the tempestuous period of over a hundred years lasting from the accession of Elizabeth I to the restoration of the monarchy, the leaders of the Church withstood the considerable pressures applied to it by Puritans, Calvinists, Presbyterians and the like. Though the struggle to reform the ministry was a close run thing at times, the leaders of the Church successfully held on to the threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons after the Reformation. Until a generation ago, we would have taken it for granted that this ministry, limited to men, was the normal way in which the Church was structured.
The immediate post-war generation to which I belong, was therefore comfortable with a Church of England that had purged itself of erroneous accumulated medieval doctrines, had reverted to observing without addition the doctrines of the Early Church based on biblical precepts, had adopted norms of public worship largely using God's written Word, expressed in the incomparable King James' Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and had retained the existing episcopal ministry to maintain continuity with the pre-Reformation church.
I want to pass without comment over the events of the last thirty or so years that have brought us to the sorry state that the C. of E. is now in and to consider the ordinariate that is to be set up in England and, possibly, Wales.
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