Anglican-Methodist Ecumenism

The Search for Church Unity, 1920-2020

Jane Platt, Martin Wellings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000527148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book offers a detailed analysis of one of the key episodes of twentieth-century ecumenism, focusing on the efforts made to reconcile the Church of England and the Methodist Church of Great Britain in the years since the First World War.

Drawing on newly available archives as well as on a broad range of historical, theological, and liturgical expertise, the contributions explore what was attempted, why success proved elusive, and how the quest for unity was reconfigured into the twenty-first century. The volume sets contemporary ecumenical ambitions in historical context, explains the origins, course, and aftermath of the Anglican–Methodist 'Conversations' of 1955–72, retrieves their enduring global legacy, and explores the fraught nature of the ecumenical quest.

It will be of key interest to scholars with an interest in ecumenism, Methodist studies, and church history.

1 Introduction

Jane Platt and Martin Wellings

DOI: 10.4324/9781003119210-1

When Horton Davies, Professor of the History of Christianity at Princeton, published the final part of his magisterial Worship and Theology in England in 1965, the title chosen for the volume covering the period from 1900 to the contemporary age was ‘The Ecumenical Century’. ¹ At the time, this choice seemed entirely apposite, both to sum up a century whose ecclesiastical landmarks had included the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910, the 1920 Lambeth ‘Appeal to all Christian People’, and the formation of the World Council of Churches, and also to catch the mood of a decade in which the British Faith and Order Conference at Nottingham had called for the reunion of the main British denominations by a ‘date not … later than Easter Day 1980’. ² At the centre of this ecumenical enthusiasm was the scheme to bring together the Church of England and the largest of the English Free Churches, the Methodist Church. ³ For ten years, Anglicans and Methodists had been engaged in a process of dialogue, and these ‘Conversations’ had borne fruit in proposals for a two-stage reunion. The proposals, presented to the Convocations and the Methodist Conference in 1963, had undergone two years of consultation, and in summer 1965 both Churches endorsed the scheme in principle. As Horton Davies’ volume rolled off the presses, Roger Lloyd, Canon of Winchester Cathedral and one of the mid-twentieth century’s most prolific religious commentators and journalists, completed his history of The Church of England 1900–1965. For Lloyd, the Report of the Conversations was ‘one of the most influential documents in the field of reunion which has ever been written’. ‘It is at least possible – more than that, it is likely’, Lloyd averred, ‘that by the end of the century the two Churches will be organically one single Church’. ⁴

Roger Lloyd died in September 1966 and did not live to see the publication of his book. ⁵ Nor did he live to see the collapse of the Anglican–Methodist Union scheme, as the proposals failed to achieve the necessary majority, first in the Convocations in 1969 and then in the General Synod in 1972. Ecumenical enthusiasm turned to disillusionment and acrimony, as Methodism winced from a ‘smack in the face’, in Adrian Hastings’ pungent phrase. ⁶ Although Rupert Davies discerned ‘an admirable absence of bitterness’, ⁷ he believed nonetheless that ‘a golden opportunity was lost’, ⁸ and memories of the disappointment over the Conversations endured, leaving a legacy of wariness and distrust to cloud continuing ecumenical dialogue and co-operation into the twenty-first century.

The acquisition of two significant archives by the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University has recently created an opportunity to revisit the Anglican–Methodist Conversations and to set them in a broader context. The larger archive comprises materials gathered by Professor Pippa Catterall, including the correspondence of C. Kingsley Barrett, one of the Methodist ‘Dissentients’ from the 1963 scheme, ⁹ and the papers of the National Liaison Committee, which aspired to be a co-ordinating body for Methodist opponents of union. These primary sources, together with books, pamphlets, newspaper cuttings, and Professor Catterall’s taped interviews with key protagonists in the Conversations debate, now form the Documents of the Anglican–Methodist Union Collection (DAMUC) at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History. A second archive, deposited by the Voice of Methodism Association and representing the history of the earliest and most pugnacious organised opposition to the scheme, has been added to the Collection more recently. Taken together, the DAMUC papers facilitated a day conference in November 2018 and underpinned the research embodied in the present book.

Brief references to the Conversations and summaries of the proposals, debates and ultimate debacle of 1969 and 1972 abound in the general ecclesiastical and denominational histories of the period, and in the biographies of Church leaders. ¹⁰ Acknowledging the valuable insights captured by these studies, this book seeks to delve more deeply into four areas: first, the contexts of the Conversations; secondly, the shaping of the scheme, and the key personalities involved in that process; thirdly, the polemics, and how these played out in organisations and at the grassroots of the two Churches; and fourthly, the lasting consequences, for British Methodists and Anglicans, and for the wider Church. These themes may be teased out a little here, in anticipation of the fuller treatment to follow.

Contexts

Three contexts, two long-term and one more recent, help to shed light on the Anglican–Methodist Conversations of 1955–72.

The first long-term context, mentioned already and analysed here by Mark Chapman, was the national and international ecumenical quest, reaching back beyond Lambeth 1920 and Edinburgh 1910 to the work of the Student Christian Movement and the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1886–8. ¹¹ For nearly a century, the case for organic reunion had been made by Church leaders and theologians, and denominations had moved beyond practical co-operation in home and overseas missions to serious negotiations for the healing of their past ‘unhappy divisions’. Serious-minded undergraduates meeting at Swanwick under the auspices of the SCM and ecclesiastical statesmen of the calibre of the Methodists John Scott Lidgett and Robert Newton Flew and the Anglicans William Temple and George Bell shared the goal of visible unity, ¹² and this was pursued through the 1920s in the aftermath of the Lambeth ‘Appeal’, through the sequence of international Faith and Order conferences, in the creation of the British and World Councils of Churches, and in the formation of the Church of South India in 1947. When John Robinson, bishop of Woolwich, wrote in The New Reformation? (1965) that ‘our present pattern of parallel denominations and over-lapping networks of world-wide confessions’ was ‘an abomination in church history’ and that ‘the prayers and actions of all Christians must be engaged in furthering the movements towards organic unity at every level’, ¹³ he expressed an ecumenical consensus shared by many in the Church of England and the Free Churches. Robinson was astute enough to admit that it would ‘doubtless be centuries’ before the denominational pattern would disappear, ¹⁴ and seasoned negotiators like Flew in the inter- and post-war years were well aware of the challenges. ¹⁵ But enthusiasm was running high in the 1960s, building on generations of ecumenical commitment. ¹⁶

The second long-term context was the convoluted story of the relationship between the Church of England and the Methodist movement. ¹⁷ Unlike the progenitors of Old Dissent, expelled from the Established Church at the ‘Great Ejection’ of 1662, the Wesley brothers lived and died in communion with the Church of England, and envisaged the Methodist societies operating in a continuing relationship with the Church. This picture was complicated by Anglican antipathy to Methodist field-preaching and ‘enthusiasm’; by tensions between the Wesleys’ robust Arminianism and the moderate Calvinism of Anglican Evangelicals; by the desire of Methodist preachers and congregations for full autonomy; and by John Wesley’s assumption of authority to ordain. The separation of Methodism from the Church of England was gradual and messy, and well into the nineteenth century Wesleyan Methodists asserted an identity different from Old Dissent and professed veneration for the Church as ‘the mother of us all’. ¹⁸

Alongside this official Wesleyan rhetoric, however, there were strands of Methodism which felt no kinship with the Church of England. Revivalists and reformers – the Primitive Methodists, the Bible Christians and the Methodist Free Churches – did not share the Wesleyan respect for the Book of Common Prayer and were ready to make common cause with Nonconformity. Wesleyans too, perhaps the most strongly anti-Catholic of the Methodist groups, were increasingly alarmed by the effects of Tractarianism on the Church of England, in liturgical practice and in the assertion of episcopalian exclusivity. The Wesleys’ Anglicanism became a battleground for denominational polemics, as High Churchmen urged Methodists to return to the Church of their fathers and Methodists claimed that the Wesleys had been soundly converted from a dead ecclesiasticism to vital evangelical faith. ¹⁹ Conflicting priorities within Methodism came to the fore in the decades before Wesleyan, Primitive and United Methodists came together in 1932, as some argued for Union as a way to build a Methodist bulwark against the Church of England, and others feared that accommodating Primitive and United Methodist principles would damage Wesleyan–Anglican relations. ²⁰ Thus, two centuries of history and myth, refracted through denominational polemics and local memories, shaped how the Conversations were received and understood in the two Churches. This is the theme of Martin Wellings’ chapter on the ‘long view’ of Anglican–Methodist relations.

The third, more recent, context involved social changes in post-war Britain, explored for this volume by Pippa Catterall. Two elements may be mentioned here. One was a perception of waning Christian influence and allegiance in British society. This is hotly contested territory among historians and social scientists, with some arguing for the 1950s and 1960s as a continuation of a century-long period of steady secularisation and others claiming that patterns of churchgoing held up consistently through the 1950s and then suffered catastrophic decline in the 1960s. ²¹ This debate continues to generate both light and heat, but for the purposes of this volume, it may simply be noted that the protagonists in the Conversations, both advocates and opponents, linked the scheme to the mission of the Church. Harold Roberts, who persuaded the Methodist Conference in 1955 to enter the Conversations and served throughout the process as the Methodist Chair of the meetings, wrote of ‘the painful impotence of the Church in its disunity in face of the forces ranged against it’. ²² Leslie Davison, the Methodist Church’s Home Missions Secretary and another member of the Conversations group, asserted: ‘They were fighting for the life of the Church. Time was not on their side’. ²³ For opponents, like the members of the Voice of Methodism Association and the Methodist Revival Fellowship, ecumenism was at best a distraction from evangelism; at worst, it was a substitute for genuine spirituality and renewal: ‘a pathetic attempt to find salvation in human organisations’. ²⁴

The other social change worth recording was the move towards larger institutions in industry, commerce and government. This was an era of amalgamation, with an emphasis on size, efficiency and economies of scale. Although no one compared ecumenism to an industrial merger, the backdrop of economic life is worth bearing in mind, as Pippa Catterall observes.

Shaping the scheme

One of the paradoxes of the Conversations was that Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, whose 1946 Cambridge sermon inviting the Free Churches to ‘take episcopacy into their systems’ launched the whole process, and who appointed the Anglican team to enter dialogue with the Methodists in 1955–6, later became a vociferous opponent of the 1963 Report and its proposals. ²⁵ Part of the solution to this apparent conundrum is that the scheme which emerged from the first phase of the Conversations differed markedly both from Fisher’s 1946 vision of ‘a free and unfettered exchange of life in worship and sacrament’, achieved without merging Churches, ²⁶ and from a one-stage union modelled on the Church of South India. How this came about is described here in John Lenton’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Long View of Anglican–Methodist Unity
• 3 Anglican Ecumenism and the Problems of the ‘Historic Episcopate’
• 4 Church, Episcopacy and Ecumenism: Debates about order, authority and ambiguity in the Anglican–Methodist Conversations
• 5 The Major Participants and their Actions in the Anglican–Methodist Conversations: The First Stage 1956–63
• 6 Theology, Providence and Anglican–Methodist Reunion: The case of Michael Ramsey and E.L. Mascall
• 7 Evangelical Dissentients and the Defeat of the Anglican–Methodist Unity Scheme
• 8 Fighting for Methodism’s Soul: The Voice of Methodism Association, 1963–72
• 9 ‘An Umbrella for all Dissenters’?: The National Liaison Committee, 1965–82
• 10 Grassroots Methodism and the Anglican–Methodist Conversations
• 11 Anglican–Methodist Relations in the Context of the British Army
• 12 The Anglican-Methodist Service of Reconciliation and the Ordinal of 1968
• 13 Developments since 1972
• Index