The Lord's Work

A History of the Catholic Apostolic Church

Grass

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498294003
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia del cristianismo

The Catholic Apostolic Church combined liturgical worship, charismatic experience, ecumenical vision, and eschatological expectation. Philip Schaff commented that the claims made for its apostles, if true, commanded every Christian's attention. Historians and liturgists alike have been fascinated by the Church, but deterred from researching it because of the notorious difficulty of access to material. This account of the church's growth and decline draws on archival sources from several countries, many not hitherto used for research, and publications in German as well as English. Previous accounts in English have focused on the Church in the English-speaking world, but this book breaks fresh ground by covering the Church's development in every country where it was active. Surveying Catholic Apostolic history, polity, and ministry, it seeks to tell the story rather than using the Church as a test-case for a preconceived hypothesis. In so doing, it opens up a range of lines of inquiry for future researchers.

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Introduction

The Catholic Apostolic Church has fascinated many who have encountered it, whether by worshipping in or visiting one of its buildings, by reading the works of its ministers, or by meeting former members. Its reserve makes its attraction more compelling, and for some there is the thrill of acquiring hidden knowledge as they learn about a movement which made breath-taking claims concerning its place in the divine purposes of salvation and yet was content to die out without making attempts to perpetuate itself. The Church repeatedly defies attempts to categorize it. Whilst not to be confused with Roman Catholicism, and indeed critiquing that Church for its perceived sectarianism, it is hard to view it in the same light as Protestant dissent. In England it has enriched Anglicanism in various ways, but it was often strongly critical of the Church of England. Believing strongly in the establishment of the Christian religion, it nevertheless relied on the disciplined and voluntary commitment of its members in terms of everything from money to ministry, and received nothing from the state, whether in Britain or anywhere else.

Not surprisingly, it has often been misunderstood, and written off as a fringe sect. To do so says more about the critic than it does about the Church. If belief in the imminence of the Second Advent is seen as odd or ‘weird,’ then let us remember that studying biblical prophecy was a mainstream intellectual pursuit at the time this movement appeared. If its liturgy is seen as eccentric, we need only point out that the Church was the formative milieu for one of the foremost English-speaking liturgical scholars, Bishop Kenneth Stevenson (1949–2011), who had a family background within the movement’s Edinburgh church and relatives in its Danish congregations.1 Perhaps the most difficult aspect of its faith and practice for non-members to accept is, as it has always been, the claim that God had restored apostles to the Christian Church. Yet plenty of groups attracting serious scholarly attention have made stranger claims, and the Catholic Apostolic Church has always been scrupulously orthodox in upholding the three ancient creeds affirmed by other Western Churches.

What, in a nutshell, was its message? It claimed (i) that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent; (ii) that the Christian Church was woefully ill-prepared for the events believed to be associated with that great day and ripe (along with the nations of Christendom) for divine judgment; and (iii) that God in his mercy had restored the office of apostle to the Church, giving twelve apostles to perfect it at the end of the age as he had given twelve to found it at the beginning. On the strength of these convictions, the Catholic Apostolic Church, led by its apostles, bore witness to the heads of Church and state, to clergy, and to all Christian people, calling on them to accept its message as the answer to the shortcomings of contemporary Churches of which many were partly aware, and as the only way to safety in the face of impending judgment and tribulation.

Scope

This book seeks to offer a connected history of the movement from its origins to the present day. As such, it focuses on the narrative itself rather than any particular interpretation of it, although it will doubtless provide grist to the interpreters’ mills. All the same, there are recurrent themes that have emerged. One concerns its national character, another its social class, and a third the development and then dismantling of the Church’s leadership structures. Let me comment briefly on each of these in turn.

The Catholic Apostolic Church has usually been seen as essentially a British movement, because the apostles who led it were British; but by the end of the nineteenth century it was almost as much a German movement. English-language writers have not shown sufficient awareness of this. I suggest that it might more accurately be described as ‘Anglo-German.’ Some of the movement’s best theological writing came from the German-speaking world; many of the ministers at higher levels came from Germany; and in recent decades the German congregations have frequently chosen to continue their separate existence whereas British churches have virtually all closed. The movement’s headquarters may have been in the Surrey village of Albury, but its center of gravity shifted towards North Germany. Interestingly, prophecy during the early twentieth century indicated that this was becoming the case.2

Sometimes regarded as an upper-class movement, the Catholic Apostolic Church proved surprisingly appealing to the poor and working classes. Even the congregation at Gordon Square in London, which numbered many aristocrats and gentry among its adherents and which has therefore skewed perceptions of the movement as a whole, had plenty of the poorer classes within its orbit. The movement did not engage in the sustained social outreach of the Salvation Army or the city missions, but its message proved attractive to industrial working-class converts in 1830s Scotland, 1850s Germany, and 1880s England, if not always for the same reasons. Social unrest, which made its offer of a place of refuge in the face of coming judgments the more appealing, was present in some contexts, but not all. The opportunity of ‘bettering oneself’ in becoming a recognized minister was a factor in some cases, but this was not much of an issue earlier in its history.

Works on the Catholic Apostolic Church often give the impression that its structures emerged, if not fully formed, yet much more formed than was the case. There was a degree of fluidity about how things were done, and significant changes to ministerial structures, which have not always been noted. Internal histories would admit this to some extent, but the details have to be pieced together from a range of sources, and it is impossible to offer a comprehensive account of this process. As for the dismantling of those structures after the last apostle’s death in 1901, that has received more adequate discussion, but I want to highlight the paradox that, for a movement which placed such emphasis on ordinances (men in office) as channels of divine blessing and on observance of due order, the Catholic Apostolic Church since 1971 has been a lay Church,3 led by men with no official title beyond that of underdeacon or lay assistant, and facing the challenge of reconciling this reality with its belief in the necessity of the ministrations in word and sacrament of the ordained.

Inevitably my primary focus is on work in Britain. This is partly because the apostles and many of their ministers resided in England, but also because it has not been possible to visit archives in various countries which hold relevant material. Without the assistance of Edwin Diersmann and Manfred Henke, it would not have been possible to draw on as many German sources as have been used. However, this limitation is not quite the problem that it might be for other denominations, since the Catholic Apostolic Church sought to achieve a high degree of homogeneity in its worship and polity.

The narrative follows a chronological approach, but several thematic chapters focus on the period from 1868 to 1901. This is because the Church reached the apogee of its development at that period, and because a coherent discussion was felt desirable of such themes as outreach, pastoral care, liturgy and worship, and response to contemporary religious and intellectual developments. It tries to go beyond the précis of internal narratives (valuable though they are) which has often been the basis of previous histories, giving full weight to a range of manuscript and online sources now accessible and alert to the possibility that internal works sometimes glossed over some of the problems which arose. Lack of space has, however, precluded coverage of the movement’s distincti...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part I: 1830–35: The Church before Apostles
• Part II: 1835–1901: The Church under Apostles
• Part III: 1901 Onwards: The Church after Apostles
• Appendix: Leading Ministers in the Church
• Select Bibliography