Drawing on Roman Catholic and ecumenical expertise, this article takes an honest look at the experiences and hopes of those abused. Many in the churches assume that victims seek financial compensation or legal redress. However, research indicates that many victims primarily seek truth and justice as a means of closure and that their struggles with church leadership arise when truth and justice are repeatedly withheld. This makes forgiveness near-impossible and often results in the victim being re-traumatized by the systemic re-abuse they experience. Ultimately, there is no substitute for full and genuine meeting with victims, which requires the church to lay aside its power and authority and engage with humility and proper deference to the victims abused at the hands of the church. Without such openness, the victims cannot move on, and neither can the churches.

This article examines an account by William Grant Broughton, describing a journey made in 1845 to the south of his Diocese of Australia. It was published by English supporters, describing the impossibly large area of his responsibility and pleading for a subdivision of his diocese. Broughton wanted to overcome ignorance of Australia, to thank his supporters for money and manpower, and to demonstrate that his work as a bishop was not just a state appointed official, but as a spiritual Father-in-God in apostolic succession from Christ. Broughton was inspired by the Oxford Movement. Broughton met influential colonists and inspired support in his vision of church buildings where the Gospel might be preached and the sacraments of the Church of England celebrated with a dignity to inspire and attract the flock. Broughton knew the 1836 decision of the Government to give state aid to all major Christian denominations undermined the claim of the Church of England to have inherited established legal status the church enjoyed in England. Broughton’s heroic efforts form an inspiring Anglican heritage. The article concludes that by the time of his death in 1853 his church was but one denomination in a spiritually plural, and secular, society.

This study draws on data provided to the Covid-19 & Church-21 Survey by 826 ‘non-ministering’ Anglicans living in England in order to explore why some people gave up worshipping online or in church during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2021. Nearly a quarter of the participants had given up online worship, attending offline services in church, or both: 15 per cent had given up on online worship, 13 per cent had given up on going to church, and 5 per cent had given up on both. Giving up was significantly correlated with negative experience of services. Those under the age of forty and Anglo-Catholics were most likely to give up online worship. Women and extraverts were most likely to give up on socially distanced services in church. The results indicate the sorts of people who might drift from the church post-pandemic and what the Church could concentrate on to prevent this process.

This article documents and reflects on gender-based Contextual Bible Study (CBS) work on 2 Samuel 13:1–22 over more than thirty-five years, much of it shaped by work with Anglican communities. CBS work on the story of the abuse of Tamar provides a shape to the article, beginning with the identification of the Church by women survivors of violence as the silencer of Tamar, then of the Church as the abuser of Tamar, then of the Church as the excluder of Tamar in its lectionaries and liturgies and then of the Church as abandoning Tamar with impunity. The article summons the Church, though a CBS on 2 Samuel 13:21, to hear the summons of Tamar to change.

This essay addresses challenges that emerged during Advent through recent experience of lecturing at Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal Seminary at Yale. For many of my students, Advent 2020 presented particular challenges since they found that the recurring utilization of ‘darkness’ as a metaphor for sin and death did not sit easily with their commitment to anti-racist thought and practice. This essay does not attempt to provide a definitive model for how Anglicans might engage fully with Advent themes, but serves as a paper to ‘think with’ in which the author (a) engages with Michael Battle’s work on Anglican spirituality and (b) describes how her own expertise on Gregory of Nyssa was brought to bear on present needs. The Advent focus on darkness and light, I propose, does not need to be circumvented but provides Anglicans who are attentive to the problems of racism with an opportunity to examine further their own approach to ‘darkness’.

Speaking truth ought to be normative in churches, and yet when it does, the foundations and structures of power are often shaken to the core. This paper explores the issues of identity and integrity in ecclesiology and is concerned with the ethical paradigms and moral frameworks that need to be in place if churches are to be places where honesty and truthfulness can be normative. Churches often fail as institutions because they presume they can conduct their affairs as organizations might. Churches become anger-averse, resisting the voices and experiences of victims, in order that the flow of power and its structures are unimpeded. At that point, churches become inherently committed to re-abusing victims and are unable to hear their pain and protests, which only leads to the perpetration of further abuse.

Policy and professionalism go hand in hand. When safeguarding policy is all but absent as it is in the Church of England, it leaves clergy and others ill equipped to diagnose or to respond to concerns over abuse. Complex issues such as conflict of interest, evaluation based on verifiable objectives linked to safeguarding priorities, setting a balance between confidentiality and disclosure, safe recruitment and implementing the recommendations of safeguarding reviews are in effect left dangling. Expertise and professional judgement are needed both to develop policy and to apply it in real-world cases of prospective and actual abuse. Statistics about safeguarding cases covering associated resources, expenditure and outcomes are not readily available. Safeguarding reviews, mostly about particular cases, are difficult to generalise and ‘lessons learned’ are typically left at that without evidence of how safeguarding has changed as a result. The focus of safeguarding should be on the welfare of the people concerned, including survivors and perpetrators as well as congregations and church workers. Confrontational and legalistic approaches are all too common and do more harm than good. The objective should be to restore broken relationships, not necessarily between the survivor and the perpetrator, but between everyone involved in the case and the church.

The unprecedented participation by two Ojibwe-speaking Anishinabek lay delegates in the 1866 meeting of the Electoral Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Toronto garnered a brief flurry of contemporary journalistic coverage across a networked imperial and colonial press. In the most vivid reportage, the two delegates were dehumanized, reduced to the status of ‘Indian nags … becoming inoculated with the ways of Anglicans’. In another more distantly circulated representation, an Indigenous presence at the incipience of Canadian synodality was invested with different rhetorical significance, the unsettling scandal of their voting membership justifying the struggle for self-government in the nascent Anglican Churches of other colonies, thus laying bare anxieties about the precarious situation of colonial Anglicanism. Rather than presuming to interpret the experience and discourse of Indigenous Anglicans, nor simply documenting the first local episode of formal Indigenous involvement in the counsels of Anglicans in Canada, this paper introduces the Electoral Synod, the neglected texts that covered the event, along with the lives of the exoticized churchmen featured in their coverage.

This paper gives definitions of terms which have become critical in ensuring that Anglican churches minimize the risk of harm to all who are involved as practitioners or recipients of its ministries. This imperative is rooted in Scripture, not just the recent history or pronouncements of the Lambeth Conference 2022. The terms ‘Safeguarding’, ‘Safe Ministry’ and ‘Safe Church’ (SC) are set out with reference to the ‘Lambeth Calls’. This paper explores why such terms have come to the forefront of current theological praxis, notes historical iterations of such matters and asks why some Anglican churches or provinces may resist adopting this Lambeth Call. It offers both an apologetic for the universal adoption of SC practices and a scriptural and dominical mandate for them. The paper identifies theological and scriptural principles on which SC theory and practice might be grounded. Anglican churches and provinces are encouraged to develop a theory and practice of SC pertinent to their environment rather than adhere to abstract universal prescriptions which risk irrelevance amidst cultural and contextual particularity.

The Oxford Movement in the 1830s prompted some formidable theological scholarship which profoundly affected the lives and personalities of many Oxford-educated Church of England clergymen, not a few of whom combined deeply scholarly lives with successful parish ministries. This essay examines the lives of two such men, Canon T.F. Simmons, a parish priest in Yorkshire for some thirty years, and Bishop Mandell Creighton, much of whose scholarly writing was produced in a remote Northumberland parish before his return to Cambridge and London. By the end of the century such learned clergymen were becoming a rarity in the Church of England.

This article is the first in a trilogy exploring the concept of resource churches, providing a starting point to develop a comprehensive understanding of their implications for the Church of England. The scene is set by introducing the impact of this recent model of church planting, which has become widespread since the ambitious programme of church development in London in the 1990s. This opening piece examines understanding of what constitutes a resource church and identifies flaws in the existing definition. The existence of resource churches as a distinct model is demonstrated by comparison to concepts of hub churches, megachurches, minster churches and resourcing churches. The need to discuss such distinctions provides evidence that an unambiguous definition for ‘resource church’ is needed. Evaluation of the five core elements in Bishop Ric Thorpe’s definition of resource churches establishes the need for research to determine beliefs and practices of current resource churches.

In what sense do Anglicans believe in baptismal regeneration? This article contends that according to historic Anglicanism, baptism effectually regenerates those who faithfully receive it. While this is a disputed claim even among Anglicans, it is consistent with the formularies of the Church of England, and it largely represents a predominant position held by Anglicans across the centuries. Article XXVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion will serve as the primary point of reference for assessing the above question. The following study is organized in three sections that respectively address: (1) the sacramental efficacy of baptism; (2) the regenerative nature of baptism; and (3) the need for faith to accompany baptism. Each section examines diverse historical expressions relevant to these doctrines in light of their scriptural basis. A brief reflection on infant baptism concludes the paper.

The past half-century has been a treasure trove for those fascinated by historical instances of moral panic, conspiracy theories and the enigmatic world of secretive satanic cults. The wealth of examples, ranging from the peculiar to the outright cruel, offers a captivating journey through the evolution of societal fears and beliefs. It is something of an irony that in the increasingly post-religious Developed World, the void has been filled with a multiplicity of speculative spiritualties, quasi-faith-based therapies, mystical curiosity and fascination with the paranormal. Little of the value ascribed to such a zeitgeist is evidence-based. Nor does it need to be. In a world of ‘alternative facts’ that has also steadily habituated the public into post-truth political discourse, evidence and veracity are not what they used to be.

Multiple instances of safeguarding failures and criticisms of poor process and weak governance have afflicted the Church of England for many years, despite repeated assurances that ‘Lessons would be learned’. An Independent Safeguarding Board has been formed and then abolished without being replaced. A report by Professor Alexis Jay, former Chair of Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, recommending the creation of two independent charities to oversee Church safeguarding has been passed to a Response Group and is being resisted by various groups within the Church. This article examines issues of the management of safeguarding within the overall governance of the organisation, compares issues within the Church with those which have been exposed by the Post Office Horizon scandal and considers the potential role of the audit function to concern itself with safeguarding matters as part of its oversight of risk management and corporate governance.

This article examines the ways the Lambeth Conference resolutions discuss children and youth. It is a contribution to the work of identifying historical Anglican theological perspectives on children. Opening with a brief definition and review of theologies of childhood, it then presents chronologically (1857–1998) and briefly analyzes the resolutions which name ‘children’ or ‘youth’; it closes with an analysis of how the Lambeth resolutions map onto three basic claims shared by the reviewed theologies of childhood.

This essay explores the corporate and social dimensions of discipleship by examining the theological vision of the Parish Communion movement of the last century. It outlines what the Parish Communion movement sought to achieve liturgically and how that was undergirded by its underlying ecclesiology. Elements of the theology underpinning the movement are examined, including its corporate Body theology and its social theology. How these themes contribute to contemporary elaborations of discipleship are then explored, including a reflection on the legacy of the movement in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.