Anglican-Methodist Ecumenism: The Search for Church Unity, 1920–2020

Not long ago, collections of essays fell foul of the criteria of those insistent government research exercises by which the universities in our time have sought to prosper. The work of an editor was viewed rather lightly, as though it mattered very little indeed; the contributors did not fare much better. It was soon possible to imagine such collections might become something of an endangered species altogether. Yet a volume that represents a collective reflection has, for all this, held its place in academic life tenaciously. A book like this does something to demonstrate why that should be. At least part of its value is to be found in the diversity of its authors, each of whom has arrived there by a distinctive route. Jane Platt is an archivist at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History while Martin Wellings is a Methodist superintendent and an ecumenical canon at Christ Church, Oxford. Both have published widely in the history of Methodism, and they show how much we owe to contributions made by those who oversee the libraries and archives of the churches and others who may be found variously at work across the life of the church itself. Indeed, of the contributors here, only Pippa Catterall might be viewed as a full-time academic, at the University of Westminster. Some of the authors here—like the Anglicans Mark Chapman, Andrew Atherstone, and Phillip Tovey—are to be found in the realm of theological education (while the work of the first two has also found an important place in the Oxford University Faculty of Theology and Religion). John Lenton, a Methodist local preacher, has made his way in the sphere of the denominational libraries while David M. Chapman is a Methodist district chair and a figure busy on ecumenical committees. Claire Surry works in the ‘commercial research industry’ and is the author of a doctorate on the Methodist union of 1932, while Peter Howson is a former army chaplain and the author of a book on the work of the Religious Affairs Branch in the British zone in postwar Germany. Peter Webster is an independent scholar known for his biography of Archbishop Michael Ramsey. From a denominational point of view, it could be said that Methodism is favoured here. From a geographical point of view, Oxford is certainly the essential point of gravity. At all events, this is a book that shows how much might be achieved by such an ensemble and how fruitfully it might unite a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and insights, freely developing a subject that merits new critical attention.Although the title of the book frames a century of ecumenical searching by Anglicans and Methodists, the focus of the volume falls, naturally, on the Conversations that went on across the middle years of the twentieth century and which met their final defeat in 1972. This saga remains, in the eyes of many, the great symbolic failure of ecumenical ambition in the British twentieth century, the long campaign into which every effort was poured and which, after all, still came to nothing. Perhaps we have been too ready to come to rest at that conclusion, however it has been defined for us. The reasons for it are not too hard to discern, in principles and appeals to integrity, in a noisy denominational obscurantism, an appeal to tribalism, and an almost silent digging in of heels. There was certainly enough in all this to wear out the elegant accommodations of the liberal elites, the imaginings of the idealists, the calculations of the rationalizers, and the manoeuvres of the diplomats. Perhaps that is as much as might be said of the matter? Historians, too, are susceptible to successes and reluctant to favour defeats, least of all ecclesiastical defeats.To be truthful, it is hard to resist the force of this model of success or failure, not least because the Conversations themselves sought, self-consciously, to thrive on achieving one and avoiding the other. But this book shows that to tidy up the wreckage, place it in a dark corner, and move on would be to make a mistake. For there is far more here than abject disappointment. In the variety of approaches and perspectives there is something to free us from the usual model and instead encourage us to see the many significant things that the whole venture revealed about the churches themselves—things that would never have been brought into such clear and colourful focus if the Conversations had never occurred.Collective volumes usually turn out to be curate’s eggs and one comes to expect this. But the striking achievement of this book is to be found in the even quality of its parts. Everything is rooted in primary research. The historical approach never relaxes into something apologetic, self-interested, or loosely contemporaneous. Historians at large will find all of those things by which they now recognize the essential dimensions of their trade: social class, gender, locality and region, and intergenerational relationships. Longer and broader perspectives are offered here by the two editors and then by Martin Wellings solus, while, at the far end, David Chapman takes a broader view of consequences after 1972, the acknowledged year in which the venture finally perished. In two substantial pieces Pippa Catterall and Mark Chapman confront the question of episcopacy (which Anglicans continued to insist was an invitation to union while many Methodists found in it their essential objection). These are followed by detailed examinations of those individuals directly involved in the Conversations (by John Lenton), a weighing of the contributions of Archbishop Ramsey and the Anglo-Catholic Eric Mascall (by Peter Webster), and then a tour of the myriad groups and associations, which became, in this new context, lobbies and advocates for one view or another, first by Andrew Atherstone (on Anglican evangelicals), then by Claire Surry (The Voice of Methodism Association), and Martin Wellings (The National Liaison Committee). It is Jane Platt who sets to work on the ‘ordinary’ Methodist churchgoers, and what she finds confirms the force of doubt within local experience. Peter Howson turns toward the consequences of the Conversations in the British Army chaplaincies while observing, briefly, a tantalizing invitation to ponder what might have been the consequences in other such areas. Phillip Tovey reflects on liturgical efforts, most of all in the brave—and inevitably much criticized—Service of Reconciliation and the 1968 Ordinal. There is perhaps less in the book than one might expect of the distinctive worlds of the Methodist Conference, the Church Assembly and then General Synod and, arguably, with this we perhaps lose a sense of how the enterprise was managed there, not least by Rupert Davies, a figure very sure of his own authority in such places. But we have gained something far more fruitful, not least because it is a larger picture that allows us to see those assemblies not merely as political powers but as a part of a wider and richer social picture.It is tempting to see the fate of this search for church unity in terms of arguments—arguments that held their own or arguments that failed to convert. No reader of this book could fail to be struck by how much vigour was to be found in denominational life in these busy years of the 1960s and 1970s. If such a campaign for unity had been attempted in the 1920s, perhaps the idealists would have struck a bolder, more hopeful note and even—who knows?—prevailed. And if it had been attempted only decades later, quite possibly too few in either church would really have cared so very much about the issues that had once seemed vivid and essential. Today both Methodism and Anglicanism appear to sag more and more into a broadly conservative corporate evangelicalism, in which those men and women who remain are least of all anxious about acquiring such things as bishops or losing them. The bleak facts of decline accumulate like so much debris around us, altering perceptions and priorities in every place and on every Sunday morning.In sum, this fine book achieves a great deal, above all in setting out with admirable clarity a rich and restless picture that is always fascinating and suggestive. It is a study that allows us to understand more fully the condition of British Christianity at large in a period still too seldom visited by historians of the Church. Routledge has done well to present it in a series of Methodist Studies first inherited from the much-mourned academic publisher Ashgate. But they have done so rather horribly, and the retail price places the book well out of the reach of even the most ardent private reader. For whom are we all writing these days?

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