Know the Truth

Compared to today, the theological training of my day was monastic and Spartan. The few married students in college were required to live apart from their wives, with only two free weekends per term. Permission to marry during one’s training had to be obtained from the Principal and one’s Bishop. The day started with worship at 7.15 a.m., and failure to be there meant an explanation to the Principal. The mornings were given over to lectures, and the afternoons devoted either to sport or manual work around the grounds. Further study followed from 4.30 p.m., and after evening prayer and supper, study continued until 9.30 p.m. Compulsory silence was demanded from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m.

For those of us newly returned from National Service, and especially for someone like myself, for whom education had come at such a price, this discipline hardly seemed draconian. Indeed, I soon found that I wanted more time to study, because I enjoyed it so much. Although I pitched myself into the social life of the college and had a regular place in the football team, I felt that I had to discipline my use of time so as to squeeze as much as I possibly could from the hours given to me. I found that by getting up slightly earlier than the others, going to bed slightly later, spending a little less time drinking coffee after supper and so on, I had more time for the reading and study I so relished.

There was no protection from the world of hard ideas and difficult questions. The staff was dedicated and talented. I particularly remember Victor McCallin, the Vice Principal, another Irishman from Trinity, Dublin, who gave us splendid, though whimsical, lectures in philosophy. ‘Never avoid critical questions during your time here,’ he would warn successive generations of students, ‘because if you do, when you are alone later in ministry they will come and grab you by the throat.’

I was not alone in finding many of my ideas and beliefs being challenged. Degree students such as myself were required to prepare for a university entrance exam at the end of our first year, so the work was thorough and searching. It seemed at times as if the faculty intended to drive every certainty from us: our Old Testament study focused on the historicity of the texts, and took us into the arid wastes of dry Germanic scholarship; New Testament study seemed designed to show that we could know very little of the Jesus of history; philosophy led us to questioning certainty of any kind; and history and comparative religion forced us to consider the competing claims of other religions and other denominations. That we did not cave in under this avalanche of critical theology owes much to the rhythm of worship which underpinned our studies, as well as to the caring teaching we received. We were in no doubt that each member of the staff was a practising and believing Christian, and that they were always on hand to explain and assist if any student floundered intellectually or spiritually.

All this was grist to my mill. To swim as a tiny minnow in this ocean of ideas and follow in the wake of great giants like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Karl Rahner and William Temple was a wonderful privilege. Although an evangelical and thoroughly committed to a belief in the authority of the Bible, I was unable to accept narrow theories of inerrancy, in which the Bible was held to be historically accurate as well as literally ‘true’ in every detail. I did not, for example, see a scientific world-view as incompatible with the world view of the scriptures. Many evangelicals may have believed the world was created in seven days, but that was not my interpretation of the Book of Genesis. As time went on I realised that there was nothing preventing me from accepting with conviction the trustworthiness of the Old Testament in its fundamental purpose of disclosing God’s will for His chosen people Israel, and the unfolding drama of redemption leading to the coming of Jesus. In short, I did not require a book devoid of human error, corrupted texts or mistakes.

When later in my first year I asked a prominent evangelical preacher to explain to me why 2 Chronicles was so different from 2 Kings when both books were largely describing the same historical events, his reply astonished me. ‘The difference,’ he opined, ‘is that similar to a photograph and a portrait. The books of Kings describe what actually happened, but the books of Chronicles are looking at it from an artistic point of view.’ Even though I had just commenced Old Testament studies, I was staggered by the ignorance of this answer, although no doubt the speaker truly believed what he said. I remember thinking at the time that if that was an accurate expression of evangelical orthodoxy, it was too facile for me. No serious student of the texts could dismiss the profound differences between the two books in such a simplistic way. However, the answer that I found so unsatisfactory led me to dig deeper, and it took me months to acknowledge that I had to face up to the fact that the two books of Kings as well as Chronicles were primarily theological works, in which the writers were reflecting on history as well as seeking to write it. To this day I remain dismayed that many evangelical clergy seek to shield their congregations from critical scholarship. It need not disturb trusting belief – on the contrary, it will often lead to the strengthening and maturing of faith.

My faith was greatly shaken by the rigorous studies at LCD. But such shaking is an important element within the strengthening of faith. My knowledge was broadening out to include new ways of understanding God’s truth. Of course, holding together the content of faith – namely God as understood through Jesus Christ – as trustworthy and reliable is only possible through the lived experience of knowing Him and walking with Him. This, for me and for my colleagues, took the form not only of regular worship in chapel, but also the discipline of private prayer and reflection on scripture. This practice has continued through my life and ministry, and is the foundation of what I am and what I do. My experience echoes the wonderful answer given by Carl Jung, the famous psychologist, when he was asked towards the end of his life, ‘Do you believe in God?’ To which he gave the breathtaking answer: ‘I don’t believe – I know, I know.’ My studies of philosophy showed that epistemology (the science of knowing) takes many forms, in which analytical knowledge – two and two makes four – is but a small part of what we can grasp as truth. Indeed, analytical knowledge is not without its difficulties, as its truth derives from the self-contained world of arithmetical knowledge. Knowledge as we normally understand it emerges from reflection on experience, and is as foundational for every area of life as it is for theology.

At the end of my first year at LCD the Reverend E.M.B. Green, a dynamic young evangelical scholar, joined the staff and sharpened the missionary focus of the college. Michael arrived with an impressive reputation as a scholar and teacher. He was the possessor of first-class degrees in classics and theology, and the author of several studies of New Testament subjects. To have him as one of our faculty was a great coup for the college, and he did not disappoint. We were riveted by his challenging teaching and the depth of his lectures. He was also a gifted evangelist, and many of us went on unforgettable parish missions with him. His love of God and willingness to share his conviction made a lasting impression on my life and ministry. The combination of classics and theology that Michael brought was a great gift to us all, and my understanding of the Greek text of the New Testament deepened, just as my knowledge and grasp of Hebrew flourished under the wise teaching of Mr Jordan, our Principal.

As my theological knowledge and my experience of faith developed, so did my relationship with Eileen. We had already committed ourselves to one another in a long engagement that had started on her eighteenth birthday, but now, two years later, we were anxious to get married well before I was ordained. The problem was that the rule of the Church then was very firm: marriage and ordination training did not mix, so marriage had to be delayed. I was not convinced by this logic. Nervously I approached both Bishop and Principal, and presented the strongest arguments I could muster. To our great delight both gave their full agreement, and we made plans to marry on 25 June 1960, after a three-year engagement and halfway through my studies.

This was perilously close to the prelims of the degree course, and to my dismay I discovered that the first paper in Hebrew, which was mandatory for honours degree students, was scheduled for the Monday following our wedding. The shock was compounded by the fact that we had planned to take our honeymoon in Dunoon, on the Clyde, where Eileen’s mother had been brought up. How on earth could I possibly square this circle – to marry on Saturday, 25 June in Dagenham, fly up to Glasgow, and take a Hebrew exam two days later at the University of London? It was agreed that I could sit the exam at the University of Glasgow – but what would Eileen say about this? Fortunately, instead of throwing up her hands in horror at this intrusion into our honeymoon she saw the funny side, and agreed that somehow the exam had to be included in our plans.

Our wedding was a wonderful celebration and commitment. Dagenham Parish Church was packed with family and friends. Pit-Pat took the service, and preached on the text from Joshua 24: ‘As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord’ – a verse that would continue to inspire and guide us through the years. Although Eileen gave the traditional promise to ‘obey’ her husband, both of us knew that our marriage would not and could not be based on inequality. True marriage, we knew, was a mutual obeying, trusting and learning. I realised that I had much to learn from Eileen, and I hoped that I could offer something to her as well.

We had a wonderful honeymoon, despite the interruption. While I sat in an examination hall in Glasgow University, Eileen waited on a park bench outside in glorious sunshine. I remember going into the examination in a carefree mood – I was rather surprised to find out much later that I had passed comfortably.

After an engagement lasting three years it was a relief to live together as man and wife. Today, the distinctions between married and single life have largely gone, and many cohabit without any sense that it might be wrong. I regret the loss of innocence that this implies, and the fact that it suggests that marriage is no longer special. This may be dismissed as the thoughts of someone out of touch with modern culture. So be it. I remain unconvinced that society has improved on God’s will for His people by such laxity in sexual matters. We have lost the grandeur of holiness and the personal discipline involved in keeping oneself solely for another precious person.

Back from honeymoon we settled in Northwood, sharing a house with another newly married couple, Bill and Maggie Barrand, who became lifelong friends, especially Maggie, who had earlier distinguished herself as a member of the England badminton team. Eileen began work as a staff nurse at Mount Vernon Hospital, where she worked with terminally ill carcinoma patients.

Towards the end of my final year at LCD the security of our faith and the calmness of our lives were shaken by the loss of our first child. We had both been thrilled when Eileen became pregnant. She had a very good pregnancy, and was physically well throughout it. She reached full term, and we awaited the birth with enormous excitement. The days dragged by, until fourteen days later she was admitted to Hillingdon Hospital to be induced. After examining her carefully, the doctor shook his head and told us with great sympathy that the baby was dead. To this day I admire so much that young woman who, at the age of twenty-three, had to endure twelve hours of agony, knowing that at the end of it a dead baby would be the issue.

After her ordeal we clung together tightly, wordlessly, helplessly, and found comfort in one another. So much joy and happiness had been invested in that baby – a boy, to whom we had already given the names Stephen Mark. In the delivery room I held him in my arms, and could not believe he was dead, he seemed so beautifully formed. Eileen was not so fortunate. She only saw him briefly, because the Sister firmly believed it was not in the mother’s interest to hold him. In her kindly Irish Catholic way she told me firmly, ‘Don’t worry, dear. We Catholics believe he lives in a special place called Limbo.’ It was meant to be helpful. We did not find it especially so.

We emerged from the hospital reeling, empty-handed and wounded. Where is God when bad things happen to good people? Neither of us was so naïve as to believe that our happiness and welfare was the test of God’s existence and His providence. We knew we lived in a world shot through with tragedy and the effects of man’s sinfulness. As Christians we were also aware that membership of God’s family did not give us a cast-iron guarantee that we would float through life trouble-free. But this was our first personal experience of suffering, and our thoughts constantly turned towards that vulnerable and helpless baby who never had an opportunity to live.

Two things, I believe, kept us going – personal experience and fellowship. We knew we lived in God’s love, and were aware of His presence beside us. Our tragedy also made us aware of how precious it was to belong to a tightly-knit Christian community. At its best the Church is a wonderful source of friendship and kindness – and that is what we found at college, where we were supported and embraced by affection and prayer. Almost immediately we found that our suffering became part of our lives and ministry. To our astonishment we realised that other young couples had also suffered the death of a child, and we were able to share our experience and share in their suffering. But, of course, one can never forget. On every 2 April we think of Stephen Andrew and remember him in silent prayer, wistfully wondering what kind of person he would have become.

Both of us returned to work, and I had to focus on my finals. I was determined to give of my very best, and studied night and day until the examinations which fell at the end of June – then waited anxiously for the results. I was overjoyed to see my name among those awarded a 2.1 honours degree. As I stood there looking at the board outside the Senate House in Gower Street, I thanked God for His grace which had led me to this day. Now I had to take the learning, the knowledge and the training gathered over the years, and put it to work.

I visited a few parishes to see if I was acceptable to the incumbent. One experience hurt me a little. The Principal wished me to see Canon Tom Livermore, a prominent evangelical and the Rector of Morden in Surrey. I made the journey by train, then walked to the Rectory. Canon Livermore was expecting me, and to my surprise he had his overcoat on. Without inviting me inside he said, ‘Let’s take a walk around the parish.’

As we walked he interviewed me, but I had a sneaking feeling that he had already made up his mind about me. We walked past the old parish church, then into a council estate and past the mission church. ‘That is where I would put you, Carey,’ he said, ‘if I had a job to offer, but only a few days ago I offered the curacy to somebody else.’ By this time we were almost at the station: ‘Now, how much was your fare? Well, here it is. Goodbye.’

I could not believe that anybody could be so cruel. I felt I had been dismissed as a working-class lad who could only work in one culture. Later I got to know Canon Livermore, and found him to be a friendly man and an effective leader. Everybody, I suppose, can have an off day.

Happily, we were soon offered a post at St Mary’s, Islington, in north London, where Prebendary Peter Johnston was the vicar. After years of sensing a vocation, facing the doubts, the rejections, the obstacles and the sheer hard work of intense theological study, my ministry was about to begin.

5 A Changing Church

‘He never attempted brilliance, but thoroughness; he thought more of conscience than genius; more of great futures than little results. He was deaf to the praise or blame of the world.’

Tribute to Archbishop Frederick Temple

OUR FIRST VISIT TO ST MARY’S to meet Peter Johnston and his wife Phyllis, and to see the church and parish, was an unforgettable moment in our lives. After a distinguished ministry at St John’s, Parkstone, Dorset, Peter had only been instituted a few months before our arrival, and was beginning to find his feet in this very different parish. He was a bluff, determined and clear-sighted man with firm objectives and a steady evangelical spirituality. Phyllis was a sparkling woman a few years older than her husband. As they had married late in life, the energy and love they might have poured into family life they gave instead in generous commitment to others. Their open home and commitment to building Christian community became a lifelong model for us. We were immediately attracted to them, and an instant friendship developed. Phyllis took Eileen under her wing, and through the training and leadership I received at his hands Peter was to become one of the greatest influences on my development as a minister.

We joined a large and vigorous team. St Mary’s was – and continues to be – a leading London church. Under Peter’s predecessor Maurice Wood, later to become Bishop of Norwich, it had become very popular with students and nurses. Peter did not want to diminish this ministry, but he did want to make St Mary’s a church for those who actually lived in the parish, and this became the central plank of his policy. Islington in the sixties was not the ‘yuppie’ place it is today. It was a predominantly working-class district with a great deal of poverty, and there were many destitute families and desperate, housebound elderly people. Situated at the southern end of the A1, the church received more than its share of ‘gentlemen of the road’ – so much so that one of Peter’s initiatives included turning the crypt into a night shelter for the homeless.

St Mary’s was also distinguished for its firm commitment to the evangelical tradition. In the nineteenth century Prebendary Wilson had founded the Islington Clerical Conference, which had become a major annual gathering of evangelical clergy for fellowship and teaching, in reaction to the increasing ‘Catholicising’ of the Church of England through the Oxford Movement. Peter continued the Conference, and indeed developed it, broadening its emphasis to take into account relevant themes confronting the Church. However, he used to joke that St Mary’s was more famous for its curates than its vicars, and would trot out such names as the great hymn-writer and Methodist leader Charles Wesley, Donald Coggan, who was later to become Archbishop of Canterbury, and a future Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard.

My predecessor, David Fletcher, had been a very popular teacher and evangelist. I felt unworthy to be stepping into his shoes, and was secretly afraid that I might let Peter down. The senior curate was Michael MacGowan, and we were soon joined by five other staff members: David Green, Chrisanther de Mel, David Boyes, Tom Jones and John Barton. Peter was assembling a new team to serve the community.

Together with my fellow curate David Green and at least forty other young men, I was ordained Deacon of St Mary’s in St Paul’s Cathedral on Michaelmas Day 1962 by the Bishop of London, Robert Stopford. I cannot recall much of the service, except my very strong feeling of unworthiness and helplessness. I was only too well aware of my shortcomings, and the burden of my background seemed a weight too great to bear. However, I was equally aware that the grace of God was more than a promise – it was a fact in the lives of those who took the plunge. And so it proved to be.

Eileen and I lived in a tiny cottage in the grounds of the church, and there in the course of the next four years we were to bring into the world our three eldest children, Rachel, Mark and Andrew. We were poor but very happy. My stipend was very low, and Eileen recalls that her housekeeping amounted to £3.155. a week. We could not afford a car, but through the generosity of a friend were never without one to get away on our day off. We did not have a washing machine or any of the gadgets that most young married people now take for granted.

The cottage, the oldest building in Islington, was very damp, but we managed to bring up three very healthy children in it. In spite of living on our beam ends, it was a wonderful four years of training in a great parish and at a significant cultural period. London was the pulsating centre of the ‘swinging sixties’. Rock and roll was in the ascendant, and the Beatles were making their way into the hearts of the young everywhere. A heady and optimistic excitement about the future prevailed, accompanied by a cynicism towards spiritual values and tradition. The witty but irreverent That Was the Week That Was expressed the mood of the decade. The Church was not immune from the spirit of enquiry and the culture of the age. Across the River Thames, the diocese of Southwark appeared to be the vanguard of new ideas, new experiments in ministry and new approaches to gender and sexuality. In America as well as in Britain, certain theologians affirmed ‘the death of God’, by which they meant the demise of traditional ways of conceiving of Him. Harvey Cox, one of the most radical and interesting of the new wave of theologians, predicted the death of orthodox theology by the end of the century. In Britain John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, produced a sensational book, Honest to God, which seemed to call into question the nature of the Christian faith. In the view of the press and the chattering classes it signalled that the Church had realised at last that traditional ways of talking about God were no longer relevant. The Church was at a crossroads: either it entered this heady new world where everything was being questioned and nothing was sacred, or it lived on as an out-of-touch irrelevance in a buzzing, exciting new age.

In reality there was nothing new in Robinson’s book – it was little more than a scaled-down popularising of the thinking of such theologians as Paul Tillich, who had posited the image of God as ‘ground of being’ (rather than an external deity), Rudolf Bultmann and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who resisted the Nazis and claimed that man had come of age. It caused an instant sensation, however, and made Robinson famous and the book a bestseller. Within weeks Archbishop Michael Ramsey, greatly alarmed by the furore aroused by Honest to God, responded with a devastating riposte arguing that, while Robinson’s concerns were very real, orthodox teaching properly understood and interpreted had the depth and strength to give confidence in the Christian faith. The irony is that today, despite the sales of Honest to God it now appears dated, whereas Michael Ramsey’s reply to it has a timeless quality.

The intellectual storm created by Honest to God was far from altogether negative. At St Mary’s, with an intelligent and discerning congregation, the opportunity was taken by the staff to preach on the themes of Robinson’s book, and we were not afraid to encourage the congregation to read it. One of my responsibilities was for the thirty-to-forty age group, which met following the Sunday-evening service. We usually numbered in excess of fifty, and sometimes up to a hundred if I managed to tempt a popular speaker to address us. In addition, I started a fortnightly study group for those who wished to explore the Christian faith more deeply, and a regular membership of twenty to thirty was soon established.

Peter was a disciplined leader whose expectations were high. Visiting the parish systematically was a priority, and each of the staff had to make twenty-five calls a week, which had to be written up with a verbal report to be presented at the Monday staff meeting. To start with I found this a great irritant, but as time went on I grew to appreciate its thoroughness and the concern for people that it demonstrated.