There are good stories to tell about growth in relationships and partnership in the gospel during the past two decades that have been nourished by the mutual commitments of the covenant. I hope that some of them will be told and heard as the anniversary is celebrated. But celebrations are likely to be muted.

There are two principal reasons for this. The first is widespread indifference to the covenant on the part of Anglicans in particular. In England, Anglicans are significantly more numerous than Methodists, as well as shaped by a long history of social dominance. It is perhaps inevitable that they are correspondingly less attentive to the benefits of fellowship and collaboration, and more prone to harbor the myth of ecclesial self-sufficiency. On the other hand, for Anglicans who are passionate about unity, bringing as many churches as possible together in shared practices and joint projects is likely to be a priority at the local level, with some puzzlement then ensuing about what difference a set of institutional commitments with the Methodist Church could or should make in that context.

The second reason for restraint in any anniversary celebrations is that the covenant was always intended to be a stage on the journey toward a destination that its text called “organic unity” between the two churches, with the next stage being the full interchangeability of ministries. In 2017, the faith and order bodies of the two churches published a joint report, Mission and Ministry in Covenant (for which I served as the Anglican co-secretary), that set out proposals for achieving that interchangeability. Although responses appeared initially positive at the Church of England’s General Synod in February 2018 and later the same year at the Methodist Conference, by the end of 2019 the steps of receiving and implementing the report had effectively come to a standstill, and no serious attempt since then has been made to renew the process.

Why the apparent dead end in the search for a road to the next stage on the covenant journey? Many factors could be cited, not least the lack of enthusiasm for deepening relations. The most obvious motivation, however, for active Anglican resistance to the proposals of Mission and Ministry in Covenant was widespread hostility from Catholic Anglicans to the decision of the faith and order bodies to take the “South India” rather than “North India” route to the reconciliation of ministries.

When the united Church of South India was formed in 1947, it embraced the historic episcopate in a form recognizable to Anglicans, with bishops ordained in accordance with Anglican requirements for episcopal ordination, who would thereafter preside at all ordinations to the diaconate and presbyterate. Presbyters from the non-Anglican churches also forming part of the new united church did not, however, receive episcopal ordination, leading to a period when within the new, episcopally ordered church not all ordained ministers were ordained by a bishop. This came to be described as an instance of “bearable anomaly” for Anglicans: a situation outside the historic norm, but borne together in unity with other Christians for a limited period of time, for the sake of movement toward the visible unity of the church for which Christ prayed, that the world may believe.

In the 1940s and 1950s, however, many Anglo-Catholics had no intention of bearing it and campaigned vigorously against any recognition of the Church of South India as an episcopal church in communion with Anglican churches. Later, when further proposals for united churches in South Asia began to gain momentum in the 1960s, a different model was adopted: pivoting on a “service of reconciliation,” the ordained ministers of both churches were formally welcomed into the ministry of the new church. The service included laying on of hands. This North India model was also followed in the unity efforts of the Church of England and the Methodist Church being pursued in the same period.

The North India approach sought to satisfy Anglo-Catholic insistence that in a church in communion with Anglican churches there could be no recognition of ministers who had not been ordained by a bishop in the historic episcopate. But it did so at a price. Since the beginnings of the faith and order movement over a hundred years ago, churches without what Anglicans recognize as the historic episcopate have consistently rejected episcopal ordination for existing ministers as a condition for greater unity. This had quickly become apparent, for instance, in conversations between the Church of England and the English Free Churches in the years immediately following the ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ issued by the Lambeth Conference in 1920, which petered out because of the impasse on this point, as proposals for unity in South India threatened to do a decade later. The “service of reconciliation,” then, had to define itself as not implying additional ordination, while leaving room for those who wished to do so to interpret what was happening as just that. Concern for such equivocation — laid bare when the Church of England’s lawyers had to decide on where the proposed service of reconciliation would leave participating Methodist presbyters with regard to their standing in ecclesiastical law — was one factor in the final demise of the Anglican-Methodist unity effort in 1972.

The third main chapter of Mission and Ministry in Covenant sought to lay out a coherent argument for why Anglicans, including Catholic Anglicans, could follow the South India route to reconciliation of ministries between the Church of England and the Methodist Church in Great Britain. But it failed to make much headway with self-defining Catholics in the Church of England, many of whom could only see bearing the anomaly on this path as a dilution if not betrayal of Catholic principle. Even for those not intransigently opposed to the possibility of adopting the South India approach, significant questions remained about the pathway being set out.  Ultimately, those questions will have to be addressed more effectively than was possible in 2018-19 if there is to be any possibility of recovering the core proposals of Mission and Ministry in Covenant. But that is a matter for another occasion.

In the meantime, I look forward to celebrating 21 years of the Anglican-Methodist Covenant in November, and the fellowship between our churches that is has both affirmed and fostered. There is, however, some demanding work to be done if the hope that framed it, of continuing growth toward organic unity, is to be sustained. And if it cannot, perhaps there needs to be some frank recognition of failure, and openness to both the repentance and the learning that may accompany it.

Well, holiday or not, I find it difficult to walk straight past an open church, even if I felt a little self-conscious in my tourist clothes. I wasn’t expecting much: it was a small, modern building, well-maintained, but unlikely to contain any great surprises, especially after we had visited a couple of Greek Orthodox churches already on our trip. But as I got to the door, there was one surprise after all.

Like many church buildings here in England (and I guess elsewhere), they had glass doors just inside the outer, wooden doors, which were pinned open. And on the left panel there was some text written in capitals, centered, in English and Greek. So I stopped to read it. The English (which came first) said:

Man! Nothing is stronger than the Church. Cease to fight her lest she should take away your strength. Do not try to fight him who is in heaven. For if you war with men, either you will win or you will lose. If however you fight the Church, she will win without you knowing what to do, because God is stronger than all men. Do you think we are stronger than him?
St. John Chrysostomos

My first thought was: is this normal? Is this a common thing to put at the entrance to an Orthodox church building? (Maybe some Covenant readers could help me on that.)

And then I started wondering: what’s the point being made here? If it’s in English first, then maybe whoever put it there thinks that it’s the (non-Orthodox?) tourists who need to read this most. But why? Who do they think is fighting with the church? Do they mean resisting her authority, her teaching? Is it a message for the lapsed and the unbelieving?

I had a quick look round the little church, and we left to resume our walk. But then I wanted to take a picture, so I could maybe find out some more about it and keep pondering what was so arresting about this strange piece of signage.

Could it be me, fighting against the church? Is that possible? What would it look like? I can imagine conflict with some people in the church; indeed, not much — if any — imagination would be required for that. But I wouldn’t be fighting the church. I know some people might say, and do say, I am battling the church to get justice, or to find the truth. But it wouldn’t occur to them to think they are fighting against God, as in this text. If anything, they might assume, or hope, that the God of truth and justice is fighting with them, against a flawed and even wicked institution. Perhaps, charitably: against people trying to do what they think is the right thing, and getting it wrong.

Is that the unbridgeable chasm between us and this text? That it comes from a world where people believed that the institutional church was God’s instrument in the world, but we just see an all too human institution that we may be attached to, or may be disappointed with, or both, but any strength it has is just to do with its earthly resources, and can’t possibly be divine?

I’m no expert on John Chrysostom or early Christianity generally, but I tried to find out a bit about the text. The traditional title of the work it comes from is “Homily before He Went into Exile.” It seems there are some questions about authenticity; from what I can gather, while the Greek version contains some material that is not from Chrysostom, this part probably is. I may have gotten that wrong; if so, correction would be welcome.

But still, here’s the point. The literary context is that John Chrysostom, the preacher, is about to be removed from his post as Patriarch of Constantinople after condemnation of his conduct by a synod of fellow bishops, and taken into exile by the authorities. That didn’t always end well; on this occasion, he returned soon enough to Constantinople, where he was much loved by many, but it didn’t last long and he was soon exiled again, and, according to the reference book I have to hand, “deliberately killed by enforced travelling on foot in severe weather.”

So he didn’t write those words because he had some kind of morally naïve or institutionally defensive view of the church as an institution. He knew it harbored treachery and malice that would not flinch from the arm’s-length murder of one’s enemies. He knew about its corruption by the irresistible gifts of imperial power.  He knew about the intractable conflicts tearing jagged edges through the map of Christ’s church as it spread across the earth, seeming to make a nonsense of theological talk about its unity, its catholicity, its holiness.

And yet: nothing is stronger than the church, for in Christ’s church’s action, God acts, and God’s purpose cannot fail.

Since the ecclesiological revolutions of the Protestant Reformation, it has become a commonplace to make a firm distinction between the visible church — those weak, fractured, failing institutions and communities in which we participate day by day — and the invisible one, in whose securely remote realm we can locate our theological convictions about the church as Christ’s body and bride, where they can do no harm, or real good. But it won’t do. The visible church is his body, and the visible church only becomes visible as she acts in his name, in the power of the Spirit whom he gives with the Father, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

So I ask for my eyes to be opened to see the church on earth as she is in Christ, and to rest in the strength that flows through her from abiding in him. No good will come from fighting that.

It seems to me, however, that in the contemporary context the calling, the summons to act can press hard upon us in a way that risks obscuring the gift, the eternally abundant life we have received. Perhaps that is just my (self-inflicted?) experience as a parish priest in the Church of England, struggling with the everyday demands of full-time ministry. Perhaps it is a feature of involvement in any of the U.K.’s historic churches, in which long-term decline in religious affiliation, activity, and belief, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, appears to be pushing us with increasing speed to the edge of a precipice from which we are desperate to scramble away (see the recent contributions by David Goodhew). But perhaps it is something too about our theology, specifically our theology of mission and the church.

One of the great achievements of ecumenical theology in the second half of the 20th century was a shared understanding that the purpose of the church is to serve God’s mission, or the missio Dei. Yet with it went the danger that certain versions of this thesis at least would put such weight on the activity of the church, sent to share in the sending of the Son and the Spirit, that the glory of the gift that is our life would be eclipsed.

The International Missionary Council, meeting at Willingen, Germany, in 1952, asserted that “There is no participation in Christ without participation in His mission to the world” — a powerful application of John 20:21. The church is not founded, however, or indeed justified by its work in serving the missio Dei, but by receiving the gift of peace that the risen Christ speaks to sinners who can offer nothing in return. Nonetheless, we know this gift is to and for all the world, and not just for us who now acknowledge it. We cannot, therefore, receive it without accepting the calling of Christ to be sent as he is sent by the Father, and always in his company.

What can feel, for some churches at least, like an urgent struggle for survival inevitably affects the way that the claim the church exists to serve the missio Dei is heard. If it does not speak directly to that sense of existential crisis, then — however much comfort and indeed inspiration a rich theology of mission and the church may bring for those who hold it — it will fail to orient the practical thinking that determines our attitudes and actions. On the other hand, if it can readily function as a persuasive rationale for whatever strategy may appear most likely to be effective in countering institutional decline, then it may silence questions we should be asking and serve as a solvent for historic commitments that should not be lightly abandoned.

Let me try to explain a bit further what I mean. Looking back over the development of thinking about mission and the church since Willingen, we might distinguish three distinct threads, brought together in varying combinations. One thread celebrates the multifaceted character of the missio Dei in all creation, including human society and culture beyond the borders of the church, and sees the church’s calling as discerning, affirming, and participating through its actions in this continual divine movement. Since the 1960s, such thinking has given scope for embracing the space left by religious decline as still full of divine activity, and therefore still an invitation for the faithful engagement of the church in God’s mission. Perhaps, on this view, the approaching precipice is nothing to be afraid of.

Another thread gives a specific priority to the task of proclaiming the gospel and making disciples as determining the church’s participation in the missio Dei. The Decade of Evangelism announced by the 1988 Lambeth Conference began in 1990 with the issuing of Redemptoris Missio by Pope John Paul II, which also reasserted the importance of people coming to faith in Christ. Religious decline in Western societies, and the vigor of different forms of religiosity elsewhere, have perhaps helped to promote this way of understanding the relation between mission and the church. But it can intersect with the crushing demand that churches work ever harder to reverse the encroaching tides of secularization, while also being invoked to dismiss the significance of aspects of church life that appear to lack “missional benefit” in attracting new people to our churches.

There is also a third thread, perhaps not so easy to define and not so widely influential, in my church at least, as the other two. It would be expressed in something like the claim that the church serves the missio Dei by sustaining a way of being, a form of life, that is given by God: through the relationships it encompasses, configured by its commitment to certain practices and structures of relation. What matters most for the church in mission, in this view, is not about ever-changing forms of activity directed toward engagement with the society in which it is set, as envisaged by both the first two threads in their different registers, but continuing faithfully to be the church in the world, which means maintaining the texture of practices and relationships that bestows its character and its continuity across the ages.

Weaving together that third strand with the second, if not the first as well, seems crucial for articulating anything that could claim to be a distinctively Anglican understanding of mission and the church. That may be stating the obvious, though how to do it well is not so straightforward. I would argue that Michael Ramsey’s approach in The Gospel and the Catholic Church still points us in a helpful direction. The third strand also, however, underlines that the church begins from women and men receiving together the word of the risen Christ, so that this receiving, which always elicits a response in faith, with gift and calling intertwined, forms a community, shapes its practices, and gives texture to its relationships as one body, his body, through all generations. It is only in welcoming his word of peace, which dispels all anxiety, and letting it fill our common life, that we participate in the mission of the Triune God and share the good news of his resurrection with the world.

The Hungarian Embassy, which was responsible for this event, wanted some help in liaising with the Church of England, with a view to including some of its most prominent churches in the itinerary of this precious relic. Somehow, the request had ended up on my desk. And so I came to be sitting behind the table for a press conference alongside the Hungarian ambassador and a couple of other highly distinguished figures. I don’t recall that I actually said very much, if anything.

What I do remember, however, is the sheer incredulity of one of the journalists present that anyone could still take seriously the veneration of relics. He spoke with profound contempt of the ignorance of former ages, and with evident pride in an enlightenment that began with the Protestant Reformation to wean us off such childish things. Back in the office, I was aware that my justification of time spent on this endeavor as promoting Anglican-Roman Catholic relations across European boundaries was perceived with a certain level of suspicion. One senior individual in particular was very forthright about the utterly un-Anglican nature of any involvement in giving honor to the body parts of supposed holy people. After all, the Church of England’s Articles of Religion were clear enough:

The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

Before I went to work at the Council for Christian Unity, I’d taught theology to students preparing for ministry, and in classes on the origins of the Christian year I’d grown used to shocking my charges by defending what became the cult of the saints. I would remind them of how, already in the second century, the Roman authorities sometimes sought to erase any trace of the bodies of Christian martyrs, so they could not serve as a focus for continuing devotion. Practices of marking the place where their bodies were kept began very early, animated by a twofold defiance: defiance of the imperial assertion of might to crush the confession of faith in Jesus, and the deeper defiance of death, the last enemy of all, by faith in the resurrection of the body in union with him.

Thomas Becket stood in a jagged line of continuity with these formative Christian traditions. He too was remembered as a martyr whom kingly authority had wanted to silence, not just once, with Henry II, in a moment of frustrated impetuosity, but twice, when Henry VIII gave orders for the disappearance of his body, never to be found, and the erasure of his name from the Church of England’s liturgy. The preservation of a few small pieces of his mortal remains, like the one in Esztergom, might be seen as the continuing vitality of such defiance of imperial claims to final authority, fired by the same belief in the good news of resurrection. Which is not to deny the ambivalence of assertions about the shared heritage of “Christian Europe” that hung about the relic’s progress across southeast England.

It ended, fittingly enough, at Canterbury Cathedral, the site of Thomas’s murder on December 29, 1170. I lived not far away and so decided to close this rather strange chapter in my time at the Council for Christian Unity by taking part in the procession that would escort the relic from the chapel at Harbledown to the crypt of the cathedral, where following a short ceremony it would be made available for devotion. I quickly realized that I was perhaps the only non-Catholic joining the walk, and that for everyone else there was a sense of sharing in a familiar spiritual practice, and of the passing but deep community that comes from that. I was both stranger and guest, and I was moved by what I saw.

Becket was clearly a complex figure, and the meaning of his life and his death remains contested. Anglicans take different views on how we relate here and now to the reality of the communion of saints that we profess in the creed. For most, however, devotion to relics of the saints remains an alien spiritual practice. Yet as we celebrate the mystery of the Word made flesh, we remember God’s embrace of us in the wholeness of our humanity, redeemed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our hope is that, at the last, all the fragments will be gathered up, beyond the un-creating dominion of sin and the unthinkable abyss of death. And we know that this mystery means too that for every human person, there remains the possibility of a turning toward the light, an embrace in return of the way of Christ, costly as it is, life-giving as it truly is. When may the moment come for us when, like Thomas Becket, we see that cost, and know that life?

In the Church of England, despite the furious determination of Henry VIII to erase his memory, we pray today:

Lord God, who gave grace to your servant Thomas Becket to put aside all earthly fear and be faithful even to death: grant that we, disregarding worldly esteem, may fight all wrong, uphold your rule, and serve you to our life’s end; through Jesus Christ our Lord.