Forward In Faith National Assembly

The last two days have been spent in London at the Forward in Faith National Assembly. Around 550 delegates - mostly lay - gathered in Westminster to reflect upon the decision of the General Synod in July of this year.

Some excellent speeches and a few which tried to raise the morale of the troops, but the reality is very serious for the Church of England. That white, middle-class debating society, commonly called the General Synod, which seems to presume that it has the authority to decide matters of Doctrine and Order given to The Church by its Lord and Master, has set itself on a course that will lead to the Church of England's further alienation from the greater part of the Universal Church. Of course, part of the problem is one of language and when the General Synod talks about the Church it seems unable to differentiate between itself and the Universal Church when in reality these two provinces of Canterbury and York are an incredibly small part of "The Church."

It is quite remarkable that, at a time when many parishes are seeing serious decline in worshipping numbers, the General Synod should act to effectively exclude those who seek to uphold Catholic Faith and Order from the church of their baptism. It decided to ask for the very recent secular model of a Code of Practice which Fr James Patrick (a Recorder in the Bristol Court) so brilliantly pointed out, at the National Assembly, was so often open to abuse of power, and furthermore was a relatively recent innovation in English Law which had run into all manner of problems through the way in which it was interpreted and applied.

But, of course, there is another problem with a Code of Practice and that is that it is not a Christian model at all. You can search the Scriptures and not find one mentioned. You can look at Church history and until the General Synod came into being not find one. This is because the biblical model is that of a solemn and binding covenant.

However, even if the General Synod were to understand this and bring forth a covenant which would grant traditionalists that permanent and honoured place that we were promised in 1992/93 we would still be right to be concerned as the Synod has shown an all to worrying tendency to move towards the renting asunder of that most important of solemn and binding covenants: Marriage.

What the General Synod is proposing is nothing more than terminal care. What traditionalists need is an ecclesial structure that will allow us to flourish.