Bishop Michael Nazir Ali – ‘Enough is Enough’

Two very different interpretations of Bishop Michael Nazir Ali’s resignation have emerged in the British press today.

Melanie Phillips   offers a careful assessment based on the facts of Dr Nazir Ali’s ministry and sees it as a shocking indictment of the Church of England that a bishop should have to resign in order to defend the teaching of the Church and its members effectively.

 In contrast the Daily Telegraph’s George Pitcher   speculates that the bishop mistakenly gambled on GAFCON becoming predominant and his departure signifies its demise as an effective movement in the Anglican Communion. “The traditionalist schism” we are assured “has fizzled out”.

While I have no privileged access to the thinking behind Bishop Nazir Ali’s decision, in retrospect we can see that even some two years ago he gave a strong hint that he might take such action, and for reasons which seem to have totally eluded George Pitcher.

In an address of 2nd April 2007 (subsequently published by Latimer trust as ‘Truth and Unity in Christian Fellowship’, Latimer Briefing 7),  well before GAFCON was under consideration, he warned of a point where it would be no longer possible with integrity to work with the grain of the Church of England because of its chronic tendency to capitulate to the surrounding culture.  There will come a time when “we will have to say ‘Enough is enough. We need now to bear prophetic witness to the culture around us, to the state, even within the church.’” (Latimer Briefing 7, p12)

It seems that Dr Nazir Ali has himself now come to that point where ‘Enough is enough’

And that means we should say ‘Enough is enough’ to George Pitcher and that myopic brand of liberal little-Englander attitude to the Church of England he represents. Claiming that Dr Nazir Ali has ‘abandoned his important foothold in the English Church’, he implies that the bishop and the values he stands for are a foreign intrusion, whereas it is this bishop who has pre-eminently taught and applied the biblical and historic doctrine of the Church of England in England, not shrinking from counter cultural positions on homosexuality and ideological multiculturalism or being intimidated by the death threats triggered by his refusal to accommodate radical Islamic ambitions.

No doubt  it was this inability to think outside the institutional box which led George Pitcher to be much too quick off the line in describing GAFCON in Jerusalem as a ‘circus’ and ‘a shambles’, whereas in fact it went on to produce an historic and united call to spiritual reformation, with specific commitments, and was solvent. In contrast, the Lambeth Conference a few weeks later was boycotted by some 230 bishops, failed to provide any sense of direction, and turned out to be seriously insolvent.

Likewise, George Pitcher is now much too eager in claiming that GAFCON has ‘fizzled out’. The fact that a new Province, the Anglican Church of North America, is now emerging as specifically urged in the Jerusalem Statement is not mentioned and we are told that at Alexandria ‘the Archbishops of Uganda and Nigeria were present and correct.’

They were present, but not ‘correct’ in the Lambeth sense because they withdrew from sacramental fellowship with Katherine Jefferts Schori, the Presiding Bishop of the US Episcopal Church. And Archbishop Peter Akinola reinforced his ‘incorrectness’ immediately after the Primates meeting by issuing a statement which spoke of the ‘irreconcilable differences’ now existing in the Anglican communion.

But for George Pitcher, his comfortable Anglican world of a mythical Church of England writ large has now been restored and we are reassured that ‘the Anglican Church has returned to what it is best at, ‘accommodating the richest diversity of Christian witness without any one faction imposing its authority on those who demur’; not, unfortunately, a picture that those sixty or so orthodox Anglican congregations being sued for their property and assets by TEC in the United States could recognise.

Even in the Church of England itself, one only has to recall the General Synod of July last year and its refusal to accommodate the consciences of those opposed to the consecration of women as bishops to see that this image is increasingly illusory.

Dr Nazir Ali’s resignation is highly significant, not because it indicates that the GAFCON movement is a spent force, but because it seems to show that one of the most courageous and insightful bishops of the Church of England has come to the conclusion that ‘enough is enough’, that he can no longer work with the grain of a Church so compromised by its attachment to an increasingly secularised establishment.

Although George Pitcher refers to the bishop’s ‘retirement’ it is highly unlikely that someone of Dr Nazir Ali’s ability and resolve will settle quietly into obscurity. For Melanie Phillips ‘the question now arises whether he will become the effective leader of the church in the Third World, which is on the edge of schism over gay rights and women priests. If that were to happen, he could become a formidable adversary of the current craven church leadership and the prevailing doctrine of appeasement and religious submission.’

In other words, Michael Nazir Ali, freed from the constraints of the English House of Bishops, could now emerge as a global Anglican leader. His resignation, far from signifying GAFCON’s demise, could be the prelude to a new level of global effectiveness for a movement which is giving coherence to the deep fault lines which have been emerging in the Anglican Communion over the past ten years. GAFCON is committed to the reform and renewal of the whole Communion and needs to say ‘Enough is enough’ to the Church of England of George Pitcher with its chronic habit of accommodating itself to a secularised culture.

Charles Raven

30th March 2009