[ACNS source: Diocese of Liverpool] Your Grace - I say this hesitatingly for I know that you are not entirely comfortable with these honorific titles. My Roman Catholic colleague in Liverpool, Archbishop Patrick Kelly, shares the same view, not least because he’d rather not be addressed as: “Your Grace Kelly”! As a Jones to a Williams: “Mae’na croeso e chwi yma - ‘There is a welcome for you here’. Actually I’m only half Welsh, the other half being Scottish!

I once did Thought for the Day when Scotland was playing Wales at Cardiff Arms Park. I decided to end the piece with “May the best man win” and to say it in Gaelic and Welsh. When I rang a man at Cardiff University to find out the Welsh for “May the best man win” he told me “There is no such phrase in the Welsh language!”

You are here among us as our Archbishop, as Primus inter Pares in the Anglican Communion and most importantly as our brother in Christ. We thank you for greeting us, we thank you for praying for us and our gathering, and in return we assure you of our prayers for you that the Lord will sustain you and your family in this office to which he has called you; and that through your ministry he will bless the whole church as she responds to the Mission of God to the world.

As a teacher of the faith you have lectured widely and have written many books and know the feeling of every author that immediately after sending in the manuscript you think of something new to say - some qualification, a different emphasis, but too late the deadline’s passed.

Sometime ago I wrote a book called “Why do People Suffer?” When the proofs came back from the printer they had left out the Question mark so the title of the book ran “Why do people suffer James Jones” which is what the Diocese of Liverpool has been thinking for the last five years!

Yet no-one reading your books could fail to notice that your primary text is the Bible, your primary passion is the cross of Jesus Christ and your primary concern is the Mission of God. That is why your presence here is so valuable not just because you are our Archbishop but because both personally and episcopally you share with us a deep commitment to the three grand themes of this Conference - the Bible, The Cross and Mission.

In this conference we renew our obedience to the Great Commission to go into all the world in the power of the Spirit to enable others to become learners of Christ with us and to teach all that he commanded. This is no easy task. The complexities of today’s world could never have been imagined by the Biblical authors of yesterday. Learning the mind of Christ and discerning God’s will for our modern moral dilemmas calls for patient study and humility and a global perspective.

We do this with reference to the authority of Scripture, to the lessons of tradition and to the voice of reason which is informed by the experience of contemporary culture. As evangelicals we hold that in this three-fold reference there is a primacy to the Authority of Scripture.

I hesitate to use the world ‘evangelical’. This is not because I do not associate myself with the tradition unashamedly but because I am so aware of the negative way in which the word is used today.

Recently a woman of evangelical faith was being interviewed for a teaching post in one of our church primary schools. She was, as it happened, the best candidate. However, the LEA representative in approving the appointment reported “she was not an evangelical, her faith just flowed from her so naturally and joyfully.”

I remember in the previous Archbishop of York’s staff meeting listening to another bishop describe the merits of an able Vicar then adding “He’s an evangelical but he’s very nice!”

There are all sorts of reasons for this negative public perception. Some of it may be deserved but some of it we have no control over. Yet conscious of our critics we do well to hold fast to the Scriptures and the Lord’s timeless message:

“What does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God?”

Humility is not an optional virtue. It is a divine imperative that must mark our gathering. It must shape our relationship with God, our relationships with each other including other Christian traditions and our relationship with the world at large.

Ever since I was a student William Wilberforce has been my hero. He was an evangelical Christian whose radical political action was inspired by the Scriptures. One of the joys of becoming Bishop of Hull was discovering that Wilberforce had been its Member of Parliament.

Wilberforce was able to read the Bible, uncluttered by the cultural baggage that blinded others to God’s mind, and to see the biblical principles that led to the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself. He swam strenuously against the tide, culturally and economically. He was told he “would ruin the empire”, but he persisted with principles inspired by evangelical faith and prevailed. Not because public opinion changed or because fellow members were persuaded. But because in God’s providence MPs from Ireland were added to Parliament and gave the abolitionists the majority necessary to change the world.

The historian Kathleen Heasman has estimated that three quarters of the social reform of the 19th century was directly attributable to evangelical Christianity. That is our heritage.

The world has, of course, changed. Yet that determination to connect the Word and the World in both the private and public domain remains, or ought to remain, a hall-mark of evangelical faith. When critics belittle the evangelical tradition I want to remind them that we stand not in the same frame as transatlantic televangelists but in the noble tradition of Wilberforce and Shaftsbury and Cranmer.

There are some who would argue that evangelicalism is an aberration on the canvass of English Christianity. Yet the protestant and puritan emphases on the Word had a dramatic effect not just on the church but upon the politics of England and consequently the English-speaking world. Jeremy Paxman in his book “The English” writes, “the power of the Word extended much further. By offering a direct relationship with God, unmediated by popes or bishops, the common language of devotion gave the individual all sorts of rights he might never have otherwise thought he had.” Paxman adds that the Reformation with its iconoclasm also changed the culture of England. “Here was the replacement of the visual with the verbal … The English not only came to a new way of appreciating the Word, they came to an appreciation of Words.”

The English are a people of the Word which is why even in the face of an audio-visual culture evangelicalism defies the media obituaries of Christianity and continues to grow.

Yet as we grow, we acknowledge the diversity of Anglicanism and value the biblical insights of other traditions.

For a large part of the twentieth century, while evangelicalism had forgotten the 19th century heritage of Wilberforce and Shaftsbury, it was the liberal tradition that upheld the biblical principles of social justice in the Kingdom of God. And in the same period it was the Catholic tradition that saw more clearly than most of us (with the exception of Colin Buchanan!) that liturgy is the defining expression of theology and doctrine.

With humility we need, notwithstanding our present differences, to recognise when other traditions have read and acted upon the Scriptures more faithfully than we have. My hope for this conference is that we will engage in three conversations. With each other - we are a much more diverse company than people outside our tradition imagine. And rightly so, for throughout the world-wide Anglican Communion we are engaging with different cultures and this will be reflected necessarily in our different emphases.

With other traditions - listening and learning, testifying and teaching with humility what God has revealed.

With the world at large - engaging privately and publicly in debates about values and vision, structures and strategies on the future of the earth.

NEAC4 is not about defining a sect; it is about engaging with a continually reforming church as we respond to the Mission of God in the World.

In all of this our primary text and authoritative script is the Bible, however incomprehensible that may be to the outside world.

One of our confidences in the Scriptures is this - and it is a reformation principle - that you do not need a special caste of people to interpret it. Put it into the vernacular and let the Bible speak. It is my testimony and that of many that reading the Scriptures has brought us heart to heart, mind to mind with God. Sometimes in a dramatic way, touching our deepest emotions. Through the Spirit we have been changed by the encounter. Not all the time, not often so dramatically but sufficiently to know, with the apostle, here are “the words of eternal life”.

As we study the Bible we must be open to what further truth may break upon us from the Scriptures. Speaking personally, during my study leave last year I took the theme “Jesus and the Earth - a rereading of the Gospels with an environmental awareness.” I approached it with the question: if the environment is so important why do Christians go mainly to the Old Testament? Is there nothing in the Gospels about the earth? Well, I now believe there is! Except that we seldom see it because of the baggage that we bring to the text. For example, like many evangelicals I preach often on the cross and as often on the Temple Curtain, torn from top to bottom. But I hardly mention the earth and its quaking. Nor the earth quaking again at the Resurrection. Yet the earth is more eloquent than the curtain.

It gladdened my heart when I went to see John Stott about what I might say today. He urged us as evangelicals, “to be open to what further truth may break upon us from Scripture”. I love the scent of creativity and the sense of adventure in such a humble attitude to the authority of Scripture. Hopefully, our gathering here in Blackpool will be marked by such creativity and adventure as we engage seriously with the Bible.

The second great theme of the Congress is The Cross. Michael Ramsey, at the Keele Conference in 1967, spoke of the Lordship of Jesus and here I quote him “So the crux of the ministry of Jesus...is that Jesus must in obedience to the Father’s purposes concentrate not upon those beneficent works, which are of course near to his heart of compassion, but upon the paramount theme of sin and the forgiveness and conquest of sin. It is here that the supreme battle of the Kingdom of God must be fought.”

Now this doctrine of an objective atonement is not the preserve of evangelicalism but it is one of the essentials of evangelicalism. Archbishop Ramsey touched on something else of importance “Our power so to serve God is always rooted in our status as men and women who receive the miracle of divine forgiveness. Without the centrality of the Cross the Church may misunderstand its doctrine, its own life, and the secret of its power.”

The secret of its power! As we engage with the Bible and the Cross in this conference this is not to be some stagnant pool or some sterile clinic - this is to be a place of God’s presence and power, where we ourselves are changed by the Spirit through our own encounter with the Word - the Word written and the Word crucified, risen and ascended.

Within the evangelical tradition this transformation has been most eloquently expressed in the call to Holiness. My predecessor J C Ryle wrote the classic evangelical treatise on “Holiness”. I read it on my ordination retreat alongside Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory”. In Greene’s novel there’s a haunting phrase “There’s a moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in”. Our tradition’s noted work with children and young people echoes that Jesuit saying “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

The encounter with Christ, the Word incarnate, is the opening of a door onto a path that leads steadfastly to personal holiness. I love J C Ryle’s images of sanctification

“When an eagle is happy in an iron cage, when a sheep is happy in the water, when an owl is happy in the blaze of noonday sun, when a fish is happy on the dry land - then, and not till then, will I admit that the unsanctified man could be happy in heaven.”

Ryle’s sights were clearly on heaven but his focus was very much on the earth as he engaged in the contemporary political and social justice issues of Liverpool such as child poverty and unemployment. This part of his heritage is not as well remembered.

My own experiences in Hull and Liverpool, immersed in the realities of urban mission, have informed and transformed my reading of the Scriptures. I believe there is an inextricable link between the doctrine of justification by faith and acting justly in God’s world. How can a person be reconciled through the Cross to the God of justice and mercy without at the same time being caught up in the dynamic of God’s action in the world to do justice and act mercifully.

How does God act in the world? What do the Scriptures say? With justice and mercy. What is required of God’s people? What do the Scriptures say? “To do justice and to love mercy”. Whenever the evangelical tradition has allowed a wedge to be driven between justification by faith and acting justly, between personal salvation and social justice, it has become sub-biblical.

Never has this biblical connection between the personal and the social, the private and public been so timely to affirm.

The earth faces challenges the magnitude of which are unique in its history. Previously human actions were but the trifles of flies ranged against the forces of nature. That is all now reversed. Human actions are literally changing the balances within creation. An Indian theologian, R L Sarkar, has written

“In the remote past, human actions were trivial when set against the dominant processes of nature. No longer is this so. The human species now influences the fundamental processes of the planet. Ozone depletion, worldwide pollution, and climate change are testimonies to our power.”

The Scriptures tell us that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. The Scriptures tells us that all has come in to being through and for Christ. Never has so much theology hung upon two such small prepositions!

The Environment, Biotechnology, Global poverty, International Governance, Human sexuality, the nurture of children are all raising fundamental questions about how we should then live. Into these debates the Bible speaks. As evangelicals we must read the scriptures and distil from its pages moral principles.

The Bible, inspired and with authority, urges us to walk humbly and to approach the world with a sense of moral awe. It is this which seems so lacking in our contemporary world where irreversible decisions are taken without due care and attention to their ethical quality and long-term consequences., We urgently need to recover to our public debates the sense of moral awe which is characterised by four hall marks. First, all our actions spring from and shape our characters. Secondly, all our actions have consequences, individually and socially. Thirdly, all our actions will be judged by future generations. Fourthly, we are all responsible for our actions to the source of our moral intuition.

I believe that this sense of moral awe can be a bridge, rather like Paul’s Areopagan altar, with our culture, enabling us to enter into dialogue and public debate with those beyond the boundary of the Christian faith.

As we engage in this debate, the Bible is foundational, for here God has spoken. From what reason does God speak? From love. For what purpose does he speak? For salvation.

You see, ‘The Bible, Cross and Mission’ are not just three conference themes dreamed up - albeit after much discussion! - by a planning committee.

Bible, Cross and Mission are the signs of God’s love in and for the world. They form a unique trinity. The Bible he communicates because he longs to draw us into communion with himself
The Cross he himself makes the atonement, the communion which we are incapable of making
Mission his own self-sending, the model of our being sent, is compelled by his love for the world.

“Bible, Cross and Mission” - Trinitarian tokens of the love of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. These are themes to capture our imagination, to stir our heart and to engage with the world globally.

In conclusion, I quote from Matthew Parris’ autobiography. He grew up in Africa and witnessed the work of Christian missionaries. Although an atheist he writes:

“I began to understand why eyes looked brighter and steps lighter in those areas where a missionary was at work. Because Christianity teaches a direct personal relationship, bypassing hierarchy and tribe, with God it can represent a release to those oppressed by their tribe and its panoply of brooding and often vengeful spirits. I do not myself believe in God but can still see how Christian monotheism can act to liberate.”

One of the greatest challenges that Christians face from our contemporary culture is to demonstrate by the quality of our being and doing that this spiritual and liberating transformation is not simply a subjective and psychological event, but is real, objective and rooted in the God of love who has spoken to us through his Son and reveals himself to his beloved world through the Bible, by the Cross and in Mission.