I’m writing this a matter of months after the Church of England’s General Synod, the Anglican Communion’s national leadership body, agreed to bless same-sex marriage. While refusing to go the whole way and formally conduct weddings of same-sex couples, the Church of England’s latest ecclesiastical fudge has rightly grieved evangelicals of every stripe, both inside and outside Anglicanism. It seems some form of schism is a sad inevitability.
Seeing my episcopalian brothers’ and sisters’ denominational heartache brings me no pleasure. There’s no schadenfreude here. I might be baptistic; I might be an elder-led congregationalist; I might even be named after D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones himself (yes, really); but despite my ecclesiological convictions and clear sense of being on Team MLJ, as opposed to Team Stott (see their well-documented contretemps in 1966 for more on that one), I owe a great debt of gratitude to evangelical Anglicanism.
I was raised as a reformed Baptist pastor’s kid in a small urban ministry in the east end of London before I entered the wild world of university. At this point, I wasn’t entirely sure you could even be an Anglican and a Christian. Joining those words seemed like an oxymoron, like dry water, or
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