7 - Archbishop Michael Ramsey and Evangelicals in the Church of England

Summary

Should Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury from 1961 to 1974, appear in a volume concerning evangelicalism in the Church of England? After all, Ramsey was no evangelical, and was indeed strongly associated with Anglo-Catholicism. However, his time at Lambeth spans a key period for the evangelical constituency in the Church of England, since two parallel stories often told about the movement converge in the late 1960s. The story of the liberal evangelical movement, as represented by the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement, reaches a terminal point in 1967 with the disbandment of the group. The decline of liberal influence is mirrored by the rise of conservative Anglican evangelicalism, led by such figures as John Stott and J. I. Packer. This conservative turn, which had gradually gathered strength since the Second World War, has been seen to have culminated at the National Evangelical Anglican Congress at Keele in 1967. For David Bebbington, Alister Chapman and others, Keele represented a conservative triumph.

Keele not only represented the consolidation of conservative leadership within the movement, but it also triggered a change in attitude towards the rest of the Church of England, as Andrew Atherstone has shown. It is with this relationship, between evangelicals and the central institutions of the church, that this chapter is concerned. Since at least the Prayer Book Crisis of 1927–28, conservative evangelicals had suspected that the church hierarchy, dominated by what John Maiden has aptly described as a ‘centrehigh consensus’, consciously disdained conservative evangelical opinion, and that it had systematically excluded them from positions of influence within the church. Timothy Dudley-Smith ascribed the failure of the church to appoint John Stott as a bishop in part to a vestigial feeling that conservative evangelicals had (in Owen Chadwick’s phrase) ‘a touch of the alien intruder’.

Conservative evangelicals thus perceived themselves excluded by the central institutions of the Church of England. This narrative of exclusion and discrimination is complicated by a sense that this exclusion was self-inflicted. ‘At worst’, thought Randle Manwaring, ‘Evangelicalism is always meeting trouble half way and is disappointed, almost, if there is no battle.’ For Alister McGrath, the movement was beset by ‘a siege mentality … expressed in an aggressiveness which ultimately rested upon a deep sense of insecurity and defensiveness.’