On the YouTube podcast I did recently for Leaving the Message I tentatively suggested that the Anglican clergymen who largely popularised the Charismatic Movement in Britain were reacting to a rather stiff, starchy and unemotional Evangelicalism (though there were quieter rumblings amongst Pentecostals and other Free Church people going back to the 1950s, already exposed to the US Latter Rain Movement).
I had in mind particularly the Iwerne camps run for many years for Public School boys, a number of whose alumni I met at Cambridge, and which acted as a kind of feeder for the premier Conservative Evangelical churches in London and elsewhere.
The Iwerne camps have become notorious in recent years for the sexual abuse scandals involving John Smyth and, more recently, Jonathan Fletcher (my curate at HTB), and for the cover-up that tarnished the reputation of the recently retired Archbishop of Canterbury. However, it is probably as well to remember that the victims of abuse were relatively few, and the scandal was a huge shock to many who had attended the camps and been converted through them. The main fault of the organisation appears to have been the failure to act once evidence emerged, from group-think and fear for reputation, but that’s a whole other subject in itself.
One piece of feedback after the podcast led me to a little more research, tending to confirm the links of a number of early Charismatic leaders to Iwerne, but also (as I should have realised earlier) Iwerne’s connection with the later epicentre of Third Wave Pentecostalism (Toronto Blessing, etc), that is to say Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB). Nicky Gumbel, for example, was a product of Iwerne, but has apparently written to distance himself from it both personally and theologically.
One article I read suggested that the attraction to the Charismatic Experience for these guys lay partly, as I conjectured, from the hunger for a more experiential faith than the camps offered. The article also hinted that for some, one motive was the search for healing from abuse, in what seemed a more open and innocent spirituality.
If that last claim is true, then it’s certainly a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. The Charismatic model, as it has developed, lends itself to institutionalised abuse, it seems to me, rather more readily than does formal Anglicanism. The history documented by Leaving the Message almost suggests it’s an original feature of the first, more than a bug.
But I suspect that the theological issues around “experiential Christianity” were more important, or at least that’s what I want to consider today. I’m told (never having been either at Iwerne camps or a public school) that the camps were strong on the basic gospel message and the need for dedicated discipleship, but thin on theology, being somewhat anti-intellectual. That, I think, was the general state of Evangelicalism going into the 1960s and 70s, for a number of reasons.
For Nonconformists, of course, the Restoration of Charles II put an end to university education for a couple of centuries. But even within Anglicanism, the intellectual high ground had been occupied for a century by the Higher Critics, so that a simple gospel and “muscular Christianity” became what fed the Evangelical pulpit and mission field. John Stott (who you may know rejected the Charismatic Movement) was among the first to try and restore Evangelicalism’s intellectual biblical foundation.
Naturally, the “simple gospel” was not altogether a bad thing, but for the upper echelons of society, the fervour of working class Primitive Methodists, Gospel Christians, or Peculiar People was not on the menu. They attended formal chapel at public schools, and were likely recruited for Iwerne by their chaplain, who would probably have been through the same mill of single-sex boarding schools from an early age. I’m not alone in thinking that the system is not calculated to produce emotional wholeness.
Under such circumstances, the Charismatic promise of a direct emotional experience of God, together with the “release” of one’s own repressed feelings, must have been very attractive compared to the emotionally thin gruel they knew. The problem is that if that undoubtedly real experience is not, as I have argued at length on this blog, actually a communion with the Holy Spirit, then it will all end in tears eventually.
My own conversion was through that same Evangelicalism of the 1960s, but mediated through much more ordinary family people. And my particular Crusader Class had a long tradition of good natured contempt for human authority. The gospel was maybe simple, but it was fun. We were day-school kids, some from Co-Ed schools, who lived with our families. And perhaps because there was a somewhat lower expectation that we were destined to be ministers or missionaries (though a good many went that way), I don’t remember any contempt for growth in theological knowledge. In fact, I expected that there were depths in the Bible to plumb, and much to learn about church history and so on, for which university provided a great opportunity.
The early Church had no qualms about educating new Christians in theology, either. That is obvious from the content of the New Testament, all of which was intended for the building up of the people of God, not for tickling the ears of academics or sages. And the New Testament does teach a highly experiential form of Christianity. But it is (as Jonathan Edwards realised) “affection” that relies not on physical manifestations of the Spirit, nor on expecting to hear God’s voice whenever we pray, nor on witnessing miracles, but on the work of the Spirit in uniting us to the living Christ through his word, and through the sacraments, and through warm fellowship in his earthly body.
It’s easy if you’ve been taught that by teachers who know God in this way, and who know how to teach. But it’s necessarily a theological kind of experience, so that to despise theology is to miss out, to a greater or lesser extent, on the experience (though not, thank God, the reality). That applies whether the side-lining of theology is the result of “muscular Christianity” or of beleiving you have a hotline to God.
Someone I heard on YouTube today likened this kind of knowledge of God to going to a good restaurant with your spouse of many years. That was very apt for me, since we did that only yesterday, to celebrate nothing in particular except a forthcoming storm. And just as the man went on to say, we actually said comparatively little to each other, and what we did say surprised neither of us: the experience was “table fellowship,” the log fire (minus any frying pan) beside us, and our undivided mutual company, reinforcing in a silent and scarcely “passionate” way the solid relationship of fifty five years. Not a bad analogy, I thought.
Not a bad meal, either.
