By Sue Careless
Correspondent
At the annual Mere Anglicanism conference, you’re likely to hear speakers from Oxford, Cambridge, and McGill quote Goethe, Nietzsche, and Rousseau. But what you come away remembering best are tales of some of the ordinary folk who influenced these scholars’ lives.
“Speaking the Truth in Love: The Church and the Challenge of the New Morality” was the theme at this year’s conference held in Charleston, S.C., Jan. 18-20. The conference, sponsored by the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina, dates to the 1990s. An especially important gathering for Anglican Church in North America clergy, it is devoted to “discipling, training, and educating lay and clergy leaders for the renewal of biblical and orthodox Anglicanism.”
Wheaton College historian John Dickson spoke on “Gospel Hospitality in a Fractured World.” He was raised in what he described as a very typical Australian home with no religion. Not once had he been inside a church before he was 16. But he learned about Jesus’ hospitality the easy way, through a Christian who practiced it. Glenda Weldon was a teacher at his high school, and “a very open Christian.” Dickson traded his way through school by asking questions that were designed to make teachers look silly and get a laugh in the class.
“It never worked with this woman. She was very smart and funny and had answers to all my smart-aleck questions.” Moreover, she invited anyone who was interested in the Christian faith to come to her home on Fridays after school, for hamburgers, milkshakes, and scones.
“So my mates and I turned up at her lovely Sydney house, where we devoured her hamburgers, milkshakes, and scones. And she fielded our questions about the Christian faith. And she read portions of the gospels to us. She knew that we knew nothing, so she got as many Jesus stories across as she could.
“But I’m here to say this woman’s hospitality and generosity over many Friday afternoons for the next two and a half years was the means under God leading me and several of my friends, including my best mate, to Jesus Christ. Three from that one class, all little Aussie pagans, ended up going into full-time ministry.
“In those days, I had no idea there was such a thing as a bigoted Christian, a Christian who would look down on you, who would shun you and judge you. That’s something I only learned later, when I became a Christian and started attending church. In those early days, Glenda epitomized one of the most striking and beautiful features of the life of Jesus. He was known as ‘the friend of sinners.’”
Anglican priest and author Sam Allberry spoke on “Why Our Bodies and What We Do with Them Matters.” He told of receiving a text message from a close friend who was on vacation. It said, “I’m about to head to the beach. I’m going to need your prayers today.” He was actually being serious. He hated his body and was very self-conscious about it. So what should Allberry say to his friend?
“Those other people at the beach … they may judge you because of your physicality — they didn’t die for you. Your body doesn’t need to be okay for them, because there’s another verdict on your body that is far more defining, and that is the verdict of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because you are his. You’re not theirs. As Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6, ‘You were bought with a price, the very body and blood of Jesus himself.’ And he has no regrets. He is pleased to own your life and to own your body.”
Paul says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”
Now, these words are ordinarily horrific: “You aren’t your own. Your body is not yours. You have been bought.”
Allberry has another Christian friend who as a young woman was trafficked. She had heard: “You’re not your own. Your body belongs to us. You’ve been bought with a price.” So Allberry asked her, “How do you read Paul’s words now as a Christian?” And she said, “They’re such beautiful words, because there is no better condition than belonging to Jesus, for our bodies to belong to him, for us to be his.”
“He hasn’t coerced or manipulated us into being his,” Allberry said. “He’s not stolen us. He’s laid down his life for us. And as we go on in the Christian life, we begin to realize how precious it is to belong to him.”
Carl Trueman, a theologian and historian who teaches at Grove City College, spoke on “Defining Identity and Self in an Age of Faulty Anthropology.” He stressed that we need a church shaped by friendship. A loss of the category of friendship is as much to blame as anything for the catastrophic sexual chaos of our culture. One youth worker in Pennsylvania told Trueman that 80 percent of the 12-year-old girls at his middle school identify as lesbian. He said it’s because they have not been taught what friendship is. “Teenagers have strong feelings for each other. The only category we give them to understand those feelings is a sexual category. We need to recover friendship.”
“Friendship is a category applied to God,” Trueman said. “When God meets with Moses in the Tent of Meeting, he spoke to Moses as a man speaks to his friend, face to face. And in the Upper Room, Jesus says, ‘No longer do I call you servants, but friends.’ The church needs to be a place that embodies friendship.”
And hospitality. “You might ask me why I’m a Presbyterian. I might answer you, because of the clear and obvious teaching of the Word of God. Or because when I was all alone in Aberdeen, my first week as a postgraduate, not knowing anyone, I sat down in the pew in the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland and the little old lady in front of me, Effie Morrison, turned round and said to me, ‘Would you like to come home for lunch?’ That made a huge impact on me. I still remember her name. You always remember the name of the person who gave you hospitality. We have a hospitable God: ‘I am the Lord your God, who loves the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner.’ So, we too should love the sojourner.
Author and apologist Rebecca McLaughlin spoke on “Right Thinking: Gospel Truth in a Culture Subscribing to the Secular Creed.”
One person who texted McLaughlin to tell her that she was praying for her at the conference was a young woman who, a couple of years ago, checked all the boxes for least likely to become a Christian. She was raised in a non-Christian home. She is Gen Z, and was identifying as lesbian at the time. She first heard the gospel from a beauty YouTuber who shared her testimony of how Jesus had saved her. And this young woman started attending a little Southern Baptist church in Madrid.
But her family and her friends told her she was crazy, and she started thinking, They’re probably right. She moved back to Boston, cut off all her hair, covered her body in tattoos, and threw herself into LGBT culture. But she couldn’t quite put Jesus out of her mind. She was reading books and listening to podcasts. And last September, she heard McLaughlin’s podcast and then came to her church ready to repent and put her trust in Jesus.
One of the beautiful things that she said to McLaughlin about a week after she had joined her church was, “I just realized, you guys have to love me. I could go to any other group in town and they could get to know me and decide I was weird and they didn’t want me, and they could throw me out and reject me, but you guys have to love me.” And McLaughlin told her, “Yes. The problem is, you have to love us, too.”
“If we are following Jesus, if we are doing what the Bible calls us to, we are going to have more love and not less,” McLaughlin said. “If somebody leaves the LGBT community to become a Christian, they should find more love and not less. And if we’re brutally honest, that is often not the case.”
Amy Orr-Ewing, senior fellow at the Oxford Center for Apologetics, addressed “Speaking the Truth in Love in Relationship.” She alluded to how, when it became clear that her former employer, evangelist Ravi Zacharias, had led a double life filled with sexual exploitation, she learned that “it is definitely true that in church we have failed. Sometimes we need to have the maturity to have grace for the rage around us, because it’s actually a true diagnosis that sometimes we fail to live the truth we believe.”
Orr-Ewing was giving a lunchtime talk at a British university on the question of suffering. How could God be good and loving and this be the world there is? It was organized by 19-year-olds trying to share their faith with their college friends.
There was an open discussion, and it was going well until a very angry looking, tattooed man with lots of piercings received the mic for the last question. He told how he had suffered terrible abuse in his church. Orr-Ewing replied, “Firstly, I’m sorry and I believe you because that has been my experience, too. And it’s agony. Secondly, Jesus reserved his harshest criticism for religious leaders, and he was particularly concerned by those who caused harm to children.”
Then Orr-Ewing said, “I plead with you to consider Jesus yourself and don’t let abusers take more from you than they have already taken. I found, in the person of Jesus, justice, hope, peace. Will you take a second look at Jesus?” She had a wonderful conversation afterward with him. “His parents, amazing Christians, had been praying for him and he came back to the Lord that day.”
