From the Press

Lighting a candle for the land

By Chris Cocksworth

This article first appeared in the Church of England Newspaper on Thursday 4 September 2003 and is reproduced with their permission.

Have you heard of Nikitas Stithatos? I hadn't until very recently. But he's worth getting to know. You won't actually find him at NEAC. He died a thousand years ago but I'm sure that the vision of NEAC to fan the flame would have warmed his heart. Like his mentor, Simeon the New Theologian, Nikitas was absorbed with the question of how we can truly know God's truth.

He commended a three-fold pattern. First, there is humility - the sort of humility that lies at the heart of justification by faith and recognises both our inability to save ourselves and our incapacity to know God's truth by ourselves. Second, there is 'undistracted spiritual prayer and intensive reading of the Scriptures'. This is how we arrive at the truth, at right 'spiritual knowledge' - by speaking to the one who is truth and hearing him speak to us. Third, as we allow ourselves - our whole selves, our individual-selves, our church-selves, even our evangelical-selves - to be brought to the cross, as we pray and read the Bible alone and together, the 'divine fire', the power of the Spirit, will set us on fire with the amazing grace of God. The fire of God's grace and truth will transform us into living witnesses - flames of the gospel - to change the world with the extraordinary reality of God and bring others to know him in Christ.

I work in a Theological College whose founding influence, in one sense, was fire. As Nicholas Ridley was burning at the stake for his evangelical witness not only to the world but within the Church, he heard the strong voice of Hugh Latimer, also dying for Christ, call out to him - 'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out'.

Evangelicalism in the Church of England has not always got it right. Most of us know something of Wilberforce's experience that he had been hurt more by fellow evangelicals than by others in the Church and the world. But we have been united and remain united by the sort of passion that caught hold of Nikitas Stithatos and Nicholas Ridley - a passion for the light of Christ's gospel to inform our minds and hearts, infuse our Church and irradiate our nation.

NEAC 4 presents one of those 'few in a life-time opportunities' to gather with hundreds, hopefully thousands of others who have learnt of the poverty of human life and thought before the judgement of the cross, and who are committed to an intensive engagement with the Bible and who are longing for the flame of the gospel that is within and among us and desperately needed by the people of our nation, to be fanned into fire by the coming of the Spirit. My hope for NEAC 4 is threefold. One, that many will come and make use of this concentrated chance for fellowship, prayer, apostolic teaching and the breaking of bread. Two, that many will go from the Congress freshly inspired to live out in our times Bishop Grindal's challenge to Bishop Ridley - 'ye, blessed be God, are enough through his aid to light and set up again the lantern of his Word in England'. Three, that the credibility of our commitment to the cross, bible and mission displayed at NEAC 4 will encourage parishes and communities throughout the land to say to us what a bishop on one side of another country said to a pastor on another side of the land where renewal had broken out in his parish - 'Come to us and bring the fire!'

Chris Cocksworth is the Principal of Ridley Hall