A sign of hope for the whole Church in the Winter Gardens

Andrew Carey

On the promenade at midnight looking over fiercely rainswept breaking waves, Blackpool is almost a bearable place to be. Turn your back to the sea and look at the endless amusement arcades, kebab houses, brash lighting and the drunks and you have a very different place.

In the Winter Gardens, where evangelicals are meeting for their fourth National Evangelical Anglican Congress, fresh paint covers glimpses of the fading glory of this great Lancashire resort. The workers of the mill towns flocked to this summer city when it was full of boarding houses presided over by forbidding matrons, best memorialised by the McGill cartoons with their 'Carry On' humour.

It is strange to see so many evangelicals gathered in the fading glory of Blackpool, now described as the new 'Las Vegas'. To some extent it represents a cultural shift in the evangelical movement to see them in such close proximity to the gambling and drinking culture. The days of separation from the world and Puritanism are long gone. The refrain of recent years has been the call to be salt and light in the world, to act upon the example of Jesus and sit and eat with the sinners of the day.

But as Blackpool tries to re-market itself to a new generation who prefer Ibiza and Faliraki to Bognor and Blackpool it also reminds me of the fading glory of the Church of England and its own attempts to recover lost ground. The evangelicals are no exception to this desire to recapture glories once lost. But in reality, there was never ever a golden age for evangelicals in the Church of England, except perhaps the one that is on us now. If no less than a third of the Church of England is now evangelical, and 60 per cent of ordinands are trained in the evangelical theological colleges, now is the most promising time to be an evangelical.

But I continue to get the sense that we have some suicidal impulse to divide once we are even approaching that critical mass of being able to make a difference. No sooner was the fourth National Evangelical Anglican Congress born than a new grouping called Fulcrum emerged. It appeared in a kind of reaction to the existing evangelical networks and organisations. Later 30 or 40 evangelicals conspicuously absented themselves from the Archbishop of Canterbury's opening session. These acts were grist to the mill of the generalised media perception of evangelicals.

If you believed The Guardian's coverage you would have thought a Third World War had broken out. But The Guardian's problem is our responsibility as well. Do we look like people of grace, as evangelicals? or do we play to our polarised weaknesses too often?

The trouble is that it is all too easy to fulfil the stereotypes dumped upon us, often unfairly. The usual briefing by other Christians is that these evangelicals are a fringe, an import of televangelism or right-wing Christianity from America - an image that editors seem often only too eager to hear.

The long history of evangelicalism in the Church of England is forgotten and we appear to be a novelty born of whichever issue is the focus of controversy in contemporary church and society.

The reality of evangelicalism is both much more disturbing and much more boring than all that. For the boring part, there is no general conspiracy to take over the Church of England. we are happy to exercise the sort of 'generous orthodoxy' which the new grouping Fulcrum recommends. Archbishops from Ramsey through to Williams have been welcomed graciously at our conferences and congresses. we work with all in the Church of England, even where there is sharp disagreement.

But we are far more disturbing than people think, because our concern is to try to win souls for Christ. And perhaps this is the most counter-cultural message we have to offer to many British Christians who have lost confidence in the life-changing, transforming nature of the Gospel, and those in society who reject or are frightened by the universality of our faith.

Beyond homosexuality and all that, I detect in this NEAC congress an enthusiasm and experience in mission and evangelism that may ultimately be the saving of the Church in England.