Chris Chivers feels pride in Anglicanism as he reads this tale of courage against an evil.

 

Compromise and Courage:

Anglicans in Johannesburg

 

Peter Lee

 

Cluster Publications £12

(1-875053-50-6)

THERE haven’t been many occasions of late when I’ve felt much pride in my Anglican roots – the Communion-wide factionalism of the past few years cast too large a shadow for that.  But at the recent thanksgiving service for the life of Bishop David Sheppard in Liverpool Cathedral, I did feel  a surge of pride at the life of an Anglican whose breadth of vision commanded respect – and achieved reconciliation – across the massive social divisions of British society.  Throughout my reading of Peter Lee’s breathless, captivating, and inspiring history of Anglicans in the diocese of Johannesburg, I felt the same surge.

 

The common denominator, at one level, was Archbishop Desmond Tutu.  He sent a touching message to the Sheppard service, and he strides, like a colossus, through the pages of Lee’s narrative.  Certainly the book bears testament to the truth that Anglican theology invariably emerges at its best in biographical guise.

 

But though the story is structures around big figures – and the Johannesburg episcopal  succession is as big as any: Carney, Clayton, Reeves, Stradling, Bavin, Tutu, Buchanan – Lee, a bishop himself, avoids a descent into hagiography.  He can, for instance, be objectively critical of a Tutu as of anyone else.  The book is dominated by bishops, a fact that its author admits will be judged as a fault.  But between the poles of compromise and collusion with oppression, on the one hand, and collision with injustice and courage to fight it , on the other, Lee’s Episcopal subjects all emerge as figures of considerable integrity.

 

Lee is too good a historian, and too sensitive a pastor, however, to have bishops eclipse the rest.  In this sense, the reason for pride – in this brilliantly judged tapestry of selections from a vast array of archival material – lies with the ordinary Anglicans who struggle to make sense of their faith in the face of an evil whose complexities would daunt the most courageous soles.

It is their struggle to overcome the divisiveness of a colonial church – in which until Tutu’s time, black people had no real say – which makes this book so compelling a read: for such wrestlings with truth speak directly into the current situation in the Anglican Communion.

 

the subtitle to the book. “a divided church in search of integrity”, might profitably be added at the heart of the Compass Rose wherever it appears, since the struggle for justice which he describes models the struggle for full humanity which is the subtext of recent debate and dissension.

 

Quoting the poet Antje Krog, Lee end his story with these words: “Maybe this is how we should measure our success – if we manage to formulate a morality based on our common humanity.”  Quite so; for, transcending the invective of the past few years, this brilliantly told narrative shows us how to get there.