Archbishop Jensen said the crisis in the church had forced churchmen to look for a way forward.

As his vision for the future he made a plea to return to sound biblical theology, and to engage in evangelism in the West.

What follows are extracts from his exhaustive paper on the state of the church in the world…

Some would say the word evangelical has ceased to have any meaning. But it’s a noble word with a noble history.

The movement in the Anglican Church began in the 18th century, taking its shape from the Reformation, the Puritans and the Pietists.

Its founding father was the great saint Thomas Cranmer, and we ought to see ourselves standing in the line of that great one.

The evangelical luminaries were men and women such as the Wesley brothers, Whitefield, Simeon, Wilberforce, Newton and the Clapham Sect.

Its theology was distinguished by first its commitment to the authority of scripture above all, by a keen sense of sin and guilt, the centrality of the penal substitutionary work of Christ on the Cross, and the experience of conversion and assurance.

It was the 18th-century affirmations of the great Reformation slogans, “Christ alone”, “scripture alone”, “faith alone”, “grace alone”. You see, all your affirmations are really not much use unless there are also negations.

You can say all you like positively; if you’re not prepared to say what you need to say negatively, then your positives are not much use. Your “yes” is only as good as your “no.”

It was a highly serious movement; its adherents were active in both evangelistic mission and social action on behalf of the poor. It produced the Prayer Book of the Church of England and the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England.

From it came some of the great missionary movements in Christian history. It is no accident that the first preaching of the gospel in the penal colony of New South Wales and the first preaching in the free land of New Zealand were both biblical expositions by Anglican evangelicals.

Evangelicals seem to have had a massive impact on Victorian Britain and also on its colonial possessions. Their cause in the Church of England lapsed a bit from the 1880s onwards as the Anglo-Catholic movement came into its own, and liberal views of scripture began to dominate the universities.

You can see it in architecture: if you go back to the early churches in New South Wales, they are preaching boxes where the sermon counted, not the altar. As the century proceeds, you begin to see the more gothic Anglo-Catholic influence.

The movement languished in the 1920s and 1930s, but was reborn in the 1950s, and in England today at least is one of the most significant elements of the Church of England, and also of Africa, Asia, South America and Australia.

I say this to dispel any doubt: you are not alone. You are part of a great movement worldwide in all the mainstream Protestant denominations.

The 1950s regeneration was accompanied by an academic flourishing. The old charge that evangelicals are simplistic and uneducated is completely untrue. On the other hand, like all vigorous movements, it has developed all sorts of emphases and variations.

There is no spokesman, although I think you could point out that John Stott and Jim Packer are admired by evangelical Anglicans everywhere.

If you wanted to sum it all up, you could say that the evangelicals of the Church of England have always been gospel people. They put the Gospel before they put the church. They understand the Gospel to be the proclamation of Christ’s lordship in the power of the Spirit, calling for repentance and faith.

They have been famously active in good works. Victorian England was transformed through the power of the evangelical movement.

Evangelicals often make other Christians feel uncomfortable. They are enthusiastic. They have assurance, which others read as over-confidence or arrogance. If the Gospel of the grace of God is not understood, then of course evangelical assurance is misunderstood.

They do not assume that all who are baptized are necessarily saved. They appeal to the scriptures and the right of individual judgment. They engage in Christian witness at times and in ways that seem inopportune and rather crass.

The result is that many would say evangelicals regard them as second-class Christians, or even not Christians at all. On the other hand, it’s a favorite game of some to call evangelicals by abusive names, like “fundamentalist...

How many evangelicals are there? It would be fair to say that at least one-third of Australia’s active Anglicans are evangelical. The diocese of Sydney is a big contributor to that, but Melbourne has something like half its active churchgoers in the evangelical camp.

I have been told that something like 248 of the 250 biggest churches in England are evangelical, and that would not surprise me. Of course, the biggest colleges there are also evangelical.

You sometimes miss evangelicals because traditionally they are not proportionately represented in the hierarchy. One of the reasons is that evangelicals are parish people.

What is the crisis in the Anglican Communion that has forced us to ask what is the way forward? One way forward is to ask whether Christianity itself has any future in countries like New Zealand?

Callum Brown’s book, The death of Christian Britain, suggests that the marked decline of the mainstream churches has reached the point where Christianity will cease to be a significant presence in those islands.

Some forecast that only 1 per cent of Britons will go to church regularly by 2016. This parallels the situation in France, other European countries, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

According to the 2001 census, as many as 26 per cent of respondents claimed no religion, while a further 17 per cent did not specify. It looks very much as though the triumph of secularism predicted by the sociologists in the 1960s has come to pass.

But that judgment may be too simplistic. Dr. Kevin Ward of Knox College, Dunedin, has given us an account in his inaugural lecture entitled “Is New Zealand’s future churchless?”

He makes the interesting point that the census reply “no religion” really means “not connected to a church”, and in fact that many of the people who answer in that way would profess to be committed to spirituality rather than to religion. It’s not really religion, it’s belonging.

In an age of individualism, in an age of long working hours, in an age of entry of women into the workforce, voluntary organizations of all sorts are in trouble.

In a most telling illustration, Dr. Ward tells us that whereas in 1970, 400,000 New Zealanders were involved in rugby; by 2000 the number was down to 120,000. That’s a religious decline if ever I’ve heard one.

The picture that emerges from Dr. Ward’s account is of a religious society in New Zealand, but not a Christian society. Christianity is therefore faced with two problems.

The first is that Christianity is in essence a revealed faith, not a natural faith. Human beings are naturally spiritual, but they are not naturally Christian. For the Christian faith to be sustained, it needs to be transmitted intentionally, and it needs to be adopted intentionally.

The favored ideas of much contemporary Christianity – things like inclusiveness and tolerance – will not hold the faith in sufficient shape for it to be transmitted. It’s not going to work. We need to recognize the truth of the faith, and its limits. We need to teach the faith. We need to have some rudimentary account of Christian doctrine in the churches.

Spirituality in a Christian community will begin with Christian notions, so you will find that spiritual people around us will have Christian ideas, such as the importance of Jesus, and that God is personal, and there is an afterlife.

But mark my words: as time goes on, and the children are not taught any longer, these notions will disconnect more and more from the Christianity that made this country, and a new and different religion will emerge.

I predict that in other ways this new religion will be the same. It will be old story of paganism coming back. There are only a certain number of ways you can think about God, the world and our relationship to the spiritual forces.

Our natural ways of being religious are bound to be revived. There will be a supermarket of beliefs, each individual will be responsible for his or her own faith, the truth isn’t going to matter much. Paganism will come back as the religion of the people.

The second problem is there no such thing as churchless Christianity. We may suggest that the way forward for Christianity is simply to embrace the new interest in spirituality, but Christianity is a revealed faith; we don’t take it on our terms, we take it on its terms.

There are distinct limits to what is Christian and what is not Christian. In Christianity, God is committed to the truth, and therefore he is committed to declaring the error.

Without doubt, Christianity is a faith which from its very beginnings bound believers together and insisted that they minister to each other as ministers of what the New Testament calls the body of Christ. In short, Christianity cannot survive without church. But that is what is at stake in contemporary New Zealand.

Dr. Ward thinks if the church is going to survive, it’s going to have to be pretty different. He suggests reforming the existing church, making it more effective; he talks about creating new forms of church; and he talks about resourcing the social and cultural life of the nation. To his mind, churches of the future are going to have to be marked by fluidity rather than solidity.

He says the churches are going to have to mirror the culture if they are going to survive.

I think Dr. Ward’s analysis of the situation is right, and his strategy is partly right. He is right in thinking we are now in a world of spirituality; that church is in danger of disappearing. I think he’s right to pour cold water on the view that secularism meant the end of religion.

But in the vacuum caused by the decline of Christianity under the battering of the Enlightenment has come the revival, much to the surprise of the Enlightenment thinkers, in modern form of paganism and Gnosticism. In some way, we must challenge the Enlightenment, and reassert the Christian view of God, humanity and the world.

Church will be different in the future. It may meet on a different day of the week. It may not have a fixed liturgy, its ministry may be informal, and its location is almost certainly going to be non-ecclesiastical.

It will have priestless communion services for there will not be enough priests. But such meetings will have no connection with Christianity at all unless they are self-consciously based on the Gospel and the scriptures.

The crisis for western Christianity is this: will we still be Christian or will the church have become so captive to the culture of this world that we will abandon the gospel in favor of an insipid religiosified version of the current secular thinking?

Yes, we are going to have to be more liquid in the form of the church, but the more liquid you are in the form, the more solid will have to be doctrinal base. There will have to be a strong connection between scripture and gospel.

I am fully aware that this will make such culturally attuned churches – really liquid in shape but solid in gospel – fundamentally counter-cultural to the way in which New Zealand is going. When it appears that you are the strange, archaic fundamentalists, then you’re going to receive an enormous battering from the culture. That will tell you [that] you are on the right track.

These churches will be living in a state of tension. I am also aware that it goes the exact opposite to what we see happening in many mainline denominations all around the world, where we have an ever-solidifying way of doing church – because after all, only the elderly are there and they want church as it was when they were children – with an ever-liquid grasp of biblical teaching. We are conservative where we should be venturesome, and venturesome where we should be conservative.

We have chosen exactly the wrong path if we are to do what we need to do in a culture like this.

The crisis in the church is not homosexuality. The crisis is the whole state of the gospel in the West. Homosexuality is only a presenting issue.

The evangelical understanding of the church is going to be enormously important for the re-Christianization of New Zealand. Evangelicalism which is true to itself is ideally situated to be the form of the gospel which will carry the gospel through into the next decades.

I would say to mainline church leaders, foster your evangelicals. Don’t be fearful of them. I would say to evangelicals, be yourselves and work hard at drawing people to Christ through the word and fellowship of God’s people.

You have ways of doing things by instinct which will work in the 21st century. But it has to be remembered that it has to be based on a sound and biblical theology or else those churches will fly off into the ether and become pagan themselves.

I believe in order for the new expressions of church to minister effectively, they will need to be strongly biblical. They will need to understand the faith, and be able to promote the faith. They will need to preach the word of God and seek for conversions. Preferably also, they will need strong and fruitful connections to the mainstream churches, so they are helped to retain their faith.

Unfortunately, if the mainstream churches either reject the new evangelical churches or they themselves become radical theologically, the connection will become unhelpful.

Most people think when we talk about the crisis in the Anglican Communion, we are referring to the struggles about homosexuality. But the crisis really concerns the state of the church in the West and the effect that is having on the whole communion of churches. Put simply, the crisis of the church is a missionary crisis.

The Western churches face unprecedented decline. The decline of the church is indissolubly linked to the state of the host culture.

As we know, it is not only the churches that are suffering. This culture is hostile to belonging, hostile to community groups – hostile to community, really – hostile to authority, and hostile to God and the Bible.

Nothing surprises. Human beings left to our own devices will be like that. The danger, however, is that the churches have become enculturated and stand in danger of being corrupted by the individualism and liberalism of this age. We have doubted the things about which we should be absolutely sure, and we have accepted without question the things which we should have doubted.

The result has been an astonishing change of mind about what constitutes sin, for example, and where we can find God’s authority. It’s now become almost impossible to say in public what 20 years ago were fundamental truths hardly worth saying. They were so evidently based on God’s written word that Christians didn’t doubt them. On the other hand, habits of thought which owe more to secular philosophy than to God’s word have been allowed to intrude into the church’s teaching and practice.

The sad truth is, that where the church allows the culture to dominate in its message, it falters in its missionary task.

It’s hard enough to be Christian and maintain churches in a culture which sees things so differently, but if the pattern and experience of the New Testament is anything to go by, the church goes forward not by acceding to the parts of culture which are at odds with the Bible, but by resisting them, by being counter-cultural precisely where the word of God tells us to be.

When leaders from the West pass through what used to be missionary dioceses and make nice noises about all religions these days being equally right and so on, the leaders of the dioceses are scandalized by the Western Christians.

They have shed their blood for the Gospel that there is one Savior and Lord. They have done it because we told them it was so, and they can read their Bible anyway. It is a scandal that Western Christians have become so eclectic and so subservient to the view that there are many ways to God.

So the future task of the evangelicals is two-fold.

First, to preach, explain and defend the biblical Gospel which we preached in Asia, Africa and South America. This will require a firm adherence to God’s Word written as the supreme and infallible authority in all matters of faith and conduct.

It will require us to develop ways of interpreting the scriptures which will be biblical and pastoral. It will require us to show how the teaching of the Bible is actually for the benefit of the whole human family.

The Bible is the chief tool of pastoral ministry, and it works transforming lives, giving hope and bringing love.

This task is going to require a very high order of intellectual skills and spiritual understanding. We have been slack in this area. It will also involve supporting our global south friends theologically as they preach Christ in difficult circumstances. And it will require us to treat them as equals and learn from them.

The second task is to engage in evangelistic mission in the West, exhibiting the necessary flexibility when it comes to matters of church, and the necessary fidelity when it comes to matters of theology.

I hope, then, the evangelicals in New Zealand will play a crucial role in showing us how a church can be missional and biblical. I hope that you will create and adhere to preaching a biblical theology which will see the churches of the West return to their theological moorings, and at the same time prove to be at the forefront of evangelism which will create church communities suitable for a modern age.

I trust that we will be able to do this within the Anglican Communion. But if we cannot, the work still needs to be done. The Anglican Communion is not our first loyalty – the Gospel is.

To accomplish these tasks, you are going to need to be united, as far as possible. You will need to find ways to bridge divides, of setting yourselves serious theological work to do together. A divided, far-flung evangelicalism will not help anyone in years ahead. We need a new evangelical movement.

John McNeil, a veteran of 40 years of newspaper and radio journalism, is South Island editor for Challenge Weekly, New Zealand’s non-denominational, independent national Christian newspaper.