TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080690/0806610.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 125 lines

                                                                                RELIGION, Page 56

Dramatic Choice for Canterbury


The Anglicans get an amiable, working-class Evangelical from
London's East End as their 103rd Archbishop


    The Church of England nowadays draws half its new clergy
from the growing Evangelical wing, but men of more liberal
stripe dominate among the bishops and power brokers. Thus it
was a dramatic step last week when an amiable Evangelical named
George Carey, Bishop of Bath and Wells, was named to be the
103rd Archbishop of Canterbury. Carey was one of two candidates
that a 16-member commission proposed to Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, and Queen Elizabeth made the formal appointment.
Carey next year will become the spiritual leader of both the
English flock and 70 million Anglicans and Episcopalians in 164
countries. At 54, he could look forward to 16 years in office
before obligatory retirement.

    Carey told a press conference that he felt "dazed and
unworthy" when he learned of his selection. He was not the only
Englishman to be dazed. The unusually rapid appointment, a mere
four months after incumbent Robert Runcie announced plans to
step down, apparently indicated that the commission reached a
strong consensus in favor of Carey. But the choice caught
everyone from bishops to bookies by surprise. Most speculation
had centered on more prominent figures, among them Archbishop
of York John Habgood, a favorite of the intellectual left who
confessed to some disappointment at being bypassed, and
Liverpool social activist David Sheppard.

    Besides being the most forthright figure among the handful
of bishops from the church's Evangelical side, Carey is a
remarkable choice for three other reasons: as a pastor and
educator, he has been closely associated with the charismatic
renewal movement, which practices speaking in tongues and other
gifts of the Holy Spirit; he has been a bishop for just 2 1/2
years; and he is a product of the working class, whereas
Archbishops are traditionally upper-crust men bred in elite
boarding schools and polished at Cambridge or Oxford. Raised in
publicly subsidized housing in London's hardscrabble East End,
Carey will now take a seat in the House of Lords and the Privy
Council, which advises the Queen.

    The humble origins of this "rags to purple" churchman should
help him in reaching out to the alienated masses at a time when
only 15% of English youngsters go to Sunday school, contrast
to 50% in the 1950s, and when church attendance runs to a
pitiful 2.4% of the populace. Carey himself was unchurched as
a youth. Interviewed in June by the Church Times, he recalled,
"I did not encounter living Christianity until I was 17 when,
through my brother of 13, I went along to the local Anglican
church, found the worship appallingly boring but the fellowship
and preaching riveting. There I found Christ, or, should I say,
he found me."

    By then, the hospital porter's son had long since quit
school and was working as an office boy. While serving as a
wireless operator in the Royal Air Force, Carey felt the call
to the clergy, entered King's College of the University of
London and, says a friend, "suddenly realized he was quite
bright." Carey eventually earned a Ph.D., specializing in the
early church fathers. He has taught at three Evangelical
seminaries and was principal of Trinity College, Bristol, when
he was named a bishop. He also served two stretches as a parish
priest, and advocates an innovation giving bishops the power
to weed out lazy and incompetent pastors. Carey is chairman of
the important Faith and Order Advisory Group, which deals with
church doctrinal issues.

    Theologically, Carey is not on the right wing of
Evangelicalism. For instance, he rejects a literal
interpretation of the creation and Adam and Eve in Genesis. He
has also vexed low-church hard-liners with his increasing
friendliness toward Catholicism. As bishop, Carey has taken
Anglo-Catholics in his diocese on a pilgrimage to a shrine to
the Virgin Mary at Walsingham. In 1985 he declared that
Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, though longtime adversaries,
now "stand firm together for a historic faith against the
insidious bloodletting which extreme liberalism perpetrates on
the body Christian." Arthur Leggatt, the general secretary of
the Anglo-Catholic Church Union, said last week, "We welcome
his orthodox stand on the Scriptures and the creed."

    The ever vocal Anglican left too appears ready to accept the
new Archbishop. After all, Carey has raised $900,000 in his
diocese for inner-city aid and has written, "I have never found
it easy to believe in God." Moreover, Carey strongly supports
priesthood for women; he has even asked priests in Bath and
Wells to consider resigning if they oppose women's ordination.
His appointment, in fact, is read as a signal that church
leaders and Thatcher's Tory government assume that women
priests will get the go-ahead during the new Archbishop's
reign. On the other hand, Carey counts as a traditionalist on
homosexuality, but he has no objections to gay clergy who
remain celibate.

    Though no social gospeler, Carey is willing to speak
occasionally on political issues. A staunch environmentalist
who once said, "God is green," he scolded Thatcher this year
when she took a swipe at the ecology movement, and he also
criticized the Prime Minister's disputed poll tax. Thatcher
nonetheless had no hesitation in giving him the nation's
spiritual primacy, no doubt because she agrees with a
preappointment editorial in the Economist that declared, "What
is needed is an inspiring missionary leader for a church that
has lost whatever grip it had on an increasingly pagan
country." No bishop has been more enthusiastic in promoting the
church's desperately needed "Decade of Evangelism" in the
1990s, and none seems better equipped to give it a go than
Carey of Canterbury.


By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Anne Constable and Helen
Gibson/London.