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Changing Horses: a Journey from the Baptists to the Church of England

By Alun Brookfield.

Parish Priest, Diocesan Parish Development Adviser

and Editor of Ministry Today

After being a Baptist minister for 15 years, I was ordained into the Church of England in July 2000. This is the (much abbreviated) story of that journey.

Starting the journey

So how did a good Baptist boy get from there to here?

It was in fact simply the next step on a journey which led Mary and me through some deep waters and painfully difficult paths during the better part of twenty years. If there was any leaving behind, it was only that of the journey. Nothing is regretted, nothing wasted and nothing lost. But the journey must continue. I do not know for sure when it began, but I have often commented that I originally became a Baptist through an accident of geography!

Becoming a Baptist

I was, in fact, baptised into the Anglican communion (Church in Wales), but my home was little more than nominally Christian. My parents tried sending me to Sunday School when I was four years old, but the experience so upset me that, after one further attempt a year or so later, they gave up trying. I don't blame them - even at the age of six or seven I could make enough noise to wake the dead.

So it was at the end of my first year at music college at the age of nineteen that I was introduced to an active Christian faith through the witness of a friend who was himself only converted three weeks before me.

When the first long vacation started, I knew I needed to find a church near home at which to worship. The nearest by twenty yards (I was that close to becoming an Anglican!) was a Baptist church - the accident of geography - where I found a large group of young adults of my own age who welcomed me into their midst with open arms. The minister was a fine evangelical Bible teacher whose preaching enthralled and excited me. It also whetted my appetite for Christian study. Having married his daughter, Mary, we automatically joined the local Baptist church whenever we moved house. So when the call to a full-time ministry of word and sacrament (and it was always the two in tandem) came, it never occurred to me that it might be as anything other than a Baptist minister.

So I entered Spurgeon's College in 1979 where I began to wonder whether there was more to life than being an evangelical Baptist.

The first questions

Exploring the library at Spurgeon's introduced me to the writings of people whose theological position was a long way removed from the conservative evangelicalism which I had been taught by my pastors. I loved this 'dangerous' liberal thinking, often grappling with questions with which evangelical commentators seemed reluctant to deal. Charismatic renewal also brought me into contact with those of other denominations who believed differently to me, yet were following the same Christ.

Pastoral ministry

But the most serious questions arose in Baptist pastoral ministry as we found ourselves trying to relate our faith to people whose problems had no easy solutions. Often, all we could do was weep with them, sharing their pain, while becoming increasingly frustrated that our evangelical faith appeared to offer no way of creatively engaging with those problems, much less solving them. In fact, it seemed to me that many of their problems were caused by the very evangelicalism they believed and expected me to teach. I was supposed to have answers, but I found the questions too numerous.

Equally difficult was that the gathered church ecclesiology of our Baptist church provided few access points to the Christian faith for those outside the church whose lives were so damaged. For the first time, we began to feel the ecclesiology of Baptist congregationalism saying, "You can't be part of this church unless you fulfil certain conditions". Godly people were refused membership of our church by the church members' meeting because they believed slightly differently and expressed their belief in different ways.

Such personal discomforts exposed some deep inner conflicts in me and also led me into conflict with some of my church leaders, as I tried to encourage the church to be more open and welcoming. They seemed more concerned with preserving the 'purity' of the gathered church.

The Church Members' Meeting

I also began to have serious doubts about the Church Members' Meeting as a form of church government. It seemed to me (and still does) that it is hard to justify it from Scripture, impossible to make it work in a church of more than about forty members, and hopelessly unwieldy unless the members are willing to devolve significant amounts of authority to pastor and deacons. Most, in my experience, both as pastor and layman, are not.

Eventually, our discomforts led to a personal crisis which forced us to seek other ministry. Working for Bible Society for the next ten years meant that I was, in effect, a lay member of the local Baptist church, an experience which, sadly, did nothing to encourage me to want to remain within the Baptist fold.

Positive choices - liturgy and ecclesiology

But I must stress that we did not eventually leave Baptist life only for negative reasons. They were simply the catalyst which drove us to explore further. Indeed there are many positive reasons why I might have wished to remain. Baptists have an evangelistic zeal which is often lacking in Anglicanism. Mary and I both learned our Christian faith through involvement with Baptist churches. Our closest friends and confidantes to this day are Baptists. But there are two major areas of practice and belief which outweigh these other considerations and which have led us inevitably into the Anglican Communion. First, there is its liturgy and all that accompanies it. Second, there is the missionary significance of its ecclesiology.

Discovering liturgy

As a Baptist minister, each week became an increasingly desperate search for freshness in leading worship. So I found it necessary to create a basic form of service which had variety within structure. I used that of the Alternative Service Book as my starting place. Needless to say, I didn't tell my members what I was doing. I was sure they would drum me out of town if they knew.

As I was dipping my toe into the liturgical ocean, a young Roman Catholic couple joined our Baptist church. Refugees from a way of being church which was unable to recognise Martina's ministry, she and Gary (not their real names) embraced our Baptist ecclesiology, yet were firmly Roman Catholic in their spirituality and challenged me about the bareness of our chapel, the lack of visual expression in our worship and the power of liturgy which had the authority of centuries of tradition.

Then in 1990 we discovered the Northumbria Community, an ecumenical community which bases its liturgies on the ancient Celtic traditions of these islands. Within the Community, Mary and I found a freshness and warmth of liturgy allied to a creative approach to an incarnational Christian faith.

In 1996 we decided to start attending the 8.00am Holy Communion at our local Parish Church. Mary's father had recently died, and the noise and activity of most worship services in our Baptist church (this is not a criticism, merely an observation) was unbearable, allowing her no space to bring her grief before God in the context of worship. By contrast the quiet reflectiveness of early morning Holy Communion was an oasis of peace and tranquillity in which to discover the grace of God afresh. Kneeling to pray and receive bread and wine was, and still is, an unforgettable experience - Mary described it at the time as feeling that she had come home. The visual impact of the robed priest provides colour and movement within that quiet reflectiveness which are absent from most Baptist experiences of worship.

Finally, my own conversion to liturgical worship was cemented by being asked to assist in a local ecumenical parish by taking Free Church communions. Using a Northumbria Community liturgy, I joyfully led the people in the eucharistic celebration and was surprised by the huge joy and privilege of serving each one personally at the communion rail and praying that "the body of Christ keep you in eternal life". I cannot fully explain my feelings about this part of the Eucharist - only that, for me, as it had been for Mary a few weeks earlier, this was like coming home.

The missionary nature of Anglican ecclesiology

What about the ecclesiology? Speaking broadly, we came to feel that the Church needs to say with Christ to the community around it, "You are part of the life of this church unless you opt out". This is in contrast to the Baptist version which, we feel, says by default, "You can only be part of the life of this church if you opt in". That is a terrible generalisation, and, like all such, contains as much error as truth, but let it serve for the moment. It explains in rough terms why we feel at home within Anglican ecclesiology.

Emmaus: The Way of Faith

In 1996, I was asked in my work at Bible Society to take responsibility for the marketing of a new programme for evangelism and discipleship called Emmaus: the Way of Faith. The programme presents the Christian faith as a journey and conversion is seen as making a decision to continue the journey. So being a disciple of Christ is simply about putting one foot in front of the other. Evangelism is about inviting people to join us on the journey. Instead of a line over which people have to step in order to 'become Christians', we are to invite people to join us on a journey which starts wherever they are and continues through life, with probably many little conversions along the way.

I sensed immediately that this approach seemed to be much more in tune with the ministry of Jesus than other approaches with which I was familiar. That understanding, combined with the "You're part of the life of this church unless you opt out" approach of our parish priest, led us to believe that this may well be the most appropriate ecclesiology for the re-evangelising of these islands, simply because it permits the multiplication of points of access in a way that Baptist ecclesiology rarely does. Most Anglicans (or at least those we know of) tend to want to fill the church with people so that we can all travel together. I think that's what Jesus would have done, if I read the gospels aright.

That settled, embracing infant baptism, the great apparent point of division between Anglicans and Baptists, over which I had agonised, was easy. I was able to see it as a sacrament of welcoming a child and its family into the family of God and into the life of the local parish church as part of their journey of faith. It can be a mission tool, a pastoral tool, a community-building tool, but most of all, it is the imparting of divine grace and an opportunity for the parish to start this child and also its family on their own Emmaus journey.

Selection Processes and Beyond

I first applied for ordination into the Church of England in 1997, but the Selection Committee asked me to resign my Baptist ordination immediately, wait two years and then apply again. It turned out to be good advice, although bitter medicine to take at the time.

The intervening period, however, was enriching in many ways, as I learned more about myself and about the Church of England. Landing a job working for the Diocese of Bristol as a Parish Development Adviser brought me into creative contact with the full breadth of the Church, an experience which served to deepen and enrich my growing love for it. Mary and I met and spent time with people with whom we would once have disagreed and found ourselves being warmed by their love for Christ. We experienced Anglican worship in all its variety. We involved ourselves in various examples of what we call the 'pantomime' of the Church, such as a Royal Maundy service and the Collation and Installation of an Archdeacon. And there can be few prospective ordinands who have visited over seventy parishes of all sizes and attended fifty Parochial Church Council meetings - all in a single year! And, remarkably, I was even more in love with the Church of England at the end of that process than I was when I began.