The tragic facts are these: in order to maintain the illusion of a universal Church of England, inseparable from the state and its people, the Church's leaders have spent more than 150 years in trimming Christian doctrine so as not to "offend" anyone. Or to be "inclusive". Or to make the scriptures and Christian doctrine conform to the prevailing scientific fad of the day. Or, perhaps worst of all, in the truly misguided belief that by watering down the gospel they might be more successful in persuading unbelievers to come to Christ.

They have compromised, with relative impunity, down the years, writing from the security of senior positions within the Church's establishment and protected by the national courts from any complaints which have come from concerned church members - but rarely, if ever, from the bishops who are supposed to be the guardians of Christian teaching.

At first the heterodoxy was relatively mild, in the hands of men like Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, or Herbert Hensley Henson. But by the 1920s the cancer of full-blown Modernism was active within the Church in the shape of the Modern Churchmen's Union, led by Henry Major. It is but a short step from public denial of the Virgin Birth to denial of the Incarnation, and because of the Church of England's compromised system of doctrinal discipline, such opinions have become established as being as legitimate as those of Anglicans who hold firmly to the Bible and to the Creeds. In other words, for many leaders of the Church of England, Reason is the god who stands on the pedestal of their worship.

The position of Evangelicals has been especially grievously undermined by the uncritical adoption by most of the Church's seminaries, in deference to the long-ago secularised university theology departments, of the developing schools of biblical criticism, which have sought to relativise or even simply to revise the Scriptures so as to make the word of God conform to their own presuppositions, increasingly based on a quack "science" of textual and contextual analysis which disallows in principle the faith of the authors of these sacred texts, and so fails abjectly to tell us very much, if anything, which is valuable to us in understanding the Bible.

Fortunately, modern biblical and archaeological scholarship is demonstrating more clearly than ever before the veracity and reliability of the Scriptures - but it is too late for the Church of England, most of whose clergy and church leaders have been taught from the beginning that the Scriptures are not reliable accounts either of the life and teaching of Jesus or of his Evangelists.

Thus it is that Evangelicals who read the Scriptures as a sacred text, the written word of God, are regarded within the Church of England, and even by many who would call themselves "Evangelical" (for many claiming this nomenclature the term is more cultural than theological) as an extremist fringe, freely branded "fundamentalist" by the media - and by many church leaders. Those who believe in the word of God are systematically excluded from any position of leadership within the Church of England.

The Church of England has no effective mechanisms, either for guaranteeing orthodoxy of public teaching by its leaders, or for dealing with those who lead the way in subverting its witness to the gospel. Many of the leading revisionists have actually commenced their careers as teachers at the Church's seminaries. The outcome for the Church is constant drift in the direction of unbelief. Every novelty which is proposed has to be met halfway, with a compromise. The direction of movement each time is a step away from a recognisable faith in the gospel as the Church has received it, and the further alienation and exclusion of those within the Church who seek simply to be faithful to that gospel.

The catastrophic abandonment by the Church of England's bishops of their intrinsic role as guardians of Christian teaching concerning the Scriptures and the Creeds has been accompanied by a progressive relinquishment of their teaching authority in favour of voting on doctrinal and moral issues by the Church Assembly and latterly by the General Synod, whose members are not required to possess any qualification for judging such matters and who increasingly take their lead from media and politicians who want to see the Church redesigned in their own image.

If it is possible for leading Anglicans to declare that there is no Hell, that there was no Incarnation and no Resurrection, and that there is no need for repentance and conversion in the universalist institution which the Church of England has become, then any appeal to the Scriptures for guidance as to God's will, or definition of morality, is met with blank looks and bafflement by many lay and clerical leaders for whom such an intellectual and spiritual universe is largely unknown.

There is no sense any longer of appealing to an authority in order to establish right or wrong, or what is true, even if that authority is the Bible or the Creeds. The Church of England no longer accepts any authority, except in the administration of its own affairs, where ecclesiastical power is firmly maintained by those in whom it is vested, irrespective of their refusal to maintain the very core purpose for which the Church is supposed to exist - its mission to extend the gospel: the good news that Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, is the Son of God, that he was crucified for our sins and that he is risen from the dead for our salvation. There are far too many who no longer believe one word of this, but continue to prop up what has become the empty façade of the former Church of England, now largely emptied of spiritual treasure but continuing to provide a religious career for those who like that kind of thing.

The Church of England is now a very short step from following precisely the same agenda as TEC. If you do not believe that the Bible is the word of God, how can you take exception to gay marriage, or exclude anyone from Holy Communion simply because they have not been Baptised? The only logical alternative to biblical authority is unqualified "inclusion", and that is what the Church of England will very soon have once it appoints its first women bishops, driving out most of the surviving pockets of orthodox Christian belief along the way in favour of an ecclesiology which has a large Welcome Mat at the door, but within the building can only point to the monuments to the long-deceased Christians who formerly worshipped God there in Spirit and in Truth.

There is very little hope that the situation can be reversed. The Church of England has been so successfully permeated by its liberal entryists that they have complete control of its corporate life, including its appointments system by which they perpetuate their own stranglehold upon its institutions. There remain a few flourishing orthodox Evangelical congregations here and there, largely isolated from their diocese by choice or by necessity, but there is no trace of an Evangelical revival in the Church of England. Much of the energy and much of the youth are now to be found in independent congregational churches, entirely detached from the national Church of England, free to worship God with complete trust in the Scriptures and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Despite well-publicised initiatives such as "Fresh Expressions" in the last decade, the Church of England is not growing and not connecting with the society around it in such a way as to lead people to Christ. Much of the impetus for such movements is not to save souls but to fill pews and therefore the coffers. And despite all the evidence of 150 years, that a lukewarm gospel does not persuade, convert or save, still the delusion persists that if only the message can somehow be packaged correctly, suddenly people will return to the Church of England which they have been steadily abandoning since the first religious census in 1851.

If the Church of England took the gospel as its mission statement, and set about challenging the nation to believe in the Jesus of the Scriptures and the Creeds, to repent of sin and turn to Christ, to choose between death in this world or life in heaven, then it would have some slim chance of survival. But when it is led by people who recoil in horror at the "imperialism" which they see implied in the preaching of conversion, there is little realistic prospect that the message of the Church of England to the nation will be anything other than that of the museum curator: "Come and see our historic heritage."

The cold, sober facts are published from time to time by organisations such as Christian Research, whose surveys reveal that the Church of England is sitting on a demographic time bomb. Two thirds of its churches are shrinking, some very rapidly, as older members enter into their rest, and are not replaced by the under 40s, a generation which has been cut off from any effective teaching or witness by the Church, and exists in simple ignorance of religion of any kind, let alone the question of their eternal salvation. Empty churches are not sustainable for very long, even if a handful in the pews manage to open the doors on Sundays for a congregation of 10, 15, 20 worshippers. Eventually the finances prevail.

If FCA and GAFCON wish to ensure the survival of Anglican Christianity in England (and Wales and Scotland and Ireland, all of which suffer from the same culture of liberal reductionism) then they will need to stand by to re-evangelise the country from the very beginning - the Church of England will not do it, and indeed, without believing in the gospel, cannot do it.

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