Sydney’s almost unnoticed Archbishop-elect: The challenges facing Kanishka Raffel and the Anglican church – ABC News

Sydneys Anglicans have just elected a new Archbishop the current Dean of Sydney, Kanishka Raffel. You may not have noticed. Only two decades ago, the election of an Anglican Archbishop in Sydney was not just news, it was a matter for critical commentary in the opinion pages of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Earlier this year, the retirement of the previous holder of that office, Archbishop Glenn Davies, was not even mentioned in the secular press. The death of former Archbishop Donald Robinson, Archbishop from 1982 to 1993, likewise scarcely caused a ripple.

All this tells you something about the current cultural moment into which the new Archbishop of Sydney must step. With a Pentecostal Prime Minister, much media coverage of religion in the past three years has centred on Pentecostalism as the fastest growing, and increasingly influential, Christian movement in Australia. The growing subscriber base of the Australian Christian Lobby is reportedly drawn more from these new church movements than from the established denominations.

Sydney Anglicanism is old news: the usual media criticism of Sydney Anglicans weekly fodder for journo-comedians like Mike Carlton for years has morphed into indifference.

Want the best of Religion & Ethics delivered to your mailbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Your information is being handled in accordance with theABC Privacy Collection Statement.

Despite the vigorous efforts of Raffels predecessors, the Anglican Diocese of Sydney has not been growing overall. Parish attendance figures have not declined as sharply as with other denominations and other parts of the Anglican Church, but that is of no comfort. The reality is that, while Sydney itself expands and grows numerically and geographically, the Diocese has struggled to keep up.

Not only that, but the Christian faith is struggling with declining cultural influence. Whereas once to be moral was to be Christian, there is now a serious question over that assumption. Christian morality is not the same as societys general moral sense. However much people speak of Christian values or admiring the teachings of Jesus, when it comes down to anything that matters like money, power, and sex sharp divergences appear.

All churches have been tainted by the revelations of child sexual abuse, which has caused a profound loss of trust in them. In fact, trust in all of our social institutions is at a low ebb, whether they be trade unions, sporting clubs, political parties, banks, or the once-great media companies. But the church had developed a trust problem all of its own. In addition, the Anglican Church is culturally Anglo-Australian in many ways a strange fit for a multi-cultural city, where every third citizen is born overseas.

Whats more, the Christian contribution to the cultural and intellectual landscape has become largely invisible. Its a surprise to many people to discover that two of our leading contemporary novelists, Helen Garner and Tim Winton, profess Christian faith in one form or another. The biblical references and Christian themes remain unnoticed in their work, because literary critics are not trained to notice them. The association of Anglican Christianity with colonialism and with the establishment breeds an assumption among the left-leaning intelligentsia that Australias Christian heritage is, at best, an embarrassment.

Its not that people are become less spiritual as such. True atheists remain a very small (and mostly male) group. But younger people are more inclined to describe themselves as spiritual not religious. In her book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara Isabella Burton charts the decline of interest in institutional religion among young Americans (and Westerners in general) and the simultaneous pursuit of what she calls intuitional forms of spirituality. She writes of millennials and Gen Zers:

They prioritize intuitional spirituality over institutional religion. And they want, when available institutional options fail to suit their needs, the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems.

Of all the forms of Christianity, Pentecostalism seems a better fit for the intuitional moment. Its emphasis on the experiential, emotional, and spontaneous side of faith feels more in tune with the zeitgeist. But as it becomes more established, it too has struggled with institutional versus intuitional problem.

As one speaker at the recent Archbishops election synod put it, Sydney Anglicans are like the Ever Given, the massive tanker that got stuck in the Suez Canal. The Anglican Church has impressive resources in property and personnel, but its infrastructure was designed for the Sydney of 1850, not 2050. It has an admirable commitment to democratic processes and to the independence of its local parishes, but at the expense of efficiency and quality control. For every growing parish and there are some amazing stories of growth there are many more that are in decline.

Any organisation facing this kind of stuck-ness is open to several temptations. The trouble is, that to fall for any of them is to hasten the decline, not arrest it.

The first of these is the temptation to appoint a crash-through leader. Anxious people want superhero leaders who will fix everything. They dream of the alpha individual who just crashes through the barriers to change and growth, firing and hiring at will. We want the guy who will build the wall and make us great again. (Sound familiar?) The church is no different. We yearn for a radical change agent. And yet, the problem with the crash-through leader is well, the crash. They will likely prove polarising and destructive.

The second is the temptation to become culturally defensive. A church could retreat into itself, becoming a bunker against the waves of social change. It could attach itself to cultural and social conservatism and rage against the advance of progressive causes that it feels are undermining the Christian character of our society. The problem here is not that the church needs to get with the times or that it needs to upgrade its views. The problem is that it always ends up fighting on terms set for it by others. It is perpetually on the back foot. And it never sounds like it has good news to share.

Sydneys Anglicans have noticed that numbers of their members who say that they are willing to invite someone to a church service have fallen in the last decade. If you keep telling people that society is becoming a more hostile place to be a Christian, is it any wonder? Cultural defensiveness will breed a generation of anonymous Christians, brave on Sundays but terrified the rest of the time.

The third is the temptation to pursue structural solutions at the expense of spiritual renewal. There is no question that Sydney Anglicans need to renew and refine their organisation. The administrative burden on clergy sucks the joy out of the job of being a parish minister. Many experienced parish clergy are leaving the job prematurely. As the west of Sydney fills with new communities, we need to shift our resources and quickly. There is a need for greater accountability and transparency, fewer conflicts of interest, and fewer overlapping committees and departments. Less energy needs to be spent on governance and more on sharing Christ.

But what it really needs is a commitment by all Anglicans in Sydney to spiritual renewal. What we need to see is Christians who are more deeply shaped by Christ that is to say, Christians who are more authentically, well, Christian. We need to experience once more the grace of God in Jesus Christ. We need to repent of our past sin and receive divine forgiveness. We need to be marked by our generosity, our humility, and our love. After all, the church of Jesus Christ is not primarily a corporation seeking greater efficiency. Our greatest and most powerful resources are spiritual.

The fourth is the temptation to become obsessed by infighting. You dont need to be a sociologist to know that groups that are under pressure start to fight with one another. This is true of churches, as well. The temptation is to become focussed on finer and finer points of doctrine as markers of true belonging and trustworthiness. Defending the purity and power of the in-club can become a substitute for the real mission. There can be a lot of talk about connecting with outsiders and sharing the gospel, but that can become a smokescreen for the work of internal politics.

Its not exactly a secret that Sydney Anglicans can be very political when they want to be. But the detrimental effects of infighting dont need to be spelled out. The sheer energy taken up by infighting exhausts good will. A person who feels continually excluded from the group is less likely to work for the good of the group. Infighting eats away at trust and creates a motif of fear with a community. Theres not really an upside.

But even more importantly, infighting is profoundly unchristian. From the beginning, Christians have argued with one another about important things. Thats not surprising. But to disagree well is a basic ingredient to the church an expression of the very unity we have in the Spirit.

What, then, can Archbishop Kanishka do? What is the Anglican Church in Sydney to do, under his leadership?

I am reminded of the words of St. Paul when he was imprisoned. Not much use, his followers might have thought, an apostle in chains. But, as he wrote in 2 Timothy 2:9: the word of God is not chained. However stuck Sydneys Anglicans might be, they do not follow a God who is stuck. The followers of a resurrected Lord cannot act as if anything is an insurmountable barrier to him. In just a few short decades, to take one example, the church of Jesus Christ has exploded in places like China, despite the active and violent suppression of the faith by the Communist regime.

And this means: whatever a Christian church is to do, it must not anxious. It mustnt look to crash-through leadership, nor expect it of Kanishka Raffel. It mustnt retreat into cultural defensiveness. It must renew its structures, but not as a priority. It mustnt descend into infighting. At one level, the millennials are right: there is a deadening institutionalism that can infect churches that is antithetical to true spirituality. If the Anglican Church in Sydney is to survive, it must never become poisoned by institutionalism.

The answer must surely be that the church of Jesus Christ needs to be more authentically what it actually is. Christians in Sydney be they Anglican or not need to be more Christian. The calling of the church of Jesus Christ is to be more like him. It is called upon to worship God, and to live life together that reflects his character, whatever the circumstances. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:

The Church is the Church only when it exists for others ... not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.

Archbishop-elect Kanishka Raffel has not been appointed as a manager or as a CEO. He has not been recruited by a firm of head-hunters after a world-wide recruitment programme. Hes been called to be a spiritual leader not to try his hand at a corporate style of leadership, but to embrace the prophetic and pastoral ministry of his office.

He must lead his churches, then, in a concerted effort in prayer and repentance. There can be no priority higher than this. It would be a grave mistake to put evangelism above this, since evangelism is powerfully effective when there is evidence that people really live as if the gospel is true. In the past, weve been too triumphalist, too presumptive. The grace of our message has not always been matched by the grace of our welcome.

Kanishka must lead them in a return to the Word of God. Martin Luther once said, with typical exaggeration, the ears alone are the organ of the Christian. The Christian church is a listening church. It is found wherever the Word of God is preached. Where Jesus is declared to be Lord, and where people gather to hear it, there you find the Spirit of God active not only there, but certainly there. When the people of God are seeking the voice of God in the pages of the Bible when they hear themselves addressed by him from above then there is hope.

The Archbishop must encourage us to be local communities of loving welcome. The action, as it were, is not in the bishops office or in committee rooms. The faith is not a matter of reports by theologians. It lives in the congregations that gather Sunday by Sunday, worshipping God and hearing him address them. Archbishop-elect Kanishka has written of a visit he made while holidaying to a small congregation, unimpressive by normal standards and few in number. And yet, he wrote later that he saw there the stunning beauty of the gathered people of God. It is my experience that people who are you might think the least likely to find a spiritual home in an Anglican Church in Sydney do so when they find that the hospitality they experience is for real.

But there must also be a courageous and prophetic engagement with post-Christian culture. The great Swiss theologian Karl Barth once said that sermons should be written with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The Bible gives us eyes to see what is really in the newspaper. But it is also the case that news may help us to see better what is in the Bible. The mistake that many American evangelicals have made is to imagine that political and cultural means are the way to pursue or to defend the kingdom of God mostly in alignment with the political right. That is a fools errand. It leads to an idolatry of political power, as was seen the Trumps presidency. It shows no faith in the ultimate Lordship of Jesus, who is the churchs only Lord.

But neither should the church simply follow the spirit of the age. Its calling is not to provide a chaplaincy to contemporary narcissism. It finds laughable talk of getting with the times or history being on our side. It does not pursue relevance, as if that were anything worthwhile. It outlasted Rome: it will surely outlast Atlassian.

The culture question is not simply an either/or. Too often Sydney Anglicans have framed it in this way. Culture and the church are not simply separate, opposing domains one sinful and the other holy. This is intellectually and ethically unpersuasive. Every church lives in its culture, and is part of it, sharing in its besetting sins and benefitting from its glories.

Instead, a new Archbishop will need to sponsor and encourage the kind of work that Augustine did in his epochal book The City of God. Contemporary Western culture is arguably showing signs of decadence, as Ross Douthat has recently argued. The pandemic has exposed the lack of spiritual values at the heart of the secular Western paradigm for human flourishing. Questions of meaning and value have by no means been settled simply by jettisoning Christianity. The Christian tradition presents its adherents with some powerful intellectual and ethical weaponry for just this moment.

Is Kanishka Raffel the person to unstick Sydney Anglicans? No, he isnt. But Ive been arguing that thats the wrong paradigm of leadership in any case. The stuck-ness is primarily a spiritual challenge; and the true agent of spiritual change is not a human being, but the Spirit of God.

Kanishka, however, is a man who will be able to lead Sydney Anglicans to be more truly what they are supposed to be. Converted to Christianity in his twenties from a Buddhist background, he is something of an outsider to the Sydney Anglican establishment. He is clearly not from one of the dynasties that are part of the fabric of the diocese. He did not go to an Anglican school. He has spent many of his ministry years outside of Sydney, as Rector of St. Matthews Shenton Park in Perth.

When he returned to Sydney to serve as Dean in 2015, Sydneysiders were reminded that Kanishka is a preacher of rare quality. And yet what you hear from him in the pulpit is what you hear from him in person. Kanishka is a person of empathy and compassion. He has a noticeable humility, if such a thing can be said. Those who have worked with him have immense regard for him. Rory Shiner, who worked with Kanishka in Perth, says that:

The lasting impression has been his character, integrity, and devotion to Jesus. There are few people I know whom I trust more, respect more, or whose relationship with God Id more like to imitate than Kanishka.

If Sydney Anglicans can catch something of the character of Christ as it has been refracted in their new leader, and imitate him as he continues to imitate and serve his Lord, then who knows what the Spirit of the living God may do? But the task of any Christian, and of any Christian church, is to witness to Christ and to leave history to God. As the great Christian historian Sir Herbert Butterfield once wrote: We can do worse than remember a principle which both gives us a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.

Rev. Dr Michael Jensen is the rector at St. Marks Anglican Church, Darling Point, and the author of Sydney Anglicanism: An Apology, Between Tick and Tock: What the Bible Says about How It All Begins, How It All Ends, and Everything in Between, Is Forgiveness Really Free? And Other Questions about Grace, the Law and Being Saved, and My God, My God Is It Possible to Believe Anymore?

The rest is here:

Sydney's almost unnoticed Archbishop-elect: The challenges facing Kanishka Raffel and the Anglican church - ABC News