Reflections

Objective

This paper has no pretensions to be a history, already adequately covered by others.¹ With a request to produce something personal, something scholarly’ the result is more akin to impressionism. By ‘personal’ I understand not only ‘the way I see it’ but also a limited amount of personal anecdotal experience not found elsewhere. By ‘scholarly’ I understand ‘based on fact and evidence not fiction or fancy’, raising questions which may have some relevance to where we are today . . . or tomorrow. The result is a personal response to Shakespeare’s ministry, vision and limitations and a comment on the long term influence on the Union, the Baptists and the Gospel.     

Setting the Scene

Thinking in biblical terms, I see John Howard Shakespeare as a John the Baptist figure. Not the Messiah. No pretensions to Messiahship, but sensing that the world is changing. Not content with what he sees around him, he has a hunch there is something in the atmosphere (he knows not what but it harbours change) and he wants to give it a push.

Unfortunately Shakespeare and I just missed each other. He retired in 1924 and died just a few months after I was born. Had we met I would have wanted to ask him about his first day in the office, because I imagine him sitting at his desk, facing east so as not to miss the first hint of sunshine because if he looked over his shoulder the outlook was certainly not good. 

Waiting for that sun to rise that morning must have seemed an eternity. Any vision he had could only be seen through a glass darkly as through a thick London fog. Despite his name and reputation he had never before written a play, nor performed on a stage like this.

For 300 years Baptists had fairly successfully negotiated rocks and reefs on church, ministry and ordinances (sacraments came later) but when Shakespeare sat at his desk on that morning he knew that there were two (possibly three) amber lights flashing. One was doctrine (the Downgrade Controversy² still cast its shadow), one was church relations (Anglicans making overtures to the Free churches) and the third was the increasing challenge (or threat) from people like John Clifford and his colleagues, who were exploring the mists of contemporary biblical scholarship and the more liberal attitudes of a social and political agenda. Three clouds, three shadows, three rocks that could wreck the boat or become stepping stones to terra firma. And Shakespeare was the new Captain. 

Wisely he decided to start in a different place — soft-pedal faith and doctrine, pump up church structures and institutions —  and I visualise him taking out a piece of paper and writing down three thoughts.³

1 If the Union is to survive it needs a clear foundation and structures.

2 If the Baptists are to make a significant contribution they have to plant their tanks on the ecclesiastical lawns of the wider Christian family and acquire recognition.

3 If the Gospel is to make an impact Baptists must learn to relate to the 20th century world.

So with that as a framework we will explore occasional highways and byways as we make the journey.

1  Union Foundation and Structures

Shakespeare’s first review of the troops must have told him that what he had was not an army but a rabble — a collection of independent institutions, sustained by the powerful independency that had created them, and beyond a measure of consanguinuity with those who practised believers’ baptism by immersion, Baptists for the most part were preoccupied with themselves and their survival. Tensions were still rumbling between Generals and Particulars and the Down Grade Controversy still too close for comfort. Neither battleground had been cleared, future relationships were tenuous to say the least, minor skirmishes were always likely to break out, and did, and even for a man of Shakespeare’s reputation, experience and ability, to say that the job was a challenge was the understatement of the century.

Organising independency called for leadership and money. As for leadership John Howard had quite a bit going for him. Born in the north, son of the manse (so hopefully discreet), grown up in the Midlands and trained at Regent’s (so a touch of class) and having ministered in Norwich, this man was no ingenue when it came to Baptists. He was forty, old enough to have acquired wisdom, young enough to have 25 years to make his mark, which he did. A pacifist, clearly from the more liberal wing, committed to church unity (ecumenism not yet having arrived) and not afraid of going out on a limb with one eye on the possibility of a united church, even with episcopacy and re-ordination.

As for money, being a Yorkshireman, I guess he ‘knew a bit a’baht brass’. Practical. Down-to-earth. Called a spade, so keep facing east, hope the clouds behind will go away, let the 19th century dust settle, brush it off and move on to other more practical and less controversial measures. 

Ernest Payne describes those the first ten years, reflecting a Cliffordian type of agenda, as ‘a decade of developments of almost breathless quality’,⁴ backed by two five-year remarkable funding programmes the fruits of which continued into the second decade and beyond. First, the Twentieth Century Fund (£250,000⁵) which provided headquarters in Southampton Row and 75 new church buildings ‘where Baptists were inadequately represented,⁶ followed by a similar sum for the Settlement and Sustentation Fund, thereby opening the door to a minimum stipend, closer relationships with the churches and Associations (Federation), Superintendency, with ministerial selection, training and accreditation, and (he hoped) the Colleges.

In twenty years Shakespeare had laid the foundations and structures. Seeds had been sown. Not all flourished but some thrived and celebrated their 50th anniversaries mid-century, and anyone born after 1925 would take most of them for granted. He also created the mood music for the century as the fundamental themes came and went, never quite the same but never really different. In a different world or at a different time, his offspring might have been stillborn, or at best a struggling ‘prem’. In reality his infant grew steadily and rapidly: a good brain, a healthy body, and a capacity for creating a distinct trend with a knock-on effect on some of his contemporaries. By 1924, the sun was not exactly high in the sky but there was more than a touch of light in the east and re-visiting those years, I sense a new atmosphere. An infectious mood of deus vult in the air of a new century, and our ‘J the B’ had caught the tide just right. But then what?

Fortunately there was no Salome out to get him, but Salome’s shadow (a woman nurtured in tradition, doctrine and dogma) never quite went away, and whenever she surfaced the ride was always a bit bumpy. For most Baptist churches the priority was the local church and ministry.⁷  The Union was peripheral.

So how were Shakespeare’s changes received, how well did they work, and how long did they last?

(i)  The BMS

Salome’s first shadow was the BMS. Back in the 1880s T R Glover had unsuccessfully mooted the possibility of closer integration between BU and BMS.⁸ Shakespeare was not interested. Salome let it pass but never forgot and her shadow returned in the 1930s when a proposal to purchase a site in Russell Square for Joint Headquarters was voted down by the Assembly,⁹ and again in the 1950s when further popular pressure was postponed until after the BWA Golden Jubilee Congress, 1955, with an assurance that the matter would then be dealt with, but it never was. Joint Headquarters was the priority (the  sine qua non), so I saw the move to Didcot in 1984 as prophetic fulfilment. ‘My heart leapt up when I beheld a rainbow in the sky’, until on the opening day I was told that if you went through the main entrance you would find the BMS on the left and the BU on the right.  Plus ça change, plus la même chose . . . which leads to my first ‘What if . . .’ question.

• WHAT IF closer integration had happened in the 30s or the 50s? With the loss of Empire how differently might the BMS have developed, how would the change have affected the Union, and how differently now would we be looking to the 21st century? 

Three good questions. No answers.

(ii)  Federation

Salome’s second shadow budded up with any hint of Federalism. Not a natural for Baptists. Independency was a watchword. Centralisation was a ‘cus-word’. Add in geography and communications, even church members of wider vision rarely got beyond their own District or Association, and of 2,000 Baptist churches in 1883 no more than 500 had any connection even with Associations,¹⁰ but by 1911 Federation was a live issue. Churches were encouraged to ‘join’ . . . to ‘belong’ . . . . to ‘pay dues’ to the Union. Imagine the enthusiasm. 

Some recognised the need, embraced the positives and quietly acquiesced. Some were acutely resistant. Some thought they ‘belonged’ already and some didn’t know whether they did or not. But for all, raising money and sending it to London was never a priority. 

Could it be that that despite all his experience Shakespeare was unaware that something reasonable and innocuous in a London Committee could be lethal by the time it got to the Pennines, and if it meant forking out money, never mind sending it to London, a typical reaction would be, ‘What’s it got to do with us what they are doing in London?’ And this was never going to go away.

Nevertheless, Federation slowly established itself, but only ever as a drip-feed.  Even in the 50s Arnold Clark was still struggling to sell his dream of ‘Sing-a-Song-of-Sixpence’ for the Home Work Fund.  And Salome let it pass.

(iii) The Colleges

Not so when it came to the Colleges, where Shakespeare met his Waterloo and Salome got her first scalp. Shakespeare’s plans for a Northern Baptist College uniting Rawdon and Manchester were abandoned by 1903 and had to wait sixty years for fulfilment, but his logically reasonable attempts to incorporate the Colleges into the Union remained ‘no-go’ territory. How much the Colleges were motivated by genuine differences and how much by self-interest can only be guesswork, but by the middle of the century many of the differences were more historic than divisive. As William Shakespeare might have said, ‘Some colleges were born with an identity, some acquired an identity and some had an identity thrust upon them’. With time such distinctions seemed less of a problem, despite the occasional bumpy ride over Accreditation and Settlement, where initial tensions between Principals and Superintendents rumbled on and were only resolved by a new batch of incumbents.

By mid-century College differences were largely matters of choice, variety and uniformity but had I asked a local Baptist in the mid-40s which College I ought to choose I might have got a somewhat ‘jaundiced’ View from the North.

View from the North

‘Well, lad, you pays your money and you takes your choice! South of the Thames Spurgeon’s rules supreme. Viewed from here it’s a bit old-fashioned. All its students and faculty are conservative right wingers, and if one isn’t he’s obviously in the wrong place. Best to keep your distance till they catch up. Manchester’s just the opposite. Henry Townsend is ‘a wrecker’ and so are a lot of his students. When he retires they’ll find another wrecker, and if he isn’t he soon will be. Rawdon’s just as liberal, some would say even more so, but whereas Manchester is down-to-earth Rawdon’s liberalism is an intellectual affair, a bit up in the clouds, so people don’t always know what they are on about. Bristol carries an air of respectable West countrystolidity, with Dakin presenting a radical front while covering his back, and Regents is for the clever boys and that‘s usually enough to rouse suspicion in true believers of the less informed variety’.  

It is (and was) of course a travesty, and like all travesties should not be taken too seriously, but contained a crucial grain of truth. To some extent the differences between the colleges reflected the differences within the denomination. Their distinguishing features had a positive value and were not to be dismissed.  Taken together they were a serious reflection of what it meant to be Baptist and to try to understand Baptists through simply one college was to leave oneself very deformed. We needed them all for a full picture.

By the end of the 20th century, however, their reluctance leaves two nagging questions. With Denominational colleges closing down or losing their identity, like ice puddles on a spring morning (Wesley in Bristol, Richmond and Heythrop in London, Lancashire/Didsbury/Brighton Grove in Manchester),

 WHAT IF Shakespeare had got his way?

But then again . . .

WHAT IF a cut-throat battle to attract students turns those independent, self-regulating colleges into little more than pale reflections of US Liberal Arts Colleges with little more than a nominal Baptist Foundation?

(iv)  Superintendency

Salome’s fourth shadow was in response to the Superintendency, and if churches were suspicious of Federalism many ministers were no less suspicious of Superintendents, possibly with good reason as this Rochdale story which I stumbled on by accident when browsing the web demonstrates. 

In 1935, as a seven-year-old growing up seven miles from Rochdale, Superintendent matters were not on my agenda, but little pigs have big ears and I was not too young to pick up the vibes from visiting ministers who stayed with us.  Some seemed hardly aware of them, some were cautiously cooperative, and a few positively anti. 

Some (both churches and ministers) just didn’t take them seriously. Herbert Motley became North Western Superintendent in 1934. I think it was getting on for ten years before he visited our church and even then he had to invite himself. For us he just didn’t figure. Henry Townsend did and (as we saw earlier) that tension between Supers and Principals persisted to the end of WW2.

Personally my experiences of Superintendents were always good and positive, but that was not the case for every minister and in twenty years of pastoral work, and an even longer spell closely involved in Union affairs, observation suggested that they blossomed in two colours. One saw himself as pastor to ministers and churches to help them achieve what they wanted to do, and Douglas Hicks was a good example. The other came with plans for co-operation and seemed to think he was there to organise the churches’ programmes. The one usually succeeded, the other often came unstuck, as the Rochdale story amply illustrates.

Once they found their niche, my overall impression was that most Superintendents settled in well and did a fair job, though I sometimes felt the system did not help them in two respects. One was their Domains which varied considerably in size, affecting workload and priorities. Lancashire and Cheshire (including North Wales and Carlisle) was huge, scattered, and coterminus with the Association of which the Super was also Secretary. At the other extreme, the Central area embraced eight compact Associations and the Superintendent was Secretary of none. 

The other was their Job Descriptions. They were neither fish nor fowl. Strictly speaking they were BU staff, employed by the Union, but whereas in Council Meetings BU staff sat round a central table and were not allowed to speak or vote Superintendents sat in the body of the Council and did both. On one occasion that caused considerable confusion when the Council went into Closed Session and Superintendents objected to being excluded with the staff, and since nobody knew quite what to do nobody had any authority to do it. 

Salome, however, mostly quiescent on this front, kept a watchful eye to the end of the century before sending in Samson, to flex his muscles, shake the pillars, and watch the whole temple come tumbling down. Jonah’s gourd . . . rose and perished, not in a night but in a century.

But then here’s the next ‘What if . . . 

WHAT IF Shakespeare had got the Episcopacy he sought? Could Salome still have got away with it?

Surprisingly perhaps, I have a touch of sympathy for Shakespeare on Episcopacy, the result of an experience on a visit to Zimbabwe in the 1980s. I took the night train from Harare to Bulawayo where I was to be the guest of the Anglican Bishop. I arrived in the very early morning. Hardly anyone got off the train and the platform was deserted save for one man who looked a bit lost. Deciding he must have come to meet me I approached him and said, ‘Are you the Bishop’s Representative?’ ‘No’, he replied, ‘I’m the Bishop’. When I expressed surprise that he should meet me personally, he smiled. ‘No problem’, he said, ‘we can teach the English something about episcopacy’. Only later did I find myself wondering why my forbears a century before never thought of it. Probably because throughout the 19th century Episcopacy was a major bone of contention, second only to baptism, but why did our forefathers handle the two so differently?

In the case of baptism¹³ the emphasis was always clear and positive (believers and immersion) not negative (babies and sprinkling). In the case of Episcopacy we took the concept as worth fighting over but made no effort to refine or replace it. Over the years our view of baptism established itself in the ecclesiastical market place and though not widely followed at least gained recognition to the extent that open baptistries and the baptism of believers is not unknown in Anglican churches.¹⁴ 

But did we miss a trick? We would probably never have had bishops but we might well have enriched ecclesiastical and theological thinking with a different understanding of episcope no less important than baptism.

In 1989 I was unaware that fresh thinking was in the air: Paul Fiddes¹⁵, Geoffrey Reynolds¹⁶ and NIgel Wright¹⁷ were busily making valuable contributions backed by biblical and historical evidence, but when I looked more closely the overall objective seemed to be an enquiry into how best we can draw on traditional episcope to adjust current patterns of Baptist oversight rather than a root-and-branch examination of biblical and historical interpretations as a basis for a totally new Baptist episcope, which had it been more actively pursued might well have led to Nigel Wright’s conclusion¹⁸ that when it comes to title, ‘bishop‘ is ‘perhaps the best alternative’ . . . if not the only one. 

      

(v) The Baptist Union Council

Undergirding all these structural changes was the BU Council. Mid-century, it consisted of Association Representatives and allied bodies plus 100 others (70 elected by the Assembly and 30 co-opted from unelected nominees, some of whom just had to be there and some representing nobody but themselves who had acquired a reputation among Baptists). 1959 is where I came in as one of the seventy. 

For the next 34 years I had a ringside view of the Union’s activities, focused particularly on Ministerial Accreditation, Publishing and Administration, including the Selection Committee for Payne’s successor, five years as part-time Editor of the Carey Kingsgate Press (1962-67), Chair of MR (1971-74) and Chair of the Baptist Times Directors (80s and early 90s).  

In some respects the Council had a touch of the Shareholders’ Meeting about it — programmes, problems and prospects, either for approval or support, plus all the Committees and a fair number of ‘Shakespeare’s babes’ (now fully grown) reporting on their work. It was mostly legalistic and practical, with little opportunity for serious debate of issues, imagination or creativity. (Any Baptist student seeking a research topic might consider a survey of Council Agendas to compare with today).

Most of my work was behind the scenes, supporting and questioning others as their programmes came before Council and Committees, but on two occasions quite unintentionally I ‘put the cat among the pigeons’, both of which serve to reflect the tensions and delicacy of footwork required when tradition or motivation were even questioned, never mind challenged.

The first was in 1967. I had been a member of the GP&F Committee for some time so was familiar with the ropes. I was also a member of the Selection Committee for Payne’s successor, so had a full grasp of all that had, or had not, been done. The crunch came when our nomination was put before the GP&F for approval. All went smoothly until I quite spontaneously expressed concern that we had had no discussion whatsoever on Job Description, Terms and Conditions and (most important) salary. The atmosphere was electric. I don’t think the Chairman (Len Champion) ever forgave me and  the Treasurer angrily declared that he would never tell anyone what he paid Dr Payne! But the issue soon had traction and the Committee went berserk, not so much because the issue had come up but because nobody knew how to handle it, and only after a tussle did the Committee agree that the time had come for such information to be in public domain. But how?  

Feeling responsible for this fracas I thought it was up to me to come up with something so I proposed that having established the principle the ‘how‘ called for reflection and could come back next time. Champion (still angry) would have none of it: ‘the Committee has made the decision and the Committee now must decide how to handle it’. Fortunately someone remembered that the BMS had already gone down this road, come up with a perfectly acceptable solution and the Committee was only too pleased to follow suite to mixed cries of relief and satisfaction.

The other ‘event’ was in the MR Committee on which I sat for many years, succeeding WG Channon as Chair in 1971 until I left the pastorate in 1974 and was no longer eligible for the office. Of all the Committees I ever sat on I always felt the MR was one of the most interesting and valuable. We never had to find a niche or develop a programme. We knew exactly what we had to do and the denomination could not function well if we didn’t do a good job. It also called for a good mix of strict legalism (applying the rules) and sensitive empathy with the candidate in front of us at a crucial turning point in life. But Salome was always hovering in the wings. 

For example, ministerial candidates who had pursued a satisfactory Baptist College course and had the College’s recommendation were ipso facto accredited by the Union. The accreditation of ‘non-collegiates’ (commonly known as ‘BU Men’) was a different matter. Some had virtually no training at all but their reputation and years of pastoral experience made them eligible for consideration and accreditation by the Union, following local backing, an assessment of their record and a fairly cursive interview by the London Committee, and they too presented few problems.

Issues arose post 1945 with an increasing number of candidates who could make no claim to experience but who could claim College training albeit in a College not affiliated to the Union, mostly Bible Schools. Did they have sufficient Baptist content and understanding in their training? Many were from the London Bible College whose Principal was Baptist minister Ernest Kevan, which added an element of acute sensitivity, almost to the point where sometimes the debate reflected committee members’ reactions to Kevan as much as to the candidate. 

In the interests of fairness the Committee required a balance of members (ie liberal and evangelical) which again for the most part worked well, but once issues arose tribalism soon clicked in and debate could be fierce and long. It was all part of the game, but what struck me as a newcomer was that after a fight over one man the next man almost invariably went through on the nod.  Weariness and time pressures seemed to take over. In this case, either through boldness or inexperience, I drew attention to it, only to get a flea in my ear from a senior brother, which encouraged me to think that I might be right and perhaps something different was called for. 

Thankfully, the Chairman, WG Channon, responded positively, and the direct result of our good personal relationship (despite our very different public persona), was a major revision replacing a twenty-minute interview and a large Committee with a two-day Selection Conference and a small group of selectors. I had stirred the pot and came up with the recipe, Channon’ s skill and reputation piloted it through, and by the time it got to Council his mantle had fallen on me do the rest.

2  Baptist Recognition and Tanks on Lawns

(i) Hugh Martin

With a wealth of familiar and generally unrewarding historical material on church unity in the first 30 years of the century, I propose in this section to focus on Shakespeare’s point of Baptist Recognition and tell the story through the eyes of  three key personalities and two quite different major events, leading up to an assessment of 20th century ecumenism. 

If the Colleges were Shakespeare’s Waterloo, his dream of a United Free Church of England proved his nemesis. Salome struck again, a fatal blow from which (according to Underwood) Shakespeare never recovered. His quest for Baptist recognition by other churches — Tanks on Lawns — was salutary and prescient, yet scant evidence of any attempt to initiate it.¹⁹

Compared to his warm enthusiasm for the 1905 BWA Congress, Shakespeare’s cool indifference to Edinburgh 1910²⁰ speaks volumes but, fortuitously perhaps, that left an open door for Hugh Martin, a young Scottish Baptist minister, one of only two Baptists present in Edinburgh (as stewards),²¹ for whom it proved an experience that according to Ernest Payne,²² was ‘a decisive influence on (Martin’s) development’ and triggered the ecumenical course of his life, so touched was he by friendships with those from other traditions and this wider vision of the world. 

Anthony Cross²³ and several obituaries have pointed out what an undervalued Baptist personality Hugh Martin was, so there is no need for me to dwell on it save to add a personal tribute. A cursory glance at his phenomenal contribution to  Public and Baptist Life speaks for itself but in addition to his full-time commitment to  publishing it was in Ecumenism that he made his greatest mark, for which he received the rare award of a Companion of Honour.

By 1930 he was obviously destined for ecumenical leadership. Nobody did more than he to establish Baptist tanks on ecumenical lawns. He always seemed to be in the room when ecumenism was in the air. Scarcely any major ‘ecumenical pie’ that didn’t have his finger in it.  Where he was, the Baptists were. His quiet manner and his independence from high ecclesiastical office gave him a freedom to do and say things denied to officialdom and at the same time made him so crucial in tricky negotiations. 

In the case of the 1920 Lambeth Appeal, for example, he was up there with ME Aubrey,²⁴ Gilbert Laws and JH Rushbrooke, produced a paper on ‘The Faith of the Baptists’ (part of the official Baptist response), was persona grata to the other Free Churches and acted as their principal spokesperson in converstions with Cosmo Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury. 

He was present in a personal capacity in Lausanne 1927 (First World Conference on Faith and Order). In 1937 he was responsible for Towards Reunion,²⁵ one of nine Baptists in  a  nineteen strong Free Church Unity Group to draw up A Plan for Unity,²⁶ and when things were flagging a bit he gave the whole Reunion Movement a push toward connexionalism, though not episcopacy.

From the 30s to the 60s he was the Free Church Leader (alongside Henry Townsend and Wilson Black) in the establishment of the National Free Church Federal Council, and gave more than twenty years unbroken service leading  to the creation of the Free Church Federal Council and subsequently the British Council of Churches,²⁷ from its inauguration in 1943 serving as Vice-President (1950-52), Moderator (1953), and Chair of  the Executive Committee (1956-62).

Personally, from an early stage I felt an affinity with Hugh Martin — a bit on the fringe rather than mainstream, an academic who never held an academic appointment, publisher, (SCM for him, Lutterworth for me), a writer and editor (Two Baptist Hymnbooks, he in 1962 and me in 1989, and both intensely loyal to the Baptists but equally at home working with other traditions in the interests of good and rewarding relationships. 

Unfortunately I never had the privilege of working with him nor actually seeing him at work but I did have a couple of personal contacts. In 1955 I sent him the mss for my first book to enquire about the possibilities of publication in the hope that he would recommend it to SCM from which he had recently retired. He didn’t. He wanted it for the CKP of which he had just become Chairman. The other was in 1962 when I became Editor of CKP and sought him out for some publishing expertise. He responded by inviting my wife and me to lunch at his home, in the course of which (a delightfully human touch) he told us we were sitting on the two chairs on which they had sat at the coronation of the Queen in 1955 when he was Moderator of the Free Church Council and which they were allowed to keep. 

One of his lesser known contributions was the creation of the Friends of Reunion in the 1930s serving as Free Church Secretary for the first ten years. I first came across FoR in the early 50s and went to one of their Conferences. Hugh Martin was not there but I was warmly greeted by a woman who asked me who I was and when I said I was a Baptist gave me a look of shocked surprise (Baptists being a bit thin on the ground in their territory) and said ‘By Gad, I ought to know you. I’m Gwenyth Hubble’, so in conversation I told her I had just started the Baptist Student Society in Manchester and was currently the secretary of the Baptist Student Federation. That was not my best line. She highly disapproved of all denominational societies but left me in no doubt that I had met an outstanding personality and a leading Baptist light²⁸ of the century — a light which she certainly did not hide under a bushel though not excessively fanned by her constituency. Like Hugh Martin, she too cut her teeth in SCM and the Baptist world and contributed in no small way to putting ‘Baptist tanks on ecumenical lawns’.

All these bricks led to Baptists becoming a significant unit in the BCC, where Hugh Martin, backed up by Ernest Payne, played a prominent role, supported by countless Baptists in prominent ecumenical appointments in many parts of the world.²⁹ By the mid-century Baptists had arrived. Shakespeare’s hopes were being fulfilled.

(ii) Ernest A Payne

Mid century, change ushered in a new era with the retirement of ME Aubrey, the appointment of rnest Payne as his successor, and the loss of Percy Evans, whose personal support led Payne to accept the appointment and whose untimely death therefore left Payne somewhat exposed to the right wing, not least because the 19th century shadow of doctrine and dogma (Salome still at it) had not altogether gone away, and indeed in the post-war years had seen something of a comeback.

Nobody who knew Ernest Payne could ever imagine him being ‘swept off his feet’ by anyone or anything, yet that was his phrase to describe his experience as a seventeen-year-old when he read Shakespeare’s The Churches at the Crossroads with ‘its elegant plea for Christian unity’.³⁰ Small wonder therefore that from his appointment as General Secretary in 1951 to his retirement sixteen years later (and beyond) he was a giant in ecumenism, highly regarded on all sides in BCC and WCC circles, yet he never lost his Baptist roots and convictions, was assiduous in his work for European Baptists, and a consummate diplomat on behalf of Baptists behind the Iron Curtain where he visited several times. 

Over thirty years on the Council (1959-92) I don’t recall him ever fighting his own line, but I do remember him raising relevant issues for consideration, checking unwise extremities and doing all he could either to ensure that Committee recommendations were satisfactorily passed or amended.  Criticised by some for being remote and unapproachable, he had a sound pastoral heart and always ready to go the second (even the third) mile where tact and diplomacy were called for. 

Neither a public speaker nor a charismatic character, leadership to him was spotting what was needed followed by encouragement and support for others who were ready to do it, as ‘The Tale of Christian Baptism’ (on the next page) demonstrates. Without his understandlng and support it may never have seen the light of day, nor was this the only door he opened for me, nor was I the only one to have this experience. To work with him, and alongside him, was an inestimable privilege.

(iii) Billy and Harringay (1954)

              

1905 having  trumped 1910, Shakespeare’s mood music fading with time, and the Baptist Revival Fellowship always ready to drum up the conservative beat, Billy Graham arrived in the 50s to turn up the volume. Suddenly Baptist tanks were centre stage and welcomed on everybody’s ‘lawns’.

To say that Harringay³¹ split the denomination would be a gross overstatement, but it certainly highlighted divisions: for some an answer to prayer, for others an unwelcome reminder that Salome was still around. The old tensions between Generals and Particulars were making a comeback.  Stand by for a bumpy ride. The media loved it — Hollywood razzmatazz, soft lights, sweet music, Cliff Barrows and George Beverly Shea. It put religion in public domain. Other churches, without our Baptist hang-ups, had nothing to match it and Billy’s impact on personal lives was unquestionable, but looking back now after a further fifty years I find myself still with two lingering questions and a powerful memory. Questions first.

1  Were Baptist churches fuller, more alive or evangelical afterwards than they were before (and if so for how long)?      

2  Judging by the number of senior evangelical Anglican clergy I have run across over the years who like to quote Harringay as highly significant in their formative years, is there any connection between Harringay and the subsequent upsurge of Anglican evangelicalism,?

Now for the memory. With half the denomination running after Billy others were much more interested in Iona and George Macleod, but it was no surprise when half-way through the Campaign Billy was billed as principal speaker for the Closed Ministerial Session at the Assembly but surprisingly he was to share the platform with George Macleod and it proved a memorable occasion. Perfect for a bit of ‘hurrah-boo’ music hall stuff.

But then Sydney Morris, thanking George Macleod in his closing speech, paused, gave him a  hug, and said, ‘But you’re not always right’. Loud applause. He then turned to Billy — same thanks,  same pause, same hug . . . but then, ‘But you’re not always right either’. Sydney Morris  at his best.

(iv)  F Townley Lord

Ernest Payne, asked by a confused Baptist what to make of it, could only say he found it ‘puzzling’. Townley Lord, however, took a different view and was fully supportive, and despite not sharing Townley’s view on Harringay I want to redress the balance, because if Hugh Martin suffered from a lack of recognition Townley may be said to have endured too much, not always favourable, and if I felt a touch of affinity with Hugh Martin, in Townley I always felt a touch of warmth. 

Townley started my 60-year BT writing career by publishing an unsolicited article on worship in 1952 (six months before I left college} followed closely by another dozen before he retired in 1955. Maybe it was our shared Lancashire genes (we were born and grew up within 10 miles of each other, though 30 years apart)  but then my personal feelings were matched quite independently by my wife who as a student in London was a regular attender at Bloomsbury and always paid tribute to the quality of his preaching and pastoral care.

Sadly, there were those who felt differently  and his liberalism and ‘why-washiness’ were something of a joke in my college days.  When Ingli James was minister at Canon Street, Accrington (where Townley grew up), Ingli had a great gift for rubbing people the wrong way and causing trouble, and on one occasion Fred Lord (Townley’s father) decided it was time to intervene. ‘Why is it, Mr James’, said Fred, ‘that you always seem to be upsetting people? Why can’t you be like our Fred . . . he never upsets anybody?’ Possibly true, but  that’s not to say he was pusillanimous. He wasn’t. It was an unworthy ‘joke’ which I relate not to denigrate the man but to show the shallowness of critics who so much enjoyed telling it. 

Alongside his genial personality, his record speaks for itself. Few others could have so satisfactorily sustained nearly 30 years at Bloomsbury (1930-57), 14 years coterminous with editor of the Baptist Times (1941-55), with Tuesday at the printers; an annual visitor to the mid-week lunchtime services in Manchester Central Hall (a regular appointment for Manchester’s theological student community) alongside Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Weatherhead and Sangster, and when the BT needed an obituary on  a relatively unknown public figure an hour in his office proved sufficient to come up with the finished product. Finally, glone-trotting as BWA President and Baptist ambassador in retirement to within a couple of years of his death. Few others could have matched it.

(v) From Harringay to Nottingham

As the Mood Music of 1905 faded it was quickly replaced by a quite different Mood Music, for a different audience, and if the starlight of the 50s was Harringay 1905, the star of the 60s was Nottingham 1910, with the 1964 Faith and Order Conference, and its dream of a UK United Church by Easter 1980.  

550 delegates from 15 denominations. Baptist tanks now firmly established on ecumenical lawns — Ernest Payne, Don Black, Michael Taylor, Neville Clark and the rest. I was Vice Chairman to Donald Allchin in one group and I think Morris West had a similar appointment in another — and with a firm proposal for a united church by 1980. Had Shakespeare been alive, he might have sensed mobilisation round the corner. Alas, no!

For the British churches it was the nearest we got to the unity we never achieved and by 1980 its failure cried out . . . but was barely noticed. Why? I think two (possibly three) reasons.  

One, the resolution did not really arise from the body of the conference and the discussions that took place. It was more the brain child of Horace Dammers, in a panic measure as the end approached and nobody could see the next chapter.

Two, there was no plan for follow-up. No ‘Churchill’ to drive the engine. 

Three, and more tentatively, either the mood in the country was not right (the constituencies needed a lot of work doing on them) or the generals sensed the price they would pay, lacked the conviction that it might be worthwhile, and joined the turkeys who don’t vote for Christmas. 

By the end of the century ‘ecumenism’ had become a dirty word.

(vi) Ecumenism: Failure or Success?

So how do we assess half-a-century of ecumenical endeavour? Was it ‘all talk and no do’? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that it failed to achieve what it set out to do and left a lot of unfulfilled dreams and expectations. But No, and for two reasons:

1  That was the 60s. By the end of the century the world was a different world. Had we gone ahead it would have absorbed a lot of energy we could ill afford. Time also demonstrated that institutional unity was no longer the priority. Unity of purpose, programmes and plans were; so too was an emergent ‘Local Ecumenism with a Difference’, much of it powered by close personal relationships where time and circumstance were so different.³² 

The arguments were reasonable and had a certain validity. Church relations and ecumenism cannot be limited to official committees or institutional unity and by the end of the century that seemed to be increasingly recognised, which is why the dissolution of the British Council of Churches was such a tragedy, because if the Nottingham failure was salutary the dissolution of the BCC was to say the least regrettable  when leadership was never more needed at the local level.

Positively the arrival of Applied Theology in our colleges and universities is a big plus, but no substitute for an ecumenical powerhouse with a unique capacity to enable all the churches to relate the gospel together to the wider world, emphasising what is common, refining the excesses and helping all to find their way through the often confusing mists of time. Without it, where in the 21st century do we cultivate a common Christian thinking on social and political issues leading to common programmes of education for churches to work on together at the local level?

2 The ecumenical environment provided a double spin-off for Baptists. On the one hand it effectively killed the notion (never popular with many Baptists) that what we needed was one big ‘tank’ combining everybody’s varying instruments and incompatible software. On the other hand contacts with other churches widened our horizons, gave an incentive to examine our software and their software, and to learn sensitively to share where we could. 

That leaves yet one more unresolved question for the 21st century.

In all our ecumenical endeavours, were we too eager to grab and adapt what was on the surface rather than exploring what was much more difficult to handle in depth? 

Answers (not on a postcard) call for a separate paper, as I hinted in the case of episcopacy and will return to again when we get to liturgy, but for now let us stay with what actually happened and since the field is vast, and what you see depends on where you look, I therefore propose a whistle-stop tour of the literary output over the third quarter of the century, hopefully leading to Shakespeare’s third issue, ‘learning to relate the gospel to the 20th century world’.

Before we ‘whislestop’, however, we need to go back a decade to take a quick  look at Tools for Ministry, which in 1952, amounted to  little more than Wheeler Robinson,³³ Frank Bryan,³⁴ Henry Cook,³ Underwood’s History³⁶ and  RC Walton challenging the status quo (were we a Church of a Sect?) with The Gathered Community.³⁷  

Ordination, for example, (first recognised in 1922), was still a questionable ‘feast’, leading to a spat in the 40s, between Dakin,³⁸ who wanted Ordination to relate only to a single church and to be repeated on each move, and Payne with a broader view which carried the day in 1948, with an official statement by the Council,³⁹ and an Enlarged Edition of The Fellowship of Believers in 1952, a further Statement on Ordination in 1954,⁴⁰ and a fuller Report on Ministry in 1961.⁴¹

So how did Baptists respond when suddenly, from the 60s to the 80s when we were plunged into a world where all the churches (though not necessarily all  the people in the churches) were going head over heels to reinterpet the gospel for a new world order and the question to keep in mind is how much of this would have happened if Shakespeare had not given us a nudge get out there and get in the swim.

The 60s was hardly a rerun of Shakespeare’s first decade but had he been around I think he might have felt at home with a touch of deja vue or even deus vult in the world of Tillich,⁴² Bonhoeffer,⁴³ Honest to God,⁴⁴ Teilhard de Chardin,⁴⁵ Harry Williams⁴⁶ and Soundings,⁴⁷ van Buren⁴⁸ and Harvey Cox,⁴⁹  sensing the change in the atmosphere and wanting to be part of it.

True, we didn’t have a Shakespeare but we did have a small coterie of ministers who picked up the vibes and wanted the Baptists to be part of the action (see a few samples overleaf), emulating Shakespeare’s desire to see Baptists not only putting tanks on lawns but mobilising 20th century tanks for 20th century theology: gospel, scholarship and action.

        

Was this not also the Century when Baptists discovered Liturgy . . . and then lost it again? For the first fifty years of the 20th century we hardly knew what liturgy was. Sunday services were ‘a hymn sandwich’, the sermon dominated, preceded by ‘the preliminaries’ which often bore little relation to each other.

Aubrey, in the 1940s, was the first to dip his toe in the water with A Minister’s Manual,60, little more than basic ministerial guidance for Births, Marriages and Deaths, but a significant start. Thanks to Stephen Winward, with encouragement from Ernest Payne, ministers post 1960 had the benefit of a wealth of liturgical material,61 some of which found its way into The Baptist Hymnbook (1962), providing a feast of material for all manner of occasions. 

This was slimmed down somewhat in Praise God,⁶² which concentrated more on basic weekly pastoral needs, followed ten years later by Patterns and Prayers for Christian Worship⁶³, an update which made good the deficiencies of Praise God without going all the way back to Payne and Winward.

Despite some initial resistance (‘we’re going all Anglican‘ attitude) the movement made a distinctive contribution to Sunday worship which came to be generally not only accepted but appreciated, but then by the end of the 80s (Salome again) the storm cones were out; two in particular. One was the indifference, if not downright opposition, to Baptist Praise and Worship (1991). The other, identified by Bernard Green in the Preface to Patterns and Prayers for Christian Worship, reflected 

‘changes in the approach to worship and its language’ which had led
to ‘a wide variety of practice, from liturgical formality to charismatic exuberance, from reformed traditionalism to ecumenical experiment‘. 

Time will tell. My first impression is simply that most churches have ditched liturgy and gone back to the preliminaries and a hymn-sandwich, though limited experience leads me to believe it approximates more to a soufflé than a sandwich. No meat, no protein, little nourishing and nothing to give me a mild headache or a bit of indigestion, without which health is at risk. But when I ask myself  why,

 I am left with a couple of liturgy questions which I can only pass on. 

With the exception of Michael Taylor’s Variations on a Theme,⁶⁴  what I miss is a serious study of Liturgy as against the provision of liturgical material, which leads me to ask . . .

Were we too content to copy or ape the liturgies that were all around us and do insufficient homework on the history, theology and purpose of liturgy in the world of the 20th century? 

But then again . . .

Have we really ditched liturgy, or have we exchanged one form of liturgy for another?  

If we did miss a trick on episcopacy, a bit of hard thinking on Liturgy might be an appropriate act of penitence? 

3  The Gospel in the 20th Century

So where does that leave us with Shakespeare’s third point: ‘relating the gospel to the 20th century world.’  Three points.

(i) Language

The gap between everyday language and church language throughout the century was phenomenal. Church language was so ‘yesterday’ and too often ‘the-day-before-yesterday’. It was less of a problem 100 years ago, but had he been around I am sure Language would have  been be high on Shakespeare’s agenda. We were not good at talking, and even worse writing, about matters of faith in the common language of  the people. 

The key to improvement lies with the editors of church papers at all levels, from the village church to the national broadsheet or website. In an attempt to keep on board their readers who like to read news in traditional church language they seem slow to realise that they are missing out on so many for whom that style and language have no meaning whatsoever, and these are the very people who most need the church and  the church needs them.

or a bit of indigestion, without which health is at risk. But when I ask myself why, I am left with a couple of liturgy questions which I can only pass on. 

With the exception of Michael Taylor’s Variations on a Theme,⁶⁴  what I miss is a serious study of Liturgy as against the provision of liturgical material, which leads me to ask . . .

Were we too content to copy or ape the liturgies that were all around us and do insufficient homework on the history, theology and purpose of liturgy in the world of the 20th century? 

But then again . . .

Have we really ditched liturgy, or have we exchanged one form of liturgy for another?  

If we did miss a trick on episcopacy, a bit of hard thinking on Liturgy might be an appropriate act of penitence? 

(ii) Content

Given an opportunity anywhere to talk about the Gospel, what did we focus on? Reviewing a recent collection of articles by Harvey Cox⁶⁵ (a leading Baptist light of the 1960s in the USA) my attention was drawn to a couple of quotes⁶⁶ from two distinguished mid-century Asian ecumenical leaders: one from MM Thomas,⁶⁷

‘The ecumenical movement has paid too much attention to the church and not enough to God’s world’

and the other from DT Niles,⁶⁸

‘If we want to speak with God, then we had better find out something about the world because that is the only subject in which God is interested’.

Whether Shakespeare would have put it like that is debatable, but I like to think that had he been there at the time he would have approved. 

(iii)  Action 

On this point most of Shakespeare’s agenda worked fine for the first half of the century, increasingly Clifordian (practical action) rather than Spurgeonic (dotrinal), but once some of that pioneering became redundant with inevitable social change, and the Gospel successfully shamed the State into taking over responsibility for some of the others, I find a loss of momentum. It wasn’t that there were no issues. The women’s battles were not done and dusted once we got women ministers and a few more women on our committees. Inequality and harassment in the workplace were not waiting in the wings but very much alive on the shop floor, and though the whole range of current gender issues has emerged in the 21st century the seeds were there long before. Local responses to emergencies (debt, homelessness, food banks, refugees, &c,) I think held up well but what I find lacking is that pioneering thrust which turns gospel proclamation into gospel action leading to the transformation of society. Which brings me to my last question:

Have we paid too much attention to the apostles
and too little to the prophets?

When it comes to relating the Gospel to the world the prophets can be an excellent starting point. Not what they said nor what they did (both totally irrelevant in today’s world), but rather the prophetic skill for seizing the moment and identifying God in it. Harold Macmillan’s ‘Events, dear boy’ was the staple diet of the prophets. which brings me to my final personality of the century, David Russell.

(iv)  David S Russell

Not one you would immediately associate with the prophets. Hardly a Clifford, though his sympathies all pointed in that direction. Neither was he an Ernest Payne, but one thing they had in common was a commitment to Europe and Human Rights, fortifying a British Baptist commitment to Europe going back to Rushbrooke. Both made substantial, if slightly different, contributions. Both battled in a Cold War environment and for David the focus was on the churches’ educational and literature requirements, particularly as Chair of the EBF Books and Translations Committee for a decade, where I worked closely with him and followed him as Chair.

David wanted money for European Baptists. His office prevented him from specialised fundraising. I wanted Feed the Minds⁶⁹ to open up a front in Europe but had no contacts. A marriage was arranged. EUROLIT was the result and the partnership flourished. David promoted the cause among Baptists. EUROLIT evaluated the projects in collaboration with his Committee. 

David’s initial commitment was in a co-operative effort (European Baptists, US Southern Baptists, and Mennonites), to translate the William Barclay commentaries into Russian. In that, EUROLIT had a minor role, more in the technicalities than in finance. In line with EUROLIT policy the Books and Translations Committee was directed more at providing small machinery, paper, technical advice and training, to enable the European churches to do the job of writing, printing, publishing and marketing themselves. 

One of the first projects was making Rowley’s Bible Atlas available in Poland and Hungary. One of the last and most substantial was financial support for the Reformed Church of Hungary not long before the end of the Cold War when the Hungarian Government agreed to Religious Education in State schools, and handed over the whole operation to the Reformed Church who had no expertise or professionalism in the field and no money to do it.  With Russell’s drive and Baptist generosity, EUROLIT supplied them with both. 

The initial (EBF/Eurolit) target was £10,000 pa. Over close on two decades grants totalled £200,000, half from Baptist sources and half from others, providing £20,000 for mini-libraries for 300 Baptist Eastern Europe pastors and £40,000 for Hungarian RE textbooks for schools.⁷⁰ David was a prophet and an Old Testament scholar. In Hebrew dabhar knows little distinction between ‘word’ and ‘deed’, and neither did David. Much more could be said about David’s wider contribution but for this purpose suffice it to focus on that European programme which was so dear to his heart that he insisted it be one of three tributes at his Memorial Service.

Denouement

 As for Shakespeare, were he to return, I like to think he would still be a John the Baptist, sensing something in the atmosphere, different in detail from that first foggy morning, but reassuring himself in the words of Robert Browning, one of his favourite poets,

‘God’s in his heaven—
All’s right with the world’ (Pippa Passes) 

or still singing (courtesy of Edward Burns,) we have 

‘a gospel to proclaim, good news for all throughout the earth’ (BPW 585)

even if Burns did stop halfway, because ‘Proclamation’ is but one step to ‘Practice’ and the prophetic role includes the battle to achieve. Today’s language, in today’s world, transcending any and every biblical text, ecclesiastical doctrine or theological dogma. 

Focussed, simply and literally, on that ‘good news’, having begun with John the Baptist, let me end with John the Evangelist. I’ll take the liberty of substituting ‘good news’ for logos and then emulating TW Manson⁷¹ emphases (in bold type)when he read the AV.

‘In the beginning was good news,
and good news . . . was with God,
and good news . . .  was God.

Notes, References and Documentation

1 AC Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, Kingsgate Press, 1947, EA Payne, The Baptist Union. A Short History, Carey Kingsgate Press, London, 1958, Ian M Randall, The English Baptists of the 20th Century, Baptist Historical Society, 2005.

2 At the Assembly in 1883, a Unitarian guest speaker, formerly a Baptist, had overstepped the mark. Spurgeon reacted strongly by refusing an invitation to address the Assembly ‘lest he be compromised’. In 1884, Richard Glover, (‘interested in Darwin’) assumed the Presidency and in 1887 John Clifford (a man deemed by Spurgeon to be ‘unfit for the office’) became Vice President. Matters came to a head in the Down Grade Controversy, coming to a head with Spurgeon’s resignation from the Union on doctrinal grounds, driven by a mixture of increasing liberalism and the fear of change. Added to that, in 1891, General and Particular Baptists came together after living apart for a couple of hundred years. By1900 the storm had subsided but the clouds were still dark. Shakespeare came to office in its shadow which lingered, and in some respects never went away throughout the 20th century, but the issues and their intensity varied.
Looking back after fifty years Ernest Payne judged it ‘an important landmark in the history of the Baptist Union’. (Ernest A Payne, The Baptist Union. A Short History, pp 127-31). The fear of a split in the Union failed to materialise. Few followed Spurgeon down the resignation road. Some saw it as a direct attack on the General Baptists but the majority saw a national organisation as central to their well-being and one view is that the Controversy actually fortified the need for the Union as it nurtured the soil for the seeds Shakespeare was about to plant.

3 With virtually no documentation, these points have been constructed retrospectvely on the basis what he actually did. This is not the moment to unpack what he understood by ‘gospel’ so I am content to interpret it simply as ‘good news for all people’. 

4 Developments included Baptist Church Hymnal (1900), Publications Department and Bookshop (1902), A Revised Constitution (1903), Baptist Insurance Company (1905), Baptist Holiday Fellowship (1907), Baptist Historical Society (1908), Baptist Ministers and Missionaries Prayer Union (1908), Baptist Women’s League (1908), Baptist Commonwealth and Colonial Society (1910), Baptist Times (1910), plus abandoned plans for a Northern Baptist College (1902-03). 

5 The Statistics are staggering. With an average working man’s wages of £150 pa and 85,000 Baptist members, that was £3 pa per member.  

6 E A Payne, The Baptist Union. A Short History, p158.

7 In 1883 no more than 500 of the 2,000 Baptist churches had any connection with Associations. (EA Payne, Ibid., p 117).

8 EA Payne,  Ibid., p 10. 

9 Anthony R Cross, Baptist Quarterly 37.3, July 1997, p 135.

10 EA Payne, The Baptist Union. A Short History, p 117. 

11 Mirfield, 1910-20, South Parade, Leeds, 1920-31, Cannon Street, Accrington, 1931-33. 

12 A Whitehead, The Rochdale Baptists 1773-1973 to commemorate the Bi-centenary of the West Street Baptist Church, Rochdale, re-published, 1998, p 36.

13 Thanks to John Smyth and Thomas Helwys.

14 Martin Warner (Bishop of Chichester), in a lecture to the Worthing Theological Society (November 26, 2018) on York Minister, described the York Minster open baptistry in detail and with a commentary on the significance of immersion that any Baptist would welcome. 

15 A Leading Question, Baptist Publications, c1980.

16 First Among Equals, Southern and Oxfordshire and East Gloucestershire Associations, 1993.

17 Challenge to Change. A Radical Agenda for Baptists, Kingsway Publications, Eastbourne, 1991.

18 Ibid., p 189.

19 Maybe he was hoping that something would turn up, but when it didn’t after twenty years the  lack of support from most of his senior friends and colleagues telling him the denomination was not with him was too much for him to take, leading to a nervous breakdown and early retirement. (AC Underwood, op.cit., pp 248-55).

20 Recognised as the forerunner and ‘birthplace’ of the Ecumenical Movement. (Ruth Rouse & Stephen Neill (eds), A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517-1948, Volume 1, WCC Publications, Geneva, Third Edition, 1988, pp 357, 360, 362). W Richey Hogg describes it as ‘the prototype for the worldwide, ecumenical conferences that followed’ and ‘marked the beginning of the organised Ecumenical Movement on the Protestant-Orthodox side’. (‘Conferences. World Missionary’ in Stephen Neill, Gerald H Anderson & John Goodwin (eds), Concise Dictionary of the Christian World Mission, Lutterworth Press, London, 1970, p 134). John Mott said it was ‘the symbolic beginning of modern ecumenism’ (Michael Kinnamon & Brian E Cope (eds), The Ecumenical Movement. An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices, WCC Publications, Geneva 1997, p 325.

21 The other, also a steward, was HG Wood, son of a former BU President. (Anthony R Cross, Baptist Quarterly 37.1, January, 1997, p 35.) 

22 ‘Hugh Martin’, Baptist Handbook, 1965, p 36l, qtd in Anthony R Cross, ibid.

23 ‘Hugh Martin (i) Publisher and Writer’, in Baptist Quarterly,  37.1, January, 1997, pp 33-49, (ii) Ecumenist, 37.2, April 1997, pp 71-86 and (iii) Ecumenical Controversialist and Writer, 37.3, July, 1997, pp 131-46. Briefly, his ‘day job’ was in educational publishing, principally through SCM, starting as an Assistant Secretary (1914-19) and retiring as Managing Director (1929-50), making his greatest mark in Ecumenism for which he received the rare award of a Companion of Honour (pp 35-36, 38-39, 43). For a summary of his involvement in Unity, and especially the Plan for Unity see also pp 76-79.

24 The support and contribution of ME Aubrey should not be overlooked.  At the second Faith and Order Conference, Edinburgh 1937, Aubrey was Chair of Section IV (‘The Church’s Unity in Life and Worship’) which produced a report strongly favouring the formation of the World Council of Churches, after which there was no looking back on the unity line. Having missed out in 1910 Baptist Tanks were now steadily arriving on Global Ecclesiastical Territory and (thanks to EA Payne and others) were determined to remain involved in the action. Salome had not gone but had at least been marginalised. Shakespeare could turn over in his grave and go peacefully to sleep. (Anthony R Cross, ‘Hugh Martin (ii) Ecumenist’, loc.cit., p 81). 

25 An SCM collection of essays in which members of the Friends of Reunion sketched the positions of their respective denominations believing that the first step on the road to reunion was for the Churches to understand what each other stood for, focusing on mutual comprehension not compromise. ‘The Baptists’ was written by Townley Lord, who set down the common religious heritage Baptists shared with Anglicans, Quakers and the other Free Churches, and only then proceeding to the Baptist distinctives which he identified as their appeal to the Bible, the necessity of faith in Christ for Christian discipleship, and the Church as a fellowship of the regenerate, admission to which was by the immersion of believers. These, however, did not lead Townley Lord to believe that reunion was impossible, though episcopacy, State control and baptismal regeneration continued to be obstacles. (Anthony R Cross, ‘Hugh Martin (ii) Ecumenist’, loc.cit., p 80).

26 Details in Anthony R Cross, ‘Hugh Martin (ii) Ecumenist’, loc.cit., pp 76-78, 85 n41 & n42.

27 Anthony R Cross, ‘Hugh Martin (i) Publisher and Writer’, loc.cit., p 39.

28 Principal, Carey Hall, from 1945, involved in the Third F&O Conference, Lund 1952, present at the  WCC Evanston Assembly 1954, attended meetings of the  International Missionary Council (IMC) at Willingen (1952) and Ghana (1958), joined  their staff which was integrated into the WCC in 1961, and served the Division of World Mission and Evangelism, 1961-68. Not the first female Baptist minister (pace Violet Hedger) but a distinguished second when women were expected to be Deaconesses. (Anthony R Cross, ‘Service to the Ecumenical Movement. The Contribution of British Baptists’, in Baptist Quarterly 38, July 1998, p 113).

29 Anthony R Cross, ibid., pp 107-21.

30 EA Payne, ‘John Howard Shakespeare, 1857-1928’ in AS Clement (ed), Baptists Who Made History, pp 126f.

31 March-May, 1954.

32 It was much easier for Baptists in Northamptonshire than in Oxford.  Once, when I mentioned Northampton to David Paton, Anglican leader and ecumenist, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I don’t like visiting Northampton. I much prefer Oxford, where the Dissenters know their places’. Church relations and ecumenism cannot be limited to official committees or institutional unity and by the end of the century that seemed to be increasingly recognised.

33 H Wheeler Robinson, Baptist Principles, Kingsgate Press, 1925.

34 FC Bryan (ed), Concerning Believers Baptism, Kingsgate Press, 1943. 

35 Henry Cook, What Baptists Stand For, Kingsgate Press, 1947.

36  AC Underwood, A History of the English Baptists, Kingsgate Press, 1947.

37 Robert C Walton, The Gathered Community, Carey-Kingsgate Press, 1946.

38 A Dakin, The Baptist View of the Church and Ministry, Baptist Union Publications, 1944. See also Ian M Randall, op.cit., pp 217ff and WMS West, To Be a Pilgrim. A Memoir of Ernest A Payne, Lutterworth Press, Guildford, 1983, pp 60f. 

39 ‘The Baptist Doctrine of the Church (1948)’, qtd in EA Payne,The Baptist Union. A Short History,  Appendix x, pp 283-91.

40 The Meaning and Practice of Ordination. 

41  The Doctrine of the Ministry, Baptist Union, London, 1961.

42 Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be, Collins, London 1962.

43 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Collins, 1959.

44 John A T Robinson, Honest to God, SCM, London, 1963.

45 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveller, Collins, London 1969.

46 HA Williams, The Four Last Things, Mowbrays, London, 1960, God’s Wisdom in Christ’s Cross, Mowbrays, London, 1960. The True Wilderness, Constable, London, 1965.

47 AR Vidler (ed), Soundings. Essays Concerning Christian Understanding, CUP, Cambridge, 1962.

48 Paul van Buren, The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, SCM, London, 1963.  

49 Harvey Cox,The Secular City, SCM, London, 1965.

50 A Gilmore (ed) The Pattern of the Church, Lutterworth Press, London, 1963, with contributions from SF Winward, Neville Clark and WMS West. 

51  A Gilmore (ed), Ministry in Question, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1971, with contributions from Caryl Micklem, Neville Clark and Ernest Marvin.

52 G R Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament, Eerdmans, 1962, A Gilmore (ed), Christian Baptism, Lutterworth Press, London and Judson Press, Philadelphia 1959, with contributions from SF Winward, REO White, SI Buse, GR Beasley-Murray, DR Griffiths, AW Argyle, WMS West, DM Himbury and Neville Clark. 

53 A Gilmore, Baptism and Christian Unity, Lutterworth Press, Guildford, 1966.

54 PW Evans, Sacraments in the New Testament, Tyndale Press, London, 1947.

55  Neville Clark, An Approach to the Theology of the Sacraments, SCM, London, 1956. 

56 RL Child, The Blessing of Infants and the Dedication of Parents, Kingsgate Press, London, 1946.

57 David Tennant, Children in the Church: A Baptist View, a contribution to All Generations, a Handbook for Leaders in Worship, and David Tennant, Understanding Christian Nurture, in British Council of Churches, 1981. Ronald CD Jasper (ed), Worship and the Child, SPCK, London, 1975.  

58 Ronald CD Jasper (ed), Worship and the Child, SPCK, London, 1975. 

59 Michael H Taylor (ed), Baptists for Unity, 1968, with contributions from Paul Rowntree Clifford, Robert Brown, Peter Coleman, Roger Nunn and Donald Smith.

60 Kingsgate Press, nd. The Revised and Enlarged Edition (purchased October 1947) has the benefit of input from F Townley Lord and Hugh Martin.

61 EA Payne & SF Winward, Orders and Prayers for Church Worship, Crey Kingsgate Press, London, 1960.

62  Compiled by Alec Gilmore, Edward Smalley and Michael Walker, Baptist Union, 1980.  

63 Compiled by Bernard Green, Christopher Ellis, Rachel Harrison, Stuart Jenkins, Michael Nicholls and Tony Turner, Baptist Union and Oxford University Press, 1991.

64 Michael H Taylor, Variations on a Theme, Stainer and Bell, London, 1973.

65 Robert Ellsberg (ed) and Harvey Cox, A Harvey Cox Reader, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 2016, p 65 (after 50 years of pastoral responsibility).

66 Qtd in Harvey Cox,  God’s Revolution and Man’s Responsibility, Valley Forge, Judson Press, Philadelphia, 1965, pp 15-36 and reprinted in Robert Ellsberg (ed) and Harvey Cox, ibid.

67 Asian ecumenical thinker and layman,  based in Kerala, and moderator of the WCC Central Committee,1968-75.

68 Asian ecumenical leader of the ecumenical movement from the 40s to the 60s.

69 For further information see The Story of Feed the Minds (www.gilco.org.uk/books-on-the-web/ or https://www.feedtheminds.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/From-Literacy-to-Literature-pdf.pdf.  

70 Other grants included  Hymnbooks for Hungarian Baptists (£8,500), Translations and Publication costs of Barclay Commentaries in Poland, Hungary and Russia (£8,500), Children’s Bible Encyclopaedia in Poland, Magazines and  Journals in Hungary (£15,000), Small Printing equpiment in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania.

71 The intended effect was to put the emphasis on ‘God’ rather than ‘was’, as in ‘what God was, the Word was’ (NEB, REB) or (the Word) ‘was the same as God’ (GNB). More usual emphasis on ‘was’ suggests two entiti. . .