Hot on the heels of the Archbishops’ suggested compromise over women bishops yesterday, they have today been quoted in the Independent as gung-ho for evangelism. Don’t be shy about telling people about Christianity, they urge us.

‘In Christ, old identities are never the last word and the good is offered for all the world,’ their publication reads, ‘So there should be nothing embarrassed or awkward about the Church’s commitment to draw others to Christ. This we do, not in order to win favour for ourselves, not to make others more like us, but simply because we want to share God’s gifts as we have received them – freely and unearned.’

Jerome Taylor in the Independent reports that

[The archbishops] said they recognised that conversions are a contentious subject which often had a “shadow side” that “led to actions in Christ’s name which have been inconsistent with Christ’s own teachings”. But they also called on fellow believers to be “up front” about the fact that Christians are expected to spread their faith to non-believers.

“In a society fixated on personal choice it is sometimes, paradoxically, frowned upon to promote one’s own choices as good for others,” the two bishops wrote. “But the fear of getting it wrong should never obscure the Christian’s commitment to the good of all and to making Christ the centrepiece of that good.”

These comments should, I imagine, be taken in the context of the ABC’s stated view that evangelism must not be of the bullying kind – or indeed of the kind that views people of other faiths as inevitably outside the salvation of God. Back in March, the ABC was reported as condeming the kind of proseletysation that proceeds from the assumption that other faiths have nothing to offer. The Archbishop’s speech, titled “The Finality of Christ in a Pluralist World”, was given in March at Guildford Cathedral, and addressed the difficulties modern Christians have with Biblical texts which suggest that Christianity is the only path to salvation. was an attempt to reconcile the claims of the Bible about Jesus and Christianity with the multi-faith societies in which Christians around the world must live. He noted that the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament urge believers to spread the “good news” or evangelise, but he was keen to emphasise that the need for good relations with other faiths in the secular world militates against proselytism.

Me? I’ve never been attracted to the bullying variety of evangelism, but neither have I ever been embarrassed to talk about the claims of Christianity, or to invite other people to check it out for themselves. I am not much of an evangelist by nature, if by that you mean someone who bangs on about Christianity in the belief that I have got all the answers. My sense of wonder, my intellectual curiosity and my genuine appreciation for the human race disallows me from wanting to think I already have all the answers: how appallingly boring that would be. But Christian theology, per se, is interesting and wide ranging if you take it seriously, and don’t allow yourself to be taken in by those who insist it has no intellectual credulity.

The more pressing problem for evangelism, it seems to me, is the ongoing debacle about women in the Church, this week of all weeks. Yesterday we learned that the Archbishops seem OK with proposing a compromise on women bishops that downgrades the status of all the women in the Church. It beats me how you can put that together with an upbeat view of evangelism. They might feel fine about evangelising people into a Church that continues to give women second class status. I do not. You don’t have to go back that many decades to find a church that disallowed people from becoming priests or bishops because of the colour of their skin, or because they had a disability. Those barriers have been broken down in the name of justice, and rightly so; no-one would dare uphold such an idea now, and even if they thought it privately they wouldn’t dare to say it out loud. It seems outrageous to me that we continue to believe that it’s OK to delay indefinitely the active acceptance of women at all levels in the Church. Its patently obvious that the world at large thinks so too, and this unacceptable injustice towards women is far more of a blight on evangelism than shyness.