Analysis: what sort of bishops do evangelicals want anyway?

Many British evangelicals basically want a bishop who will agree with them and then keep out of their way.

Or at least that’s true among the older ones, like the advocates for a nationwide ‘third province’ where a handful of bishops can turn up on occasion from some remote Oswestrian corner of the country and pronounce the magic words at ordination. But aligning with the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans under its current chair Archbishop Justin Badi Arama would be subscribing to a much more demanding version of a bishop specifically and Anglicanism generally. Have we got the stomach for it?

I recently spent time in South Sudan with Archbishop Justin Badi as he taught a series of SEAN facilitators a course on Anglican identity in the Episcopal Church of South Sudan. It struck me that, for him, Anglican is a vibrant identity: a badge you can unite around; a glorious consistent Biblical vision. In the UK, at best we laud the ‘breadth’ of the Church of England – but that has reached its elastic limit as its multiple religious systems pull it too far; or we say ‘it’s the best boat to fish from’ – but that establishment compromise is also nearing its natural ‘no-one can serve two masters’ conclusion.