c. 1998 Religion News Service

LONDON _ A tiny but influential British religious group _ the Christian Socialist Movement _ that counts Prime Minister Tony Blair and four cabinet officials as members has called for the disestablishment of the Church of England.

But the call has been _ at least for the time being _ rejected by the key member of Blair’s party responsible for church affairs in Parliament.”The prime minister has made it clear that neither he nor his government generally has any policy for the disestablishment of the church,”said Stuart Bell, Second Church Estates Commissioner.

The call for separation of church and state came from Chris Bryant, chairman of the Christian Socialist Movement, who argued that what he called the many anachronisms and the”rococo accretions of centuries of precedent”involved in the Anglican Church’s established status”undermine both the spiritual authority of the Church of England and the moral authority of the state.” Bryant said reshaping the relationship between church and state should be as important a part of the new Labor government’s agenda for change as the reform of the House of Lords, the renewal of local government, or devolution.

In particular, Bryant said the Church of England should be free to elect its own bishops, as happens in every other province of the Anglican Communion, including the Episcopal Church in the United States, and bishops should no longer be ex officio members of the House of Lords, where the 26 most senior of the 42 English diocesan bishops sit as Lords Spiritual.

Bryant said the bishops are already likely to lose their place in the House of Lords as part of the government’s promised reform of that body. If that comes about, he said, the prime minister should, in return, surrender the control he at present exercises over the appointment of bishops.

Currently, a small church committee forwards two names to the prime minister for consideration as a bishop. The prime minister forwards one to the queen for actual nomination. While the role of the government and queen is most often pro forma, in the past prime ministers have sometimes chosen the church committee’s second rather than first choice, and Blair last year asked the committee to submit two new names for a successor to Bishop David Sheppard of Liverpool.

Bryant said the present system prevents the church from being fully the church.”Prophetic witness _ of whatever political hue _ is disabled by the very fact of establishment,”he said.

But, he said, because the church’s established status is such a complicated affair, the system could not be dismantled simply by scrapping one piece of earlier legislation.”Disestablishment will not, and should not, come at the sweep of a single legislative brush, Bryant said.”But come it must.”Otherwise it is the church that will suffer most, unable to sustain its spiritual authority, given privilege beyond its level of popular support, its bishops placelings of government, and its governance at the whim of MPs.” In a separate but related development, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey told a TV interviewer he favored establishment but thought leaders of other churches and other faith groups should sit in a reformed House of Lords.”The established status of the Church of England has changed a lot in the past hundred years and will continue to change, and if constitutional reforms were to include other faith traditions then I would welcome this,”Carey said.

DEA END NOWELL