Despite the request of the Primates, there are currently some 40 property lawsuits being conducted by the Episcopal lawyers against churches which have left. This provides an added threat to the orthodox who remain. But the Network which primarily consists of the orthodox rump within TEC, with additions, has refused to get disgruntled or negative.

Instead they have set up three initiatives under competent leadership. One on youth and children's work, one on church planting (and they have planted well over 30 churches) and one on offering training and modeling in evangelism. They have asked me to lead this task force. More of that anon. What I am saying is that I cannot lay claim to an overall view of what is happening in the US, even in the Episcopal part of Christ's church. The country is so large and the variations so great.

I ought also to mention that between 1987 and 1992, I was professor of evangelism in Regent College, Vancouver, During that period, I not only taught the subject but led teams in evangelistic missions in many cities and most of the main universities in Canada. So, although I am not up to date on the Canadian situation, I do have some knowledge of what is going on both sides of the border.

The second preliminary point I need to make is that, as you well know, mission, the missio Dei, is much broader than evangelism. Strictly, Temple got the definition of evangelism right when he said:

'To evangelize is so to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit that men and women come to put their faith in God through him, accept him as their Savior and follow him as their Lord in the fellowship of his church.'

But the mission of the church includes healing, education, prophetic declaration and action, and works of mercy. I am proposing to restrict myself, in these few minutes, to evangelism proper, bringing people into a living relationship with Jesus Christ.

Let me begin with overall trends. I do not know what is happening in the large Roman Catholic church in the US. It has been ravaged by accusations of massive abuse of trust in homosexual contact between priests and young people. These accusations have been prevalent in both Canada and the US, coast to coast, for almost a decade, and greatly to their credit the Catholic Church has come out firmly against sexual congress in all forms except between married people, and has reasserted the call for celibacy among their clergy. This has done a good deal to restore the situation in the Catholic Church when the outlook looked so perilous only a few years ago. I suspect the church is doing much better these days, though there is still the massive shortage of priests, as elsewhere in the Roman communion. Their main methods of evangelism are through the impressive schools system that they run, through well advertised and high quality instruction courses which they offer, and of course, through insisting that in mixed marriages that the children be brought up in the Roman Catholic faith.

Of the non-Roman churches, the largest in the US is the Southern Baptist denomination with more than 12 million. They suffered a loss of nerve under poor and liberal leadership a decade or so ago, but are now flourishing. Near to us, there is a magnificent university and seminary, Southeastern, where a conservative president has let a largely liberal faculty go and has replaced them with a highly intelligent and orthodox faculty. The results, both in our part of the States and elsewhere, is that the Baptists are confident of their God and of their gospel, and are in the forefront of evangelism. I have been impressed with the quality of their leaders and the passion of their outreach. Altar calls are common in Baptist situations, and this breeds some disenchantment among those who hear them too often, but it also results in a regular cadre of new believers. A Baptist megachurch near us is growing exponentially,and not primarily through the preaching of its senior minister, but through the mobilisation of his congregation. They have a special Sunday night every month for new baptisms and the attached testimonies. This event is filmed and shown to the morning congregations the next Sunday, thus mobilizing them to reach out. Nevertheless the tendency of the Baptists to split at the least provocation, and the lack of imagination in many of the churches of the denomination have led to an overall small, but worrying, decline in Baptist membership in the US.

The Pentecostals are on the move. They are growing almost everywhere, although the far west is the most stony soil for them as for other denominations. Their passion for lost people, their willingness to sacrifice, their enthusiastic worship, their reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit, and their encouragement of initiative in congregational members all combine to produce a healthy, outward looking church which is making big inroads in American Society, and to a similar if smaller extent in Canada. An enormous Pentecostal Church has sprung up in our part of Raleigh, with magnificent buildings and 7 day a week ministry. They see a lot of conversions, and they deserve them. They care for their people well and are a far cry from the rather unintelligent and ranting style that has in the past sometimes characterized some aspects of their movement. It is estimated that two out of every five converts in the world these days are either Pentecostal or charismatic. It is clear that we are in no position to despise them, and need humbly to ask their help in outreach. We have much to learn from them.

I have just been addressing the leadership of the World Methodism. They called together their 8th International Seminar on Evangelism in Atlanta last week, preceded and followed by practical evangelistic outreaches. There was a substantial UK Methodist presence there and I think they were amazed at the passion, the skills, and the vision of these leaders from 69 countries. The United Methodists in the US are a very substantial denomination, far larger and better organized than the Episcopal Church. Worldwide their numbers are very similar to the Anglican Communion, with some 72 million. They have added about a million a year over the past decade. Methodism is a theologically mixed denomination, rather like English Anglicanism. Many churches are liberal in their theology and concentrate on social justice rather than evangelism. But others seek to follow Wesley in combining the two, and take Wesley as a model in evangelism that is disciplined, scriptural and dependent on the Holy Spirit. I came away wishing that we had half the passion, commitment and understanding of evangelism which most of these Wesleyan Methodists had. It was moving in the small groups to meet an impoverished bishop from Myanmar who is winning people to Christ despite political pressure. It was great to hear of continued fruit in a county I love, Sabah, where their dynamic charismatic Christianity is making inroads into Muslim society. And it was sobering to meet pastors from Indonesia where you have to found five congregations before they will consider ordaining you. It was humbling to meet a girl from Russia, just out of university who has gone to a city 50 miles from Moscow where she knew precisely nobody, in order to found a church. She gradually made contacts in the Teaching English as a Foreign Language scene, the gym and the nail shop. She now has a house church under her leadership. Story after story emerged like this, and they show up the coldness, lack of imagination and traditionalism of much Christianity in the West and not least in UK. I believe the Methodists have a substantial future in the US. They have about 7 million and although they are still losing numbers somewhat, they founded 168 churches last year and plan to get back to the founding of one new church a day which they achieved a decade or so ago.

One further point about their evangelism is noteworthy. Eddie Fox and George Morris have responded to the vision of a couple of wealthy laypeople and have produced an NRSV New Testament and Psalms in soft covers, published by Zondervan, that will fit easily into a purse or pocket. The print is clear and it is well presented. As an introduction, they have answered 24 commonly asked questions about what Christianity is all about, and in the back of the book they have produced a graceful way of leading another individual to faith and discipleship. This sells at under $5 and is an enormous bargain. We give them to new believers in our church. The book has already been translated into more than 60 languages and currently they are getting a Vietnamese version going.

I come now to evangelism within the Episcopal Church. And I have to confess that this part of my presentation is going to be very short. Because it is almost impossible to speak of Evangelism and the Episcopal Church in the same breath in the USA. Practically no evangelism is undertaken by the denomination as a whole, though there are churches which are a glorious exception to this sad state of affairs. During the Decade of Evangelism the TEC took no part but instead lost scores of thousands of members. Frank Griswold, whose erstwhile diocese declined by about 30,000 during his time as PB, bravely spoke of doubling the denomination by 2010, but instead people walk away in their thousands. It is often said that TEC has 2 and a half million members but this is entirely misleading. Not only do a mere 700,000 appear in worship on a given Sunday but when people leave, the churches will not transfer their membership to a non-episcopal church and instead they stay on their lists as inactive members, thus illicitly swelling the numbers reported. The PB is able to maintain that only a small minority of churches have left, though they number in their hundreds. But she does not disclose the fact that not only is there deep unrest in many who remain and feel unable to break away because of emotional links with the past, but when you start assessing the numbers of people who have departed, they are disproportionately large. Flagship churches are leaving, with their thousands of members. For example, Christ Church Plano, a well known Evangelical Church, has left the denomination and gone to AMiA. It has more members than the whole of the PB's diocese. And the intentional way that lawsuits are being brought against the two biggest churches in TEC, The Falls Church and Truro in Virginia shows how worrying all this is to the leaders of TEC. Those two churches between them have more than 6000 members, and they and their finances are now lost to TEC.

If we ask why evangelism is at such a discount in TEC, the answer may well be complex. One reason is that evangelism is not and never has been in the DNA of Episcopalians. TEC has been an acknowledged refuge from the enthusiasm of the Baptists! Moreover, the average age of members in the congregations is so high, up into the late 60s across the country, and this of course militates against active evangelism. The future for the denomination in sheer terms of numbers is bleak... the average number in a congregation being about 75. But also there is a theological blockage. On the one hand the belief seems to be that so long as they are baptized people, they are automatically Christians, irrespective of repentance and faith and the gift of the Holy Spiritwhereas in the NT all three elements figure in Christian initiation. The other is that the policies of the TEC are inclusive, which is wonderful, but inclusive without the need for transformation, which is not wonderful. You are welcome just as you are with no need to change. All lifestyles are acceptable. A State Governor who has had to resign because of his divorce and taking up an active homosexual lifestyle has been accepted for ordination training in TEC. Not only all lifestyles, but all beliefs seem to be acceptable in the Episcopal Church. Only the other day a woman priest who has become a Muslim claimed to belong to both faithswithout any rebuke from her bishop. The influence of Jack Spong is widespread and has never been repudiated by TEC. I find that repentance and faith is rarely mentioned in Episcopal pulpits, and the name of Jesus is scarce. As for the Holy Spirit, he is generally associated with the votes of the majority. The church is moving in the direction of an undifferentiated Deism. Belief in the deity of Jesus, an objective atonement and the reality of the resurrection are constantly discounted among influential Episcopalians, while the people in the pew prefer not to enquire too closely. And the PB herself has made it plain that all religions lead to God. No wonder the church leaks!

It may be helpful to look at other manifestations of Anglicanism in the US and see how they are doing. You may be shocked to hear that no less than 53 groups have felt impelled to leave the Episcopal Church since the REC led the way at the end of the 19th century. They mainly have left over either single issues or as a result of the 1979 Payer Book with its doctrinal innovations. Had those opposed to the direction of TEC been able to form a single and organized opposition, they would have prevailed long before now. But they remain divided, with CANA, AMiA, the Kenyan and Ugandan and Bolivian groups as well as the historic break-aways like the Charismatic Episcopal Church and the Anglican Province of America. However they are not so divided as they seem. Bishop Bob Duncan of Pittsburgh is the natural leader, and he heads up the Network (consisting of more than 900 parishes and serving 200,000 parishioners) as its Moderator. Many of those who have left look askance at him for staying in. Nevertheless he has been working tirelessly for unity among the orthodox. Most of the bodies which have dissociated themselves from TEC have joined the Common Cause, and it may well be that we shall see the new American bishops being sent to look after congregations which have fled to overseas jurisdictions such as Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda coming together if the TEC walks away from the requirements of the Windsor Report in September. It seems highly unlikely that the TEC will be willing to follow the thrust of Windsor, or the stipulations of Tanzania. They are not prepared to have anyone outside America telling them what to do, and they passionately believe their stance of re-writing scriptural belief and justifying unscriptural ethics is the way in which the whole Communion will go in future, so they see it as a 'new dawn' and not something they will readily relinquish. But if the TEC declines to play ball with Windsor, and has no time for any Covenant, the consequences for the whole Communion will be incalculable. Division will be exacerbated, and mission will become impossible. Who wants to join a church whose fabric is so torn asunder? It seems inevitable to those of us on the ground that a cohesive expression of traditional Anglicanism is bound to manifest itself, and that is why the Bishops of the Common Cause are gathering together at the end of September.

It remains to ask how evangelism is faring within the orthodox remnant of TEC and those Anglican churches which have left it. As I mentioned earlier, I have been asked to lead the Good News Initiative, rather like Springboard was in England under George Carey. It is a team consisting of Keith Ackerman, the Anglo-catholic Bishop of Quincy, Carrie BorenDiocesan Missioner for Dallas, both of them brilliant natural evangelists, along with Jenny Noyesthe Publications Officer for the Network, and Canon Daryl Fentonits CEO, together with my wife Rosemary and myself. Because there is such widespread ignorance of how to evangelize among Episcopalians, including those who have left TEC, we are offering training courses in different parts of the US.

We make available an extensive program of lectures and seminars, customized to the particular needs of each area, and in addition we try to model outreach through one or more evangelistic breakfasts, and an evangelistic rally. We have done two of these so far, and plan another 6 before Christmas. Other requests are coming in constantly. In some we draw in other speakers with particular expertise to strengthen the team in the areas of youth work and church planting.

The next such weekend will involve me debating a militant atheist and following it with an evangelistic rally the next night, in the University of Florida. This worked very effectively in N. Carolina not long ago with 1900 crowding into a room designed for a thousand, and 500 turned away. A thousand came to the rally the next night and it proved very fruitful. Of course, we have a long way to go in trying to ingest evangelism into those who have never done it. In one locality, we found that they had attempted to fill a hall holding a thousand and since they had never done anything similar before, and since the church members were not used to inviting friends, the attendance was very small. But it was a start. Some people came to faith. And the many clergy present saw that preaching for decision works.

Let me mention three other ways of evangelism that are being attempted in Anglican circles in N. America. One is church planting. This is the favorite method of the AMiA.

They began 7 years ago with only 3 congregations, if I recall aright. Now they have well over a hundred, with several score on the way to the minimum membership that allows them to be recognized as one of AMiA's churches. The impression seems to be in some circles that they are a disaffected group that can safely discounted. That is far from the case. They are a well ordered mission from Rwanda with 7 bishops and experienced coaches for church planters. An enormous church has recently joined them, and they are clearly here to stay. But the Network is also planting churches and has a leader for this important work, which has led to the creation of more than 30 new churches.

A second approach involves joining together across the denominational spectrum to back an evangelistic crusade in the area. I have this past week come off one in Raleigh-Durham which has been spectacularly successful. It even had the cynical local press and TV raving about it! 240 churches have combined to bring several extremely well known bands and a Californian evangelist, Greg Laurie for a three night outreach.

In all, some 60,000 people have attended in the local ice rink stadium, and the floor has been packed on each night with people coming forward to entrust their lives to Christ or to rededicate themselves. Let nobody think that something like this is easily done. It is not. It took 14 months of some of the best preparation for a city-wide campaign that I have ever seen. The TEC kept well clear, but the Anglican churches shared in it and were rewarded with numerous folk who professed faith and are now in nurture courses.

A third approach has been through Bible Study Groups. Started less than 30 years ago as a counterweight to the poverty of biblical teaching in most of the churches, these have attained monumental proportions. They are interdenominational and tightly regulated, but they have brought thousands of people in the South into a living faith, and continue to do so. They have become a cultural phenomenon in the South, and it is not difficult to get people to join up for a weekly study lasting no less than 7 years! Large numbers of Anglicans are involved.

I ought perhaps to mention the teams I used to take out in evangelism within Canadian cities and universities. The key thing was to get the pastors of churches in the city to work together, or, in university settings, to get the Christian groups to pull together. I would take a team from Regent College Vancouver, where I was teaching, and we would spend a week or more in the chosen locality, primarily in non-church places where people naturally congregatedat businesses, sports centres, any form of neutral ground, BBQs, along with countless home meetings as well as running sports days and preaching evangelistically in churches on a Sunday and in some major rallies in Town Halls and so forth. We frequently saw many scores of people come to faith in a land which is somewhat aggressively post-Christian.

Finally, let me mention the approach with which we have seen our Anglican church in Raleigh more than triple in the past two years. We have periodic evangelistic addresses either in a Country Club, or as an outreach from a home group, or in church. People who respond are invited to join a 6 week Foundations Course, covering commitment to Christ, Assurance, Bible reading and Prayer, Church and Christian fellowship, the work of the Holy Spirit and finally Witness and Service.

A single theme is addressed each night, partly through a talk and questions, partly through the learning of a verse of scripture on the topic for the evening, and partly through engaging in an inductive Bible study. Leaders are trained to handle these groups. There is very little fall out.

Every member has one or more extended personal sessions with one of the leaders, and it is rare that anyone remains uncommitted to Christ at the end of the course. It has proved to be an invaluable way of drawing people both to Christ and the church, and when the course is over we tip them into one of the many Fellowship Groups held in our churchand since we have no building of our own, these are as important to us as they were in the first century. The gospel remains the power of Godeven in Anglican circles in N. America.

To be sure, we have long way to go, but we are seeing evangelism once again becoming a way of life in Anglican circles in N. America.

END