Andrew Atherstone is Professor of Modern Anglicanism at the University of Oxford. He has been in Sydney for the Annual Moore College Lectures, held in August 2026, on Anglican Evangelicalism in the Age of John Stott, Jim Packer and Dick Lucas: Surviving and Thriving in a Mixed-up Denomination. The lectures explored the recent history of Anglican evangelicals in England and the question of whether to stay or leave in the face of liberal and heterodox bishops. In this interview, the ACR asked Andrew particularly about the mutual influence between Australian and English evangelicals, and the contribution of some key Australian figures.
ACR: Thanks for speaking with us, Andrew. You’ve highlighted in your lectures the strong connection between Sydney and England in the evangelical world.
Andrew: Yes, there has been a very long connection, with a flow in both directions. One thing I’ve increasingly discovered in my research is the number of mid-20th-century Sydney evangelicals who had a strong voice in shaping the English context.
ACR: Perhaps we could begin with DB Knox. I understand that some of his thinking was particularly relevant to debates around the Thirty Nine Articles in the 1960s.
Andrew: In the 1960s there was a major debate in England about the role of the Thirty Nine Articles in the life of a modern church. Many modernist theologians were arguing that we didn’t need the Articles at all, or that they should be rewritten with modern answers to the questions they addressed.
Broughton Knox was invited by John Stott to write a short book on the subject for the Evangelical Fellowship of the Anglican Communion. His volume was published in 1967 and was a defence of the place of the Thirty Nine Articles within modern Anglicanism. They weren’t simply a museum piece: they were essential to the renewal of Anglicanism today. Importantly, Knox argued that instead of reshaping the Articles to reflect the mind of the clergy, the mind of the clergy should be shaped by the Articles to which they had subscribed.
ACR: That’s particularly interesting in the Australian context, where the Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia which came into force in 1962 enshrined the Thirty Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer in its Ruling Principles.
Andrew: Yes, it was all happening at the same time. There was also a significant debate at the 1968 Lambeth Conference, which sought to downplay the role of the Articles within global Anglicanism: disconnecting them from liturgies, no longer publishing them with prayer books, and not requiring clergy to subscribe to them.
If you’d stood in 1970 and tried to predict what would happen, you might have assumed the Articles would steadily decline in importance. Surprisingly, the opposite has happened. In the 21st century, they are becoming increasingly significant for global Anglicanism.
A number of Anglican provinces are rewriting their constitutions and removing references to being in communion with the See of Canterbury. Instead, they are identifying their Anglican identity with upholding the Thirty Nine Articles. So there is a movement from an institutional understanding of Anglicanism towards a confessional one: it is the gospel and the doctrines you uphold that define you, rather than your episcopal relationships.
__
ACR: Another figure who may be less well known to Australian readers is Ian Palmer. Could you tell us about his story?
Andrew: I’ve been researching a crisis in the Church of England in 1984, when a modernist liberal bishop was consecrated as the new Bishop of Durham. He was happy to affirm the resurrection in his ordination promises and creedal statements, but didn’t believe that Jesus’ tomb was empty; he affirmed the incarnation but didn’t believe in the virgin birth.
This caused a huge controversy, and evangelical people were deeply upset and determined to resist the appointment. During my research I came across Ian Palmer, a 34-year-old vicar in the Diocese of Durham, ministering in an old coal-mining community called Annfield Plain. He led the local protests against the appointment.
I then discovered that Ian had emigrated to Australia and had subsequently been Bishop of Bathurst. He had also served as Director of Evangelism in the Diocese of Newcastle. I’ve been in correspondence with him, and his story and memories of those years have been fascinating.
Even more excitingly, while I’ve been in Sydney this week, a package arrived at Moore College from Ian’s home outside Melbourne. It contains his correspondence files from 1984: letters from evangelical leaders in the north of England, correspondence with the Bishop of Durham and the Archbishop of York, and detailed news files. For a historian, this is treasure. It will allow us to tell this story afresh.
One particularly striking letter is from Ian, as a 34-year-old local vicar, writing to the new bishop. He graciously but clearly rebuked him for the distress he was causing in the church and reminded him of his canonical obligations. He even encouraged him to return to academia—which was a polite English way of saying, “Dear Bishop, please resign”.
Another highlight is a letter from John Stott encouraging Ian, despite the distress of the situation, to stay in the Church of England. “Don’t resign your ministry. Don’t resign your orders”, he told him. Stay pastoring the local church and evangelising in Annfield Plain. “Keep fighting.”
__
ACR: Speaking of keeping on fighting, you also spoke about the influence of Phillip Jensen from Sydney on the English evangelical scene, particularly through the Evangelical Ministry Assembly.
Andrew: The Evangelical Ministry Assembly (EMA) was a new initiative bringing together evangelical leaders in local church ministry, both Anglican and nonconformist. The flow of Australian, and especially Sydney, preachers onto its platform over the past 42 years has been very significant.
Phillip Jensen was one of the earliest, speaking in 1986 after John Chapman in 1985. His message was that pastoral ministry is fundamentally a Bible-teaching ministry, and that clergy shouldn’t simply be shaped by the structures of the institution. Instead, they should reshape those structures so that the Bible can be more clearly heard and Bible ministry released.
I’ve gathered this week in Sydney that these ideas are now widely taught and often taken for granted here. But in England in 1986, they were described as ‘dynamite’. People hadn’t heard such a revolutionary ecclesiology. The recordings of his talks, distributed on cassette tapes, were passed around theological colleges almost like contraband.
One of his most striking arguments was that the local church is where the action is, rather than the institution. The denomination is really a network of local churches and congregations. At one point he argued that the local clergy were the ones exercising oversight of God’s flock, while those we call bishops were functioning more like deacons in their administrative role. It was a radical inversion of the way English evangelicals had traditionally thought about the relationship between clergy and bishops.
__
ACR: Peter Jensen also had a significant influence in England, particularly around the time he became Archbishop of Sydney.
Andrew: Peter Jensen had been a well-known teacher in England since the 1990s, first as Principal of Moore Theological College and then, from 2002, as Archbishop of Sydney. He made a particularly significant teaching tour of England around that time, just as Rowan Williams was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury.
That appointment unsettled many evangelicals, who were asking again, “Is this now the moment that we leave the Church of England?” Peter’s answer was no. Stay—but stay and protest. His message was: protest, pray, preach and evangelise.
He reflected on the ways Sydney Diocese was rethinking its structures to enable new evangelistic initiatives. In 2002, Sydney Synod had adopted an ambitious strategy of seeking, by God’s grace, to see 10 per cent of the population in Bible-based churches within a decade. Peter’s point was that if you want to be ambitious for God in evangelism, you need to work on your structures to enable it.
That means rethinking how you use money, what bishops are meant to be doing, and whether your constitutions and canons are hindering or enabling evangelism. Again, it was an example of Sydney experimenting and English evangelicals learning from that Australian experience.
__
ACR: Finally, you spoke in your lecture about the influence of John Wimber and the Vineyard movement among English evangelicals, alongside the Sydney influence on evangelicalism. There were significant tensions between Reformed and charismatic Christians, but also some surprising similarities. Could you explain that?
Andrew: One thing reshaping global Christianity is our ability to connect across continents. The invention of the jet engine has been remarkable for global Christianity. England, Australia and America can now be closely connected, and these flows of ideas and people have reshaped churches in different ways.
In England in the 1980s and 1990s there was a major contest between Reformed and neo-Pentecostal or charismatic Christians. There were painful disagreements, friendship breakdowns and relational fallout. But those debates were also important because they forced people to ask vital questions: What is the gospel? Are the Scriptures sufficient? What is the significance of Christ’s atoning death? What is the purpose of the church meeting?
But, surprisingly, there were also significant commonalities between these theological streams. At the local church level, they had quite a lot in common: an emphasis on the local church rather than the institution; the necessity of genuine conversion; evangelism and church planting as priorities; a more informal approach to church meetings; and a desire to rethink the role of bishops.
There remain significant theological differences between Reformed and neo-Pentecostal Christians. But in the 21st century we’ve also seen strong alliances and friendships develop because of their shared commitment to confessional Christianity, and their shared convictions about the purpose of the local church and how to reform it in a mixed-up denomination.
ACR: Andrew, thank you very much for your time. We look forward to the publication of the lectures.
Andrew: Thank you.
Watch the full lecture series by Andrew Atherstone here: Anglican evangelicalism in the age of John Stott, Jim Packer and Dick Lucas: Surviving and thriving in a mixed-up denomination.