The Anglican Church League 2

Once Archbishop Wright had made a strong stance against the introduction of such vestments in Sydney, the PCEU found that the wind was taken out of its sails somewhat. A new evangelical party, the Anglican Church League, emerged in 1909 as a party of broad evangelical consensus. The founder of the League, Canon Francis Bertie Boyce (1844-1931), was determined that evangelicals would not merely present a reactionary, defensive and increasingly isolated place in the Church. The League would rather pursue a constructive and reasonable evangelical policy, finding as it did so as much common ground between evangelicals as it could. It would fight strongly for the principles of the reformation but it intended to do so from a position of centrist strength and not from the fringe. In the words of Judd and Cable, ‘they were not about to be isolated as a lunatic fringe; they were determined to be a party of comprehension, not narrowly exclusive.’

From this broad base, the ACL was able to achieve considerable political success in the Sydney synod. It did this because its relatively small actual membership remained united and because it was brilliantly directed by an even smaller executive group. It also succeeded because it was led by clergyman who had the time and inclination to attend to Church affairs. In addition, the League sponsored lectures and events on Evangelical themes, and it further revived the Evangelical newspaper the Church Record.

In the view of historians Judd and Cable the secret to the ACL’s success was its pre-selection of candidates for diocesan elections – caucusing, in other words. This was not a novelty in church affairs – indeed caucusing is of ancient provenance. What was new was that Evangelicals were doing the caucusing. And it was astutely done. The League’s policy was to pre-select not only strong Evangelicals but also to elect a proportion of High Churchmen to various diocesan positions. This somewhat disarmed the High Church opposition, who were given a share of the power but only on the terms set for them by the League. By the mid-1920s, the ACL had achieved dominance in electoral terms. The proportional representation policy helped to quieten dissent and discontent.

By the mid-1930s, however, the broad evangelical consensus under which the League had first gathered its membership had broken. At the election of Howard Mowll to the see of Sydney in April 1933, the conservative evangelicals asserted themselves over against the liberal evangelicals led by the Dean, AE Talbot and the Principal of Moore College, DJ Davies. Talbot and Davies were also the President and a Vice President of the ACL at the time. These two men now resigned from the League and set up a new, more liberal, grouping, the Anglican Fellowship. This was a real challenge to the conservative evangelicals, who now felt that something of theological importance was at stake. The liberal evangelicals were more vague about the authority of Scripture and less definite that the atoning blood of Jesus Christ was central to the gospel. The business of the synod was not merely now a matter of keeping the diocese operating smoothly. With the increasingly emergence and influence of a more liberal evangelicalism, it was now a contest about the theological commitments that would mark the Church of England in Sydney.

For the first time, the ACL not only nominated its own candidates in synod elections, it issued a how-to-vote ticket. This was an immediately successful strategy; and continued to be so throughout the 1930s, such that Anglican Fellowship completely died away. Upon the death of Principal Davies in 1935, Archbishop Mowll appointed the singularly remarkable Irishman TC Hammond – arguably the greatest intellect in the conservative evangelical world - to the principalship of Moore College. Along with these two men, the League now pursued the goal of securing the specifically conservative evangelical character of the diocese. By the mid-1950s, it could be safely said that it was a strategy that had largely succeeded... (tbc)