The bishop interviewed this time is Bishop Nick Baines, Suffragan of Croydon in Southwark diocese. Please note that Bishop Nick has impeccable evangelical credentials. His comments about Mr Coekin are extremely interesting.
The item is about 9 minutes in total, and starts about 20 minutes into this link. Better link from the BBC tomorrow.
Maybe I’m missing something, but apart from training at Trinity, Bristol, what is impeccably evangelical about the credentials of Nick Baines?
Well, he was at Holy Trinity Leicester, albeit for only a year.
Archbishop Rowan would have been wise to have acted alongside instead of against Southwark Dioces, and relied on the experience that Bishop Nick Baines and Bishop Tom Butler have of dealing with Richard Coekin. For whatever Lambeth Palace may claim, the reality is that Archbishop Rowan has undermined Southwark Diocese and the wider Church. It’s a shameful contrast with Archbishop Rowan’s continued failure to take action against Archbishop Malango’s and Bishop Kunonga’s oppression – the word is no exaggeration – of faithful Anglicans in Zimbabwe. And then there’s the matter of Lake Malawi… Archbishop Rowan’s concern for “due process” and… Read more »
In his interview + Baines notes that there are some who call themselves anglican who are ‘in reality nonconformists’ – an excellent assesment !
Sometimes consecration makes labels come unstuck!
Baines is an impeccable follower of Tom Butler, from the diocese of Leicester to Southwark, onwards and upwards!
Nick Baines ducked two important questions in his interview:
1. If the Bishop of Southwark was right to revoke Richard Coekin’s licence was the Archbishop right to make him give it back?
2. If the Bishop of Southwark’s actions were referred to as “seriously flawed”, “disproportionate”, and “inappropriate” then they weren’t reversed because of a technicality?
+Croydon said: “Some people who claim to be Anglicans are really non-conformists”… I think that in the end, most evangelicals submit to the authority of Scripture before the authority of Bishops and the church’s synods. So the further the HoB allows the church to drift away from Scriptural/Traditional faith and morality, the less conformist we will become! But the abandonment of Scripture is not Anglican.
There are some people who claim to be Anglicans who don’t even believe the historical Creeds, Bp Baines! At least non-conformists are Christians…
Nick Baines gives a partial and misleading version of the facts – as does Tom Butler’s statement on the Southwark website
The principle reason given for the decision to reverse Coekin’s suspension is that it was a disproportionate response. The technical flaws in “due process” are a secondary matter