This summer, an Anglican priest met a Young man in his parish on holiday and decided to baptise him by mutual agreement.

The Revd Daniel French tells an encouraging story worth sharing from The Conservative Woman: ‘Thought crimes of an anti-woke vicar’.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine:

I pen this as an ordinary English vicar of 25 years, who runs a parish in a stunning seaside town but finds himself increasingly bewildered with the direction of travel of his home denomination …

As Ben braved Church for the first time in his adult life while here in Salcombe [Devon] on holiday I cornered him at the end of the service. During the liturgy he sat the front and seemed curiously engaged while simultaneously lost. After he shared his incredible testimony of coming to Christ in the past few months I sensed an urgency for baptism. And so days later we met at the beach and got on with it.

This phenomenon seems to be a post-lockdown one:

Young adults like Ben give me hope. He tells me he wants to work unequivocally for Christ and he doesn’t care what the pushback is. He is typical of men and women who say that they have migrated from New Atheism, psychedelics, Wicca, Marxism or whatever and awoken to a post-lockdown world which feels decidedly creepy, evil, a new Dark Age hanging over the West. They mostly come to God not through the light but repelled by the darkness.

The Church of England does not normally do immersion baptisms, but perhaps Mr French and Ben felt it was the right thing to do in this case:

Submerging Ben, 29, fully into the seawater I sense something malignant leave him, a dark force. It’s difficult to describe, but when a person is under a spiritual oppression you know it. By the third invocation of the Trinity, his baptism complete, he emerges soaking, misty-eyed, panting like a man who’d completed a marathon. ‘It’s all gone, you are free.’ The words come to me unplanned. He nods, grinning and repeating: ‘I know!’

Daniel French co-hosts the podcast Irreverend. I am not familiar with it, but he tells us of Ben and others like him:

He is however one of thousands of young adults who have quietly reached out to me and my co-hosts, Dr Jamie Franklin and the Rev Tom Pelham, of the weekly podcast Irreverend, with their own extraordinary stories. The podcast began as a knee-jerk reaction to the lockdowns and it’s gone from strength to strength. We are three vicars musing on faith issues and current affairs and though this shouldn’t be that controversial I suspect we are on borrowed time before getting closed down or cancelled. Despite this we regularly top the podcast charts for religion in the UK. 

Irreverend’s USP is our modest traditional and orthodox views and anti-woke mischief; what used to be called in the good old days ‘mainstream’ Christianity or, if you are a catechised Anglican, the Bible, the Creeds and the 39 Articles. Such religious views are now to be shunned apparently, dangerous as they are. Many vicars who hold similar views keep their head down. I am anticipating that day when dozens of police swoop in and surround the vicarage to arrest me for my own thought crimes, perhaps for misgendering someone on Twitter/X. I bet it will be another vicar who grasses me up too. The Church has of recent encouraged a type of zealous progressive cleric who sees nothing wrong in trashing the reputation of any opposition. 

He says many Bens find a less welcome reception in Anglican churches:

My nagging concern is: what if this young man had stepped through the doors of a less receptive church that Sunday? What message would this aspiring Christian have heard? From our mailbag I can tell you that hundreds are laughed away by vicars. It’s tragic. The comments can be so scornful too. ‘We don’t do that supernatural stuff any more’ … Of course, there are a mass of excellent hardworking clergy on the front lines of our parishes but it doesn’t help when the more wacky get all the headlines. How is telling your flock that Jesus was non-binary, never rose from the dead and his mother wasn’t a virgin supposed to help our mission? 

On September 4, 2023, I wrote about the depressing survey of Anglican priests showing that most of them want the Church of England to adopt worldly ideas, because their lives are too stressful supporting biblical ideals (see the end of this post).

Of the survey, French says:

A front-page Times survey of 1,200 clergy demonstrated how a good number of my confreres are captured by the liberal narrative. The implication is that they now have the upper hand. Social media was abuzz with gleeful liberals saying: ‘It’s our time!’ Paradoxically, for all the golden utopian promises, their version of Christianity is running out of steam. Liberal churches die faster than any other brand. They give no reason to join, they make no demands, so why turn up? For the young progressive types (who hold Church as irredeemable, toxic, heteronormative, patriarchal) this is just another reason not to turn up. We might as well have huge banners outside our church porches saying: ‘Nothing worth seeing here.’ 

These progressive clergy know this deep down. The same survey highlights how many are ready to throw in the towel (or cassock). Revolutions are by their nature exhausting and all too often consume their own young. I’ve seen it time and again; earnest priests who have turned their job into a stipended social work with a dollop of ‘spirituality’ eventually burn out, or retire early as ‘post-Christian’. They’ve lost the fire. Their religion has pooh-poohed the transcendent into a flat decaffeinated version of Christianity …  

Indeed. What’s the point of that? There isn’t one, which is why people stay at home tucked up in bed on Sunday mornings.

One of French’s conclusions is this:

As a rule only conservative churches grow in the postmodern world. I defy anyone to show conflicting stats.

I couldn’t agree more.

I wish the newly-baptised Ben every blessing and grace in his Christian journey. May all continued blessings go to the Revd Mr French and his co-presenters of Irreverend in saving souls.