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Bray Day at Westminster Abbey
On 15th February, SPCK and USPG: Anglicans in World Mission came together at Westminster Abbey to commemorate their common founder, the Revd Dr Thomas Bray, on the 280th anniversary of his death. The Rt Revd John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford, celebrated the Eucharist in St Margaret's Church, with a congregation of staff and trustees from both societies. The Revd Canon Dr Nicholas Sagovsky preached.
After the service a lunch reception was held in the Jerusalem Chamber.
It was a splendid occasion, greatly enjoyed by all. We extend our grateful thanks to the Dean and Chapter and to the Rector of St Margaret's for their hospitality.
Bray Day Sermon by Canon Nicholas Sagovsky
Thomas Bray was a remarkable man, an Anglican saint whose legacy lives on in an extraordinary way. As a parish priest, he served mainly in two parishes: from 1690, Sheldon in Warwickshire, and, from 1708, St Botolph, Aldgate in London. His life was opened to wider horizons when he was appointed the Commissary of the Bishop of London to the American colony of Maryland, which had been founded to be Roman Catholic, but then became open to Anglican ministry. In 1695, the Bishop of London gave Bray the task of developing Anglican church structures in Maryland. It was an inspired appointment.
At this time Bray was in his early forties. He had already shown his concern for Christian education by writing Catechetical Lectures which were based on his own teaching methods and were intended to help hard-pressed parish clergy. The book proved a huge success. Bray arranged for a number of clergy to go to Maryland before he himself visited. They were mostly poor and they could not afford to buy books for themselves. In 1695, he founded his first library in the United States at Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, to be a resource for parish clergy. By the time he died, he had founded 39 libraries in America, some with more than a thousand volumes.
Bray then began to do the same thing in England, where there was hardly less need. In his lifetime, he founded more than eighty libraries in all parts of the country. In so doing, he revived the life of the rural deaneries - Bray had the wit to see that care of a library would bring isolated clergy together to share their experiences and to work on common projects. He made strenuous efforts to persuade Parliament and the King to provide endowment but these came to nothing. On 6 March 1698, with the support of the Bishop of London, Bray founded The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Its aim was to improve the quality of Christian teaching by encouraging the foundation of libraries, publishing and distributing books and other resources, supporting charity schools, and also providing missionaries who would serve settlers and natives in the colonies. After visits by Bray to Bridewell and Newgate prisons, SPCK became deeply involved in prison work. As a society, it supported the development of parish workhouses to provide employment for the destitute and voluntary hospitals to help those who could not afford heath care.
In 1701, with the mission of SPCK growing rapidly, Bray decided that its overseas work should be developed separately, and on a different model. On 16 June 1701, a Charter was granted by which The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts was established. This was not a voluntary society with a subscribing membership like SPCK but something more like an overseas mission agency of the Church of England. It held its first meeting in Lambeth Palace and the Archbishop of Canterbury became its first President. The aim of SPG was to enable the Church of England to send clergy to the English colonies ‘for the instruction of the King's loving subjects in the Christian religion' and to evangelize the native peoples there. It was supported by collections from the parishes of England. At a time when the Church of England had no national structures, SPG began to create bonds which united the bishops and the dioceses in support of mission.
Towards the end of his life, Bray became increasingly concerned for the continuation of the work he had started. He formed other charities and trusts to push on with the work of founding and supporting libraries for the clergy at home and overseas. He also set up a foundation to support schools in North America for what were then called ‘negroes', and was thus an early supporter of education for African Americans. Six weeks before his death, appalled by the conditions in Whitechapel Prison, Bray suggested to General James Oglethorpe, one of his Associates, that there should be a new colony in America where ex-prisoners could have a fresh start. This led in 1732 to the foundation of Georgia, just two years after Bray's death.
Bray's was an extraordinary fruitful life. As a parish priest, he had an eye for the need of his day, and once he saw need, he dedicated himself to doing something about it, principally by working with others, and encouraging them to work together, but also by hugely generous giving on his own part.
Throughout his life, Bray was concerned with Christian education. Not quite as we might be, because a primary concern was to refute the errors of ‘Atheists, Deists and Socinians' as well as of ‘Papists, Dissenters ...and Quakers'! Bray's vision was that there should be an educated, thinking clergy - something we very much need today, in every part of the Anglican world.
He was consistently concerned with the plight of prisoners. He did all he could to provide comfort, education, and hope, and, on release, employment and a new start. Last week I was hearing some statistics about the UK prison population. In January 1995, the total prison population was 49,500. In January 2009, it was 82,100 an (increase of 65% in 14 years). Many of those in our prisons have problems with literacy, education and, in a falling jobs market, employment. Just as in Bray's day, the need is there. SPCK is currently developing attractive new literacy materials for use in prisons to help those who are seeking to improve their lives and their prospects for the future.
And overseas there is, of course, an ocean of need. USPG: Anglicans in World Mission has morphed from being an agency of the Church of England to being an agency of the Anglican Churches worldwide. It now works to meet a range of needs -
from education for laypeople in Myanmar and clergy in Peru, to providing food for prisoners in Zimbabwe and developing communications for the church in Botswana.
Both SPCK and USPG are also doing something else, something of vital importance at the present time. Through our work in partnership with Anglicans round the world, we are helping to bind together the Anglican Communion at a time of severe strain. Together we have a crucial role as we go on discovering what it is to belong to a worldwide network of churches, a communion for the twenty-first century.
Communion is one of the words that is used to translate the Greek New Testament work, koinonia - as in ‘the communion of the Holy Spirit'. Another word used in the Latin translations of the New Testament for koinonia is societas. This is why we heard the readings that were chosen for this morning. In the first, Paul writes to the argumentative Corinthians:
‘God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose.'
The Corinthians have been called into the fellowship, the communion, the society of the Lord, so he appeals to them to be united in the same mind and the same purpose. The words ‘fellowship' or ‘communion' are often used to suggest something intangible, not concrete. Our Gospel reading, though, suggests something very concrete: the business enterprise of Zebedee and Sons, fish merchants - with nets, boats, and a trade in fishes. We heard that James and John had gone into partnership with Simon, and that they had a bad night. If they did not remain united in the same mind and purpose, they weren't going to catch fish, let alone, when Jesus called them, to catch people.
Of course, there's a lesson here for the whole Church, but there's also a lesson for us. Thomas Bray had the wisdom to found societies, not to compete with the Church but to perform special tasks within the Church. He wanted small groups of Christians to share with him in a particular vision which had been formed out of compassion for human need. He must have been an inspiring leader, but he was not a one-man band. He managed to work with others with such extraordinary success that he transformed the life of the Church of England, and that of the Church worldwide. There is great wisdom in the ‘S' of SPCK and of USPG - wisdom for which we give thanks today. We are sister societies, we are united in mind and purpose, our aim is, in the best possible way, to ‘catch people' and to play our part within the wider communion of Anglicans, and of all Christians as we seek to build one another up in Christ. Today, as we think about the extraordinary legacy of Thomas Bray, and the contemporary challenges to which he would have responded with such compassion and practical wisdom, let us give thanks to his Lord and ours and pledge ourselves anew to the extraordinary work of the Societies which he founded.
The Revd Canon Dr Nicholas Sagovsky
For biographical information about Bray, I am much indebted to the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: University Press, 2004-10) by Leonard W. Cowie. There is a useful summary article by Arthur Middleton (2003) on the Project Canterbury website: http://anglicanhistory.org/essays/middleton/bray.pdf (accessed 14 February 2010).
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