Institution and Inspiration in the Making of Anglican Radicalism, 1919–60

The first horn of Anglican radicalism's emotional dilemma arose from the fact that most of its leadership were upper middle-class British men, who had been shaped by elite British institutions from childhood and were sincerely attached to the Church of England.Footnote ¹² A particularly pure example is John Robinson, who could count seven Anglican clergymen in his immediate family, and who was born in 1919 in the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, where his ageing father was a canon residentiary.Footnote ¹³ Robinson was baptized, his father proudly recorded, ‘in the presence of a large crowd, including 1 Bishop, 1 Dean, 2 Archdeacons, and 2 other Canons’.Footnote ¹⁴ This ecclesiastical background ensured, as his biographer notes, that Robinson ‘could not remember a time when it did not seem right for him to follow in his father's, and so many of his uncles’, footsteps’ by becoming ordained in the Church of England.Footnote ¹⁵ As was typical for boys of his class, Robinson's childhood was highly institutionalized: the Robinsons employed a nanny, and John was sent to boarding school at the age of nine.Footnote ¹⁶ From thirteen he boarded at Marlborough College in Wiltshire; from nineteen was resident at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read theology; and from twenty-one at Westcott House, Cambridge, where he completed his ordination training. In 1943 he won the Burney Studentship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he undertook doctoral research until the beginning of his curacy in 1945.Footnote ¹⁷ In 1947 he married Ruth Grace, a linguist from Liverpool and Newnham College, Cambridge, whom he had met at a Student Christian Movement meeting.Footnote ¹⁸ If elite educational institutions count as a third parent, providing housing, meals and a sense of identity – a poignant observation in Robinson's case, since his father died when he was nine, shortly after his departure for prep school – then Robinson was chiefly parented by institutions from the ages of nine to twenty-six, and from earlier if one counts the nanny. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Robinson's early career was relatively conventional for an intellectually minded Anglican clergyman. After a curacy at St Matthew Moorfields, Bristol, he became chaplain to Wells Theological College in Somerset, and then dean of Clare College, Cambridge. He was appointed suffragan bishop of Woolwich at the young age of forty because he was chosen specially by Mervyn Stockwood, the recently consecrated diocesan bishop of Southwark, under whom he had served his curacy at Bristol, and who, like Robinson, had spent the late 1950s in Cambridge.Footnote ¹⁹ Although Geoffrey Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to Stockwood on two occasions warning that Robinson should attain more age and experience before becoming a bishop, the Church of England's institutional conventions gave precedence to the diocesan bishop's choice, and Robinson was duly consecrated in 1959.Footnote ²⁰ His early elevation to the episcopacy, in other words, was chiefly due to the conventional institutional factor that he had a senior patron who knew him personally and valued his abilities.

Nick Stacey's background was less ecclesiastical, but he too was stamped by the imprint of British institutions. He was born in 1927 into a ‘comparatively privileged’ family (his father had a successful career as a City stockbroker); he had a ‘deeply religious’ nanny and from the age of seven or eight he boarded at prep school.Footnote ²¹ His parents intended him for Eton, but he insisted instead on attending the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, the naval equivalent of Sandhurst, which he joined aged thirteen, and from which he graduated at seventeen to serve on the battleship HMS Anson. While at sea he felt God's call to ordination, and he abandoned his promising naval career when he was twenty, having spent seven formative years in the Royal Navy.Footnote ²² He re-entered civilian life by reading history at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. While in the navy and at Oxford he also had a career as a sprinter, representing Great Britain in the 1950 Empire Games and the 1952 Olympic Games. After graduation Stacey prepared for ordination at Cuddesdon Theological College in Oxfordshire, where he received a spiritual training which he deeply appreciated. As he later wrote, he found ‘the daily two hours of compulsory prayer, meditation and worship a great help. I rebelled against the details of it … but it gave me an opportunity of laying what I hope were spiritual foundations.’Footnote ²³ In 1955 he married the Hon. Anne Bridgeman, daughter of the second Viscount Bridgeman, then Lord Lieutenant of Shropshire.Footnote ²⁴ After a curacy at Portsea, Hampshire, and a spell as chaplain to the bishop of Birmingham, during which he founded the sensationalist newspaper, the Birmingham Christian News, Stacey was chosen as rector of Woolwich at the young age of thirty-two, having also caught the eye of Mervyn Stockwood.Footnote ²⁵ Like Robinson, therefore, Stacey enjoyed early promotion through the established forms of Anglican patronage.

There was often a sparkle about Stacey's rebelliousness, such as his practice at Cuddesdon of maintaining an illicit bottle of sherry in his bedroom, whereas Robinson's tended to be much more earnest, as when he read a sermon by the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich in place of his own compline address while chaplain at Wells.Footnote ²⁶ Despite these rebellious streaks, however, both men clearly relished the approval of institutions. Robinson was particularly proud of having won Cambridge's Burney Prize for 1942, ‘exactly fifty years after his uncle Forbes had won it’.Footnote ²⁷ Stacey had been Chief Cadet Captain at Dartmouth, and winner of the King's Telescope, the naval equivalent of Sandhurst's Sword of Honour, and he included both pieces of information in his autobiography.Footnote ²⁸ He always regretted the fact that he had not achieved a First at Oxford, and as rector of Woolwich deliberately ensured that five of his ministry team had Firsts; when I interviewed him in 2011, he waited only a few minutes before asking if I had one.Footnote ²⁹ Consequently, when both men came to accept secular theology's critique of Anglican institutions, it caused them no little amount of soul-searching: they were rebelling partly against their upbringing, and partly against themselves.Footnote ³⁰

Whilst both Robinson and Stacey had long desired the reform of the Church of England, it was not until the very late 1950s and early 1960s that they embraced secular theology, and in both cases disillusionment with the institution they served was the central factor in their conversion. John Robinson had wished for the eschatological renewal of church and society since at least 1946, and he had been familiar with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's metanarrative of irreversible secularization since the translation into English of the latter's Letters and Papers from Prison in 1953, but he nonetheless remained confident throughout the 1950s that the Church of England could prosper in its current form.Footnote ³¹ In 1959, during his first weeks as bishop of Woolwich, he told his first cohort of confirmation candidates, ‘I believe that in England we may be at a turning of the tide.’Footnote ³² Consequently, it seems right to accept Robinson's statement in 1962 that the ‘changed convictions’ contained in Honest to God were ‘almost entirely borne in upon me by my experience since I left [Cambridge] University’.Footnote ³³ Stacey told the story rather more bluntly: in his account, he visited the Robinsons at Woolwich in 1959, and found them ‘almost as depressed as I was; they were wondering whether they had not made a ghastly mistake by leaving Cambridge’.Footnote ³⁴ Particular concerns included the rising numbers of burnt-out clergymen and the apparent alienation of Southwark's working class from the Church of England.Footnote ³⁵ Although Robinson had been developing his critique of conventional Christianity since the late 1940s, it was not until his disappointing experiences in Woolwich that he began to demand a radical restructuring of Britain's churches.Footnote ³⁶

Stacey, similarly, began his path to theological radicalism as a result of his frustrating experiences as chaplain to the bishop of Birmingham. On his own account, published in the Birmingham Mail in 1959, ‘I came to Birmingham a callow conformist from the South. I leave next week for South London a roaring nonconformist and unrepentant rebel.’Footnote ³⁷ As he noted in his autobiography, he was particularly incensed by the Birmingham churches’ apparent inability to rationalize their resources, and by the consequent necessity for overstretched incumbents to spend much of their energies fund-raising.Footnote ³⁸ Given these difficulties, he argued in his farewell sermon in 1960, it was necessary to create a ‘new-look Church’, which would reform both its theology and its institutional structures.Footnote ³⁹ ‘Only a knave or a nitwit’, he concluded, ‘would fail to agree that an agonizing appraisal of the way the Gospel is presented, and the organization and the strategy of the Church, is urgently and desperately necessary.’Footnote ⁴⁰ For both men, therefore, disappointment with the Church of England had caused their inspiration and their institution to fall out of alignment. Their dilemma was how they were going to reshape the institution that had so profoundly shaped them.

Institution and Inspiration in ‘Early’ Anglican Radicalism, 1960–5

Whilst both men felt that their institutional experience implied a need for change, it was their inspiration that told them what this change should look like. In Honest to God, and the widely-read Observer article that accompanied it, Robinson drew on Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison to articulate a fully-fledged ‘secular’ critique of the Church of England.Footnote ⁴¹ Prior to the 1960s, British conventional wisdom had typically insisted that all societies need a collective ‘religion’, and that societies rejecting Christianity would eventually succumb to murderous political ‘religions’ such as Nazism and Stalinism.Footnote ⁴² Consequently, Robinson's intervention was extremely radical: he argued that God was abolishing humanity's need for ‘religion’ altogether, such that the decline of the churches was evidence, not of Britain's increasing vulnerability to totalitarianism, but of the irreversible rise of a new ‘secular’ humanity.Footnote ⁴³ The coming of permanent ‘secularization’, Robinson insisted, was God's way of telling Christians to abandon supernaturalism and reorient themselves towards radical social justice, so that they could join ‘modern secular man’ in creating a glorious new heavenly society.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the field of doctrine, Robinson argued that this reorientation meant abandoning the classical theist doctrine of God in favour of a panentheist alternative: it was this dimension of his argument, often critiqued as atheist, which provoked most of the immediate media controversy.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet Robinson also spelt out the implications of his secular agenda for Britain's churches, insisting that through ‘secularization’ God was confronting every denomination with a stark choice between pursuing social justice immediately or suffering catastrophic decline.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the new ‘secular world’, Robinson argued, quoting Bonhoeffer,

Whilst some Christians might experience emotional tension regarding this reimagination of God and the churches, he conceded – ‘inevitably it feels like being orphaned’ – it remained the case that all these adaptations were ultimately unavoidable, because rapid and irreversible ‘secularization’ was God's will.Footnote ⁴⁸ Robinson's intervention was a radical and highly public critique of the established institutional forms of British Christianity.

The irony, however, was that Robinson's ability to project the metanarrative of irreversible ‘secularization’ into the national media was closely related to his status as a bishop in the Church of England, which during the 1950s, as Dianne Kirby notes, was ‘reputedly the national conscience’ and ‘a significant opinion-former’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Robinson already enjoyed national name-recognition as the Anglican bishop who had defended D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in the Regina v. Penguin Books obscenity trial of 1960.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the predominantly Christian culture of early 1960s Britain, it was both newsworthy and controversial for a bishop to attack classical theism, and consequently Robinson's episcopal status was a central focus of the ensuing media furore.Footnote ⁵¹ Public interest in Honest to God was such that by December 1963 it had sold 350,000 copies, and sales of the English-language edition eventually reached over a million; it was also translated into seventeen other languages.Footnote ⁵² Robinson demonstrated an acute awareness of his episcopal office while writing Honest to God, mentioning it twice in the preface's first two sentences, and signing the preface ‘John Woolwich’, the institutional form of his name with which he signed all his episcopal correspondence.Footnote ⁵³ The front cover of The New Reformation? (1965), the follow-up to Honest to God, includes a large black-and-white photograph of Robinson wearing a modern suit, clerical collar, pectoral cross and episcopal ring, an image that simultaneously emphasizes Robinson's modernity and his institutional credentials.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the uproar that followed Honest to God, Robinson's institutional status also protected him from the many demands for his resignation or defrocking; as Michael Ramsey, archbishop of Canterbury, was keenly aware, the Church of England's institutional procedures ensured that sacking an Anglican bishop was extremely difficult, and Ramsey was in any case keen to avoid anything smacking of what he referred to as a ‘heresy hunt’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite the fact that Robinson was radically critiquing the established church, therefore, his very status within that church amplified his message and shielded him from professional repercussions.

As in Robinson's case, the institutional procedures of the Church of England facilitated Stacey's activism in the early 1960s. Once Stacey had been appointed rector of Woolwich by Bishop Stockwood, he was able to use the established right of the parson's freehold to reform Woolwich's parish ministry without outside interference. Acting on his own initiative, Stacey raised extra funds through networking and tabloid journalism, and was able to employ at his own expense five curates, at a time when most parishes would have been fortunate to have employed two. Like Robinson, Stacey was enthused by secular theology's vision of God calling the church to transform the world. He converted one of the galleries of St Mary's, Woolwich, into a coffee-bar and lunchtime café, in the hope that ordinary Londoners would use it during the week: this was officially opened by Princess Margaret in 1961. He made available the crypt of St Mary's to a local branch of the Samaritans, the suicide helpline charity founded by another Anglican clergyman, Chad Varah, in 1953; and he organized a highly successful bingo club, which gave him valuable opportunities to meet local people.Footnote ⁵⁶ He also orchestrated a number of publicity coups, one of which involved him pulling the English Cheese Maiden for 1960 around Beresford Market in a pushcart. The point of all these activities, he explained, was to transform Woolwich by enabling the church to serve the world. ‘One of the tragedies of the situation to-day’, he noted, ‘is the way that Christianity has been separated from real life instead of permeating every aspect of it. Having the parish church in constant use will, I hope, make it the power house of the whole place. It can really become the great centre for everybody in Woolwich who really cares.’Footnote ⁵⁷ Stacey's hopes of creating an institutional ‘power house’ were so high that he privately set himself the target of increasing his congregation six- or eight-fold within five years.Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus Stacey resolved the tensions between his institution and his inspiration temporarily by anticipating their resolution in the immediate future.

Similarly, Robinson spent the months following Honest to God campaigning for the Church of England to transform itself. ‘Any image [of God] can become an idol’, he wrote in his Observer article of 1963. ‘I believe that Christians must go through the agonizing process in this generation of detaching themselves’ from the ‘idol’ of classical theism.Footnote ⁵⁹ After two frenetic years of speaking engagements, Robinson published The New Reformation? as an ecclesiological follow-up to Honest to God; its headline argument was that ‘only a radically reshaped church … can match the rapid secularization of the world’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Robinson's view, local churches should be so invested in social activism that they should spend 95 per cent of their time working in the community, and meet as a gathered church for only two weekends and one continuous fortnight each year.Footnote ⁶¹ As in 1963, Robinson predicted a new and liberating era for his institution if his inspiration were to be put into practice. ‘I believe’, he concluded, ‘in a new Reformation as an exciting and divine possibility’.Footnote ⁶² Like Stacey, consequently, Robinson eased the tensions between inspiration and institution in his own mind temporarily by anticipating the imminent transformation of the Church of England.

Inspiration and Institution in ‘Late’ Anglican Radicalism, 1965–70

The problem with this strategy, however, was that most of the 1960s Church of England did not want to be reformed in the manner suggested by the Anglican radicals, and by the mid-1960s this reality was beginning to become unavoidable.Footnote ⁶³ By 1967, the radical journal New Christian could freely concede that ‘the great majority in all the churches form part of a huge inert mass which is complacent and highly resistant to change. Reformers represent only a small minority and realism demands that this should be recognised.’Footnote ⁶⁴ Since this realization destroyed Anglican radicals’ existing method of reconciling institution and inspiration, it forced them to seek new ways of coping with this tension.

In Stacey's case, despair at transforming the Church of England had set in by late 1964, and in December he wrote a widely read article for The Observer's colour supplement, entitled ‘A Mission's Failure: The Story of One Church in Pagan Britain’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although Stacey had doubled the size of his congregation within five years, his inspiration had led him to expect a six- or eight-fold increase, and it was for this reason that he concluded that ‘we have quite obviously failed’.Footnote ⁶⁶ His response, outlined in a further Observer article published in May 1965, was to double down on his existing strategy, insisting that Britain's churches should immerse themselves yet further in the world. The churches, he argued, needed to undergo a ‘dramatic dismantling’ if they were to adapt to the demands of ‘secularization’. There should be a ‘greatly reduced number of church buildings’, and ninety per cent of clergymen ‘should be encouraged to take secular work’. This further integration of the church into the world, Stacey believed, would cause the church to ‘lose its life in order to save it’: the institution could survive, but only by killing itself and becoming a ‘resurrected Church’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Even in this example, however, the irony remained that Stacey's status as an Anglican clergyman was undoubtedly helpful in enabling him to publish so frequently on religious matters in the national press.

In the mid-1960s, Stacey put this new strategy into practice, reorienting his parish ministry away from ecclesiastical duties and towards secular social activism. Whilst one of the curates stayed on as sub-rector to manage the parish, the rest of the Woolwich team took secular jobs, which in most cases, including Stacey's, meant ceasing to draw a salary from the Church of England.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Methodist minister, Ray Billington, who had joined Stacey's team in 1964, started work as a lecturer in Liberal Studies at a local college of further education.Footnote ⁶⁹ Another curate went to teach religious studies at a local comprehensive, and another became a full-time youth worker. Stacey himself focused on social activism, especially as chief executive of Quadrant Housing Association, a start-up charity which bought old houses and converted them into flats for underprivileged families. In December 1965, largely due to Stacey's personal initiative, Quadrant became the first housing scheme to enter a partnership with Greater London Council, which enabled it to expand at the rate of between 200 and 400 flats each year.Footnote ⁷⁰ Ironically, this achievement required the patient handling of complex secular institutions: as Stacey later recalled, ‘there were miles of red tape to disentangle … I cannot believe that [the GLC's] feathers had ever been stroked so lovingly, or its officials smiled at so sweetly, as they were by me.’Footnote ⁷¹ Stacey also made further attempts to merge his parish church with the outside world, such as by putting a Citizens’ Advice Bureau in a side aisle and a disco in the crypt, which was officially opened by the Duchess of Kent, and by sponsoring a Family Planning Association clinic in a nearby homeless hostel.Footnote ⁷² As The Times reported in January 1967, the disco was run by Paul Jobson, a twenty-seven-year old curate, who had a ‘tearaway hairstyle’, but who always wore his cassock: ‘for Mr Stacey, the opening of the discothèque is only one more stage in the long journey towards the final integration of church and society’.Footnote ⁷³ By pursuing his existing strategy with increased rigour, Stacey restored his own hope that his inspiration and his institution might one day be realigned. ‘I am deeply convinced’, he wrote to The Times in February 1967, ‘that with imaginative and courageous leadership and by wholesale rationalization … the life of the church could still be transformed.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Since Robinson did not have a parish freehold, he was not able to reorient his local institutional structures in the same fashion as Stacey, but he nonetheless made two important modifications to his public ministry. First, as he sensed the unwillingness of the Church of England to transform itself, he increased the urgency and severity of his prophecies of the Church of England's collapse. ‘It seems to me clear’, he declared in the radical Anglican journal Prism in September 1965, moving beyond even his recently published The New Reformation?, ‘that we have very much less time than I would have reckoned even six months ago … I believe the pattern is more and more likely to be one of death and resurrection.’Footnote ⁷⁵ In 1966, similarly, he wrote to Archbishop Ramsey warning that ‘the straws in the wind point to the near collapse of our traditional structures in considerable areas over the next ten years … we are approaching, if we have not passed, the point of no return.’Footnote ⁷⁶ ‘The next five or ten years, I suspect,’ he told a Princeton audience in 1968, ‘will tell which way the Church must die.’Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘Certainly’, he concluded in 1969, looking back on his episcopal ministry, ‘I would now freely speak of the death and resurrection of the Church, rather than simply of its resurrection and renewal, in a way that I regarded as irresponsible when I first became a bishop in 1959.’Footnote ⁷⁸ As in Stacey's case, this language of institutional ‘death and resurrection’ allowed Robinson to keep his faith in the eventual reconvergence of his inspiration and his institution, thus enabling him to bear the disappointment of the Church of England's ongoing resistance to his ideas.

Alongside these heightened prophecies of Anglican collapse, Robinson also spent the late 1960s asking the Church of England to release him from its institutional constraints, so that he could have more time for research, writing and public speaking. In August 1964 he wrote to his diocesan bishop, Mervyn Stockwood, to ask if the diocese could appoint another suffragan bishop to cover most of his pastoral duties.Footnote ⁷⁹ ‘I don't in the least want to pull out of Southwark,’ he wrote, but ‘I feel I very badly need a spell in which I can take stock, think things through, and try and take further many of the things that have been left unclarified.’ If this were not possible, he asked whether he could be a part-time bishop, or take a leave of absence without pay, or at least be granted a decent sabbatical.Footnote ⁸⁰ ‘There is a part of me which views with horror the prospect of spending the rest of my life as the maintenance-man or manager of a religious club’, he wrote in a further letter to Stockwood in March 1966, in a passage that clearly reveals Robinson wrestling with the emotional and strategic dilemmas of combining radical inspiration with an Anglican institution. ‘The other half recognizes that we have got to go from where we are to where we want to be by changes in the structures, and that there is no escaping taking responsibility for it.’ Yet ‘the demands of the organization are so consuming that it is all one can do not to get sucked down by them … I am guiltily aware that I spend a very limited amount of my (seven day) week being Bishop of Woolwich.’Footnote ⁸¹

A contributing factor to these requests was Robinson's back pain, which first flared up in the early 1960s, but which rendered him essentially housebound for the last two months of 1965, and for the last six weeks of 1966, following the surgical removal of two discs from his back.Footnote ⁸² ‘An obvious course would be resign’, he reflected in a letter to Archbishop Ramsey in February 1966, but ‘I am deeply attached to my work in Southwark,’ and leaving the episcopacy ‘would also remove the platform which has come to give me most of my other opportunities … I see nothing creative in simply being in the ecclesiastical wilderness.’Footnote ⁸³ And so he petitioned Ramsey, in the event unsuccessfully, to stay on as bishop of Woolwich but to be spared most of his pastoral duties.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 1969, realizing that the Church of England could provide the occasional sabbatical but nothing more, Robinson attempted to fulfil his quest for institutional freedom by resigning to take up the post of dean of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In 1968, Stacey also began searching for a new post because he felt that the parish of Woolwich's ecclesiastical structures were preventing him from undertaking further radical innovation.Footnote ⁸⁵ ‘The frustration and sadness of the Christian radicals’, he wrote in a Sunday Times article in 1969, ‘is not caused by the hardness of secular man's heart but by the tragic failure of the Church to break out of the strait-jacket of an outmoded tradition.’Footnote ⁸⁶ As Stacey and his curates moved on to other roles, most of his pastoral innovations at Woolwich folded.Footnote ⁸⁷ Having been advised by Stockwood that he was unlikely to obtain another ecclesiastical post, Stacey considered a range of options, including working for BBC Television; he speculatively applied to become deputy director of Oxfam, having spotted the advertisement in a rubbish bin, and was genuinely surprised to be the successful candidate.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a pattern that echoed his experiences at Woolwich, Stacey tried and failed to persuade Oxfam's board to reorient its activities towards overt political campaigning for social justice, and resigned in 1970: in this respect, at least, the Church of England's institutional structures had given Stacey more freedom than Oxfam's had done.Footnote ⁸⁹ The departures of Robinson and Stacey from Woolwich prefaced the wider disintegration of Anglican radicalism in the early 1970s, as large sections of the movement despaired of transforming the Church of England.Footnote ⁹⁰ New Christian wound itself up in 1970, as did ‘Parish and People’. By 1973, according to one survey, twelve per cent of Anglican clergymen ordained between 1951 and 1965 had either taken secular occupations, resigned holy orders, or both.Footnote ⁹¹ The ideas of Robinson and Stacey did have some impact on the wider Church of England: the evangelical Keele Congress of 1967 discussed its own version of Christian ‘radicalism’, and many radical Anglican ideas, such as house-churches, church-cafés and women's ordination, were taken up and eventually implemented by other groups.Footnote ⁹² Nonetheless, once the possibility of transforming the Church of England seemed lost, Anglican radicals would always find it difficult to reconcile their inspiration and their institution.

Aftermath, 1970–85

Whilst the disintegration of 1960s Anglican radicalism obviated the movement's strategic dilemmas, the emotional dilemmas of individual radicals still remained. In the early 1970s the Church of England still filled posts mostly through taps on the shoulder, but neither Stacey nor Robinson were offered further appointments; the institution had silently closed ranks against them.Footnote ⁹³ Writing in 1971, Stacey expressed his disappointment not to have been offered another ecclesiastical post. He had not left the Church of England, he insisted; it had left him.Footnote ⁹⁴ ‘The Church may reject me,’ he commented, ‘but I cannot reject it … My love of and my commitment to the Church remain unshaken because of my belief in God’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Neither Stacey nor Robinson were ever sufficiently disenchanted with the Church of England to resign their orders.

In the event, Stacey launched a successful career in social service management, becoming director first of Ealing Borough Social Services in 1971 and then of Kent County Council Social Services in 1974, acquiring oversight of a large secular institution rather than a small Christian one. As his colleague and chronicler Don Brand notes, Stacey found that ‘his job as Director of Social Services gave him opportunities to “build the kingdom of heaven on earth” which the church had denied him’, and it was for this reason that Stacey's critiques of ‘religious’ institutions did not always apply to their secular counterparts.Footnote ⁹⁶ Another consideration was that the public sector's access to state funding allowed Stacey to pursue social activism on a much greater scale: as director of Kent Social Services, he was responsible for 6,000 staff and 50,000 clients in a catchment area of 1.5 million people.Footnote ⁹⁷ Under Stacey's leadership, Kent Social Services earned a reputation for innovative reform, especially by pioneering professional fostering schemes, and community care for the elderly, schemes which in both cases removed clients from the direct care of institutions.Footnote ⁹⁸ At the same time, Stacey's irregular respect for institutional procedures sometimes caused trouble, and questions have been raised subsequently about his handling of child abuse allegations.Footnote ⁹⁹ Stacey himself seems to have found this position one of the most congenial of his life: he remained in post for eleven years until resigning in 1985 aged fifty-eight, partly due to frustration with the County Council's insistence on cost-cutting and increasing central control.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Perhaps surprisingly for someone with his leadership pedigree, he never held another appointment of comparable seniority; instead, he split his time amongst various part-time roles, undertaking social services consultancy, being a Six Preacher at Canterbury Cathedral, chairing the East Thames Housing group and serving as chaplain to sex offenders in Maidstone Prison.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Throughout these years, Stacey remained both frustrated and expectant about the Church of England. Even in 2012, in a letter to The Times, he reiterated the language of ecclesiastical death and resurrection, prophesying that whilst Anglicans and English Catholics were both facing ‘unstoppable terminal decline’, ‘out of their churches’ death an inclusive Church will rise, uncluttered with much of the baggage of the past’.Footnote ¹⁰²

By contrast, as the radical Anglican moment faded into memory, John Robinson found the interaction of inspiration and institution increasingly difficult: his time at Trinity College, Cambridge was not a happy one.Footnote ¹⁰³ A first disappointment was the loss of the platform that he had enjoyed as a bishop: ‘not until he left South London’, his biographer notes, ‘did he realise … how much he had grown used to being consulted by the media’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ A second disappointment was the realization that Trinity, although not a religious institution, still placed considerable demands upon his time. These demands complicated his family life, such that from the early 1970s Ruth Robinson lived full-time at their house in Reigate, Surrey, where John joined her during vacations.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In an opposite trajectory to Stacey, Robinson deliberately remained at the periphery of his institution: he refused to be a tutor, rarely lunched or dined with the fellows, ‘studiously avoided College administration and politics’, and refused to serve on the College Council, a powerful committee that oversaw much of the day-to-day business of the college.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Given these tensions, it is significant that Robinson did not simply abandon institutions and resign from his post, which his royalties from Honest to God would presumably have made possible.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Instead, from the early 1970s he began searching for a prestigious institutional appointment outside Trinity, but was unsuccessful, being in the unfortunate position of having interrupted his studies too frequently for the academics, and having disturbed the peace too frequently for the clergymen.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In 1974 he was disappointed not to be offered Cambridge's Lady Margaret Professorship of Divinity. In 1975 he cautiously put out feelers to become bishop of Bristol, which would eventually have brought with it membership of the House of Lords.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Late that year he expressed interest in becoming dean of Canterbury.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In February 1978 he applied for Cambridge's Regius Professorship of Divinity, but was not appointed, the post going to Henry Chadwick; in 1980 he asked Mervyn Stockwood to make enquiries about any full-time job in the Church of England.Footnote ¹¹¹ Perhaps to relieve these disappointments, Robinson also spent more time during the 1970s reflecting on his spiritual heritage. In 1980 he published an autobiographical essay entitled ‘The Roots of a Radical’, in which he meditated on his ecclesiastical origins.Footnote ¹¹² At his final home at Arncliffe, Yorkshire, he kept a substantial collection of Robinson family papers, photographs and memorabilia in his cellar.Footnote ¹¹³ Robinson's life was cut short by cancer in December 1983 when he was sixty-four; an establishment man to the last, he arranged for his papers to be deposited in Lambeth Palace Library.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Whilst Stacey enjoyed some success in resolving his personal tensions between inspiration and institution, Robinson's deep rootedness in his ecclesiastical pedigree seems to have made these dilemmas emotionally more difficult.