Swimming in the deep end ...

The Inclusive Evangelical convenors are grateful to Mthr Arwen Folkes for permission to post her reflection here. She very honestly shares her experience of engaging with expressions of the evangelical tradition in the Church of England at this time. Someone once wrote that ‘the last thing we realise about ourselves is our effect’. This is a tough read but offered by a critical friend. It is an appeal for a greater self-awareness and thoughtful depth. We publish this here not to attack fellow evangelicals, nor to apply the metaphor without question, but because we recognise her concerns. We believe the evangelical tradition in the Church of England needs a renewing. In a few months time Inclusive Evangelical Convenors are publishing a book – Evangelical and Inclusive – a future and a hope. In it we seek to offer a vision of a more open, generous and inclusive evangelical tradition within the life and challenges of our emerging church.

Many years ago, during my discernment process, a conversation turned to the breadth of the Anglican tradition. Someone older and wiser than me remarked, “It is the shallow waters of the pool that always make the most noise.” I have never forgotten those words. Their truth is being borne out in our current time, when some of the loudest voices in our Church seem content to splash about in the shallows. There, amid the noise, hermeneutics, homiletics, and theology are too often reduced to something distressingly thin.

I fear for some of my campaigning conservative evangelical brothers and sisters. I fear they have lost sight of the deep end and forgotten the joy of learning to swim freely in the vast and generous sea of God. Instead, they insist that those who venture into deeper waters have lost their way, and try to drag us back to the shallows, where the doggy paddle of literalism is the only stroke permitted.

At General Synod, I often find myself asking: How small is your God? It is a question born not of anger but of grief. I have heard modernisms dressed up as tradition, literal moralism mistaken for orthodoxy, and in all of it, an astonishing blindness to the rotten fruit such distortions bear. Few of the early Christians would have recognised this way of practising the faith. To hang the whole of salvation on the nature of human relationships is perilously close to heresy. How small must one’s God be to imagine that human love could threaten divine holiness or undo redemption? It is not only incredible but tragic.

I sometimes watch, with sadness, as the self-appointed defenders of God stand firm in their certainties, as if the Almighty needed protection from His own creation. In truth, they have lost their way – not because they are faithless, but because they have mistaken control for conviction and noise for depth.

Increasingly, I find myself welcoming post-evangelicals who have outgrown the shallows. Life, in all its mess and mercy, has made the pool too small to hold their humanity. Instead of being cast out, they have swum upward and outward – to the deep end – where mystery and unknowing, silence and sacrament, become gifts rather than threats. There, they discover the God who truly walked among us: the One who meets us not in fear but in freedom, not in certainty but in communion.

The beauty of Anglican faith lies in the holistic dance of Scripture, tradition, and reason – each speaking to experience with grace, charity, and love. It is not shallow. It is not new. It is the deep, living current of the early Church, flowing still, calling us to swim further in.

Mthr Arwen Folkes is the Vicar of Eastbourne and a member of General Synod. This article has also appeared on. https://viamedia.news/2025/10/25/swimming-in-the-deep-end/