Anglican Eirenicon : The Concept of Churchmanship in the Quest for Christian Unity

Written with a life-time's worth of experience, this is a thoughtful and good-humoured attempt to analyse and to bridge the divisions within the modern Church. Eirenicon is an obscure word, defined as a proposal tending to make peace. In this ambitious work, Fitch focuses upon the root causes of the greatest challenge to Christianity today its crippling disunity in the face of relentless secularist attack. Analysing the Anglican Church from its origins in the 1530s to the Lambeth Conference of 2008 and beyond, Fitch identifies the primary issues of disagreement as owing to the division of the church along four cardinal points. On a compass, which he labels the Fitch Ecclesiometer, High Church Anglo-Catholics disagreeing with Low Church Evangelicals, and open-minded Broad Churchmen at odds with their traditionalist Narrow Church brethren, are opposed to each other respectively. Fitch acknowledges these differences, while attempting to define a distinctive route to an Anglican eirenicon. With insight and understanding, he suggests that every Christian can move towards the cross at the centre of the ecclesiometer, can find the Central Churchman within himself, the open-hearted Christian who seeks to embrace the other rather than triumph over him.