Stephen Bates defends Wycliffe Hall story, "Evangelical Bishop" banns Oak Hill graduates

Ed: The most extraordinary thing about this story is the scarcely believable claim that an "evangelical bishop" has imposed a ban on Oak Hill graduates! Perhaps, given Stephen Bates' statement that airing troubles in public is "what journalists do", he would like to air that problem publicly as well.

[...] There are concerns that Wycliffe, which has a 130-year tradition of open evangelicalism, is going down the conservative path already trodden by Oak Hill – a college which, the same evangelical bishop once said to me, is now of such a character that he would no longer welcome its graduates into the diocese. Whatever one thinks of Oak Hill, or Wycliffe, this would be a tragedy for the wider evangelical movement, which is already the subject of suspicions and concerns in the heightened and polarising circumstances of the gay row. This is not liberal paranoia and there are straws in the wind, not only in other ongoing rows in the Church of England, but in the secretiveness, deviousness, fissiparousness and sometimes outright mutual antipathy between rival strains of evangelicalism. Read more