A FURTHER seven men have been ordained deacon by the Rt Revd Martin Morrison, a bishop in the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa (REACH SA), at the East London Tabernacle, a Baptist chapel in Mile End.
The service was reported on the Law & Religion UK blog by the Professor of Modern Anglicanism at the University of Oxford, the Revd Dr Andrew Atherstone.
A year ago, Professor Atherstone revealed that the first set of these “alternative ordinations” had taken place, in the same location (News, 4 July 2025).
In his latest blog, he sets out the “alternative ordination pathway” followed by the seven deacons. Six of the seven REACH deacons in 2026 were recommended for ordination by the ReNew network’s Alternative Selection Panel (ASP), which is open to anyone from a ReNew church.
The ReNew Conference was incorporated in 2017. Its main activity is “supporting Anglican complementarian evangelicals working together regionally to pioneer, establish, and secure healthy local churches for the evangelisation of England”. More than 170 churches are part of its network.
ReNew describes its ASP as designed to “advise orthodox Anglican Bishops as to a candidate’s suitability for ordination”. The three panels held so far have been chaired by the Rt Revd Rod Thomas, a former Bishop of Maidstone, in “close consultation” with the Church of England Evangelical Council.
Five of the seven deacons are graduates of the Proclamation Trust’s Leaders’ Training Course (LTC), formerly known as “Cornhill Plus”. Professor Atherstone writes: “Its primary focus is upon biblical study and preaching, with no exams and no university validation, while students spend most of the week employed by a local church.”
The Proclamation Trust was set up in 1986 “to support the multiplication of faithful expository Word ministry into the future”, with Prebendary Dick Lucas, Rector (1961-88) of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, in London, as its chair. The Cornhill Training Course, started in 1991, is one of its ministries.
Professor Atherstone reports that there are 38 leaders-in-training enrolled in LTC (across all four years), two-thirds of whom are Anglicans heading towards REACH ordinations.
There had been a congregation of about 120, Professor Atherstone reported. “These new deacons view themselves as Church of England loyalists who are glad to receive ordination by REACH as a last resort and an emergency provision, but are looking to Church of England bishops to step forward with a better solution,” he wrote. “There are many like them queuing up in the ordination pipeline.”
Last year, he said that the seven men ordained would not exercise any of the functions reserved for the clergy, but continue to operate “in a lay capacity” in their C of E parishes.
But the Archbishop of York and the then Bishop of London, now Archbishop of Canterbury, expressed concern that, although “the orders of REACH-SA are recognised and accepted by the Church of England for the purposes of the Overseas and Other Clergy (Ministry and Ordination) Measure 1967 . . . It should not be assumed that an individual ordained in the circumstances outlined in your email would be granted such permission.”