Anglican Eirenicon

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.

Born in June 1922, John Fitch read History and Theology at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. After preparing for ordination at Wells Theological College in Somerset, he served for forty years in various Suffolk parishes, retiring in 1987. He was appointed an Honorary Canon of St Edmundsbury in 1975 and was a co-founder of the Suffolk Historic Churches Trust. Now living in Essex, he has one son, two daughters, and seven grandchildren. His previous areas of publication have been antiquarian and genealogical.