Religious education must stay central – Williams

Dr Rowan Williams told the congregation at Canterbury Cathedral yesterday that he believed many young people continue to take the issue of religion seriously and their perceived hostility towards faith is not as extreme as is widely feared.

The Archbishop, who announced last month that he will stand down after a decade as the leader of the Church of England, argued youngsters appreciate the role religion plays in shaping and sustaining human existence and are keen to learn about it.

He added: “There is plenty to suggest that younger people, while still statistically deeply unlikely to be churchgoers, don’t have the hostility to faith that one might expect, but at least share some sense that there is something here to take seriously – when they have a chance to learn about it.

“It is about the worst possible moment to downgrade the status and professional excellence of religious education in secondary schools – but that’s another sermon.”

The Archbishop’s comments came after the Church of England warned that pupils’ moral and spiritual development risked being “pushed to the side” due to Government reforms which put an increasing focus on the teaching of the reading, writing and arithmetic at the expense of many other subjects.

A Church of England study claimed last month that religious education was being undermined by a series of reforms drawn up by the coalition Government.

The research criticised a decision to exclude religious education from the English Baccalaureate – a new school leaving certificate that promotes learning in five core subjects, including maths, English and science.

Dr Williams, who will resign at the end of the year to take up a post at Cambridge University, also told followers the ultimate test of the Christian religion is not whether it is useful, beneficial or helpful to the human race but whether or not its central claim – the resurrection of Jesus Christ – actually happened.

“Easter makes a claim not just about a potentially illuminating set of human activities but about an event in history and its relation to the action of God,” he said. “Very simply, in the words of this morning’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that ‘God raised Jesus to life’.”

The religious leader also touched on the conflict in the Middle East, and he said Easter raised the “uncomfortable and unavoidable” question that religion may be more useful than the “passing generation of gurus thought”.

He told the congregation that the answer would not be found in instant scientific analysis but in a longer measure of the effect of faith in the lives of believers. Dr Williams reinforced his point that it was the truth of the resurrection that counts, not its effect.

“When all’s said and done about the newly acknowledged social value of religion, we mustn’t forget that what we ultimately have to speak about isn’t this but God – the God who raised Jesus and, as St Paul repeatedly says, will raise us also with him,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who is considered a frontrunner to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury, carried out what has become an annual Easter tradition of open-air baptisms outside the West End of York Minster.

A total of 13 people from local churches were baptised by being totally immersed in a large tank of water on Saturday afternoon.

Dr Sentamu paid tribute to those who took part in the open air baptisms, which he has overseen each Easter for the last six years since he was appointed to the second most senior position in the Church of England.

He said: “These people who were baptised outside York Minster are very brave – not just because they were baptised outdoors in the Yorkshire spring – but because they publicly declared that they are making a U-turn from sin, evil and the ways of the world and becoming followers of Christ.”

The open-air baptisms are organised by One Voice York, a network of Christian churches and leaders of different denominations working together across the city.

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