People tend to look up to Calvin Robinson. They don’t have any choice: he’s immensely tall. And his striking presence is given added status by a tall mop of hair.
He’s a man of strong and clear opinions – but expressed in a pleasant voice and with good humour and a sense of balance. And he’s a man of rather agreeably understated old-fashioned Anglicanism. Currently a deacon, he talks of his church and parish, mentioning that he will be “priested at Petertide”.
Already a well-known figure on GB News and in the columns of various publications, he attracted publicity when it was revealed that his clear-cut opinions seemed to be deemed insufficiently left-leaning by the team in charge of ordinations in the Church of England.
He was training at St Stephen’s House in Oxford, a well known “high Anglican” centre, when he realised that no curacy was likely to be offered to him. He opted instead for ordination in the Free Church of England, a group founded in the 19<sup>th</sup> century and now strongly linked with GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, holding firmly to traditional Christian teachings, especially those relating to marriage and sexual morality.
He evidently enjoys some of the contradictions in his position: while definitely Evangelical, he likes to be known as “Father” and holds a definitely “high” understanding of the Eucharist and of the Church as instituted by Christ.
The fact that he is of mixed race seems to annoy the Left, who somehow seem to believe that he should always be included among their team. He is mildly amused by that, and it seems also to have spurred him on to pursue a course in line with Christian orthodoxy. He’s also mildly amused by assumptions made about his Christian name. Although his parents brought him up as a Christian, they didn’t choose his name out of admiration for the famous Swiss Reformation campaigner: “actually, it was because of a footballer of whom my dad was a fan – no religious implications at all”.
Looking at the Church of England, he is gloomy about immediate prospects for orthodoxy. “It went wrong when they ordained women, and now the whole Anglican Establishment is firmly lined up to perpetuate the current line.” His branch of the CofE does not recognise women clergy – “1992 was a great mistake” - and he is somewhat scathing about the general lack of formation and academic rigour outside of residential seminaries. He remains grateful to St Stephen’s House and believes that the reduction of full-time residential formation has been problematic. “Essentially the institution has been captured by a particular line of thought, repeated in short courses. It’s all a massive echo-chamber. That is not going to change quickly.”
However, he doesn’t believe that the current Archbishop of Canterbury will preside over an actual formal change in Anglican teaching to allow two people of the same sex to go through a form of marriage. “He doesn’t want to be the man who breaks the Anglican Communion, and he knows that the African bishops will break away if there is an insistence on same-sex marriage.”
Deacon Robinson sees his branch of the CofE as a “lifeboat” and says that the central thing is to “hold on to the Word of God as our authority”. He is a strong admirer of the Catholic Church and one of his mentors has been Mgr Michael Nazir-Ali, who was for many years the effective leader of the Evangelical wing of the CofE and is now a Catholic priest in the Ordinariate.
Campaigns on education will continue, along with a strong emphasis on upholding traditional doctrinal orthodoxy. He sees his task as “doing all the good that I can in the position I am in”, promoting the Christian teaching on marriage and family, and opposing the “bigotry of low expectations” that has prevented many children from receiving a proper education in good grammar, history and literature, and encouraging authentic Christian ecumenism. “I could see the reuniting of Christians with Rome. We must trust God and work where we can.”
