Heretic!

Despite all the well publicised ructions in Anglicanism it is rare for there to be a formal charge of heresy. One of the few to have been brought was against Bishop John Jameson Willis (M 1887.1) about whom I blogged last week. Frank Weston, the saintly and determined bishop of Zanzibar, was outraged when Willis, together with the Bishop of Mombassa (William Peel) convened a conference of Christian missionaries at Kikuyu in Kenya. 

The Bible in Kikuyu

The meeting, to which Weston was not invited, sought to develop a scheme which would allow African converts to ignore denominational differences if they moved between districts. It was a vision of a pan Protestant church, but it was based on fudging doctrine and lowering the standard of ecclesial discipline to a bare minimum. At the end of the meeting Holy Communion was celebrated by the Anglican Bishops Willis and Peel and all the delegates except those from the Society of Friends were communicated. This was long before any idea of intercommunion was accepted, and Bishop Weston protested to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the strongest terms. He sent an Open Letter to the Bishop of St. Alban’s and when he came home in February 1914 there was a national ferment in ecclesiastical circles. Archbishop Randall Davidson was forced to intervene and the scheme was dropped.

Kikuyu tribes women in traditional dress

The dispute is largely forgotten now. The following year there was another conference at Kikuyu at which Weston was present, and the movement fizzled out as it became apparent that such a watered down form of Christianity was not anyway attractive in the mission field. 


Bishop Weston was a member of the Society of the Holy Cross, a priests' society of which I am also a member. I researched this incident for a History of the Society a few years ago, but never realised that Willis was a Haileyburian.