New Every Morning
On Tuesday we commemorate John Keble in our calendar of Saints. Many of us will know him as a poet and author of some of our best loved hymns such as ‘New every morning is the love’ and ‘Blessed are the pure in heart’.
But perhaps especially at this time we should remember him for the fact that he was a very positive Anglican. Throughout his life he was at the heart of what is now known as the Oxford Movement: a movement that revived and strengthened the catholic identity of the Anglican church. But unlike most of his fellow likeminded travellers in this movement Keble did not become a Roman Catholic when the movement came under pressure.
He knew that there is a special Anglican way of riding out storms: you keep as many people on board as you can and wait and pray that in time the truth will assert itself through the practice of faithful prayer, mission and ministry.
His day this year falls at the time of the July meeting of the General Synod of the Church of England. The Synod in its meeting this week will be discussing issues of environmentalism, national cohesion and the contribution we can make to it and the positive place of neurodiversity in church communities. There will also be a private members bill on blessing same sex partnerships.
The media naturally will be concentrating on highlighting divisions and controversies, and in our Anglican tradition we have never hidden these from public gaze. Sadly, the media will not be so interested in our tradition of living with and dealing with these difficulties.
With John Keble we are a praying and listening church, accommodating and absorbing differences through genuine practice of Christian faith. And sometimes certainties that appear to be non-negotiable for some will disappear from view because God helps us to see things differently.
As John Keble once memorably put it:
The trivial round, the common task,
would furnish all we ought to ask,
room to deny ourselves, a road
to bring us daily nearer God.
Bernhard Schunemann
12 July 2026
