Bishop joins row over rave worship

The Church of England yesterday divided sharply over the issue of "rave in the nave" services, after a bishop criticised the former Archbishop of Canterbury for his hostility to alternative forms of worship.

In a newspaper interview Lord Runcie attacked modern services, and appealed for the Church to hold on to traditional forms of worship in the wake of the evangelical Anglican movements. The former Archbishop, who himself once attracted criticism from traditionalists for his liberal approach, warned of the dangers of making worship "fashionable".

"I regret that people are not worshipping as they once did; but turning worship into something fashionable, an ecclesiastical health farm, is a danger," he said.

"I am temperamentally against those forms of clappy-and-happy, huggy- and-feely worship which - along with overhead projectors - seem to reduce God to a puppet. If you alter services just to get people into church, that's very dangerous."

But the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, Bishop of Wakefield, said that his colleague was "forgetting" that the Church of England was a "broad church".

"The glory of the Church of England has always been that it has a richness of very different styles of worship - Catholic and evangelical, traditional and modern," he said.

Like the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, who has backed the use of non-traditional services, he said he was in favour of new styles of worship.

"My experience in this diocese shows that some alternative worship really does draw some people who wouldn't otherwise have been worshipping."

The row follows last week's congregation figures which show the biggest fall in the Anglican church for 20 years, with little more than a million people attending services every Sunday.