IN its earliest days, the Christian Church was a persecuted group of believers scattered around Judea, Syria, Turkey, and southern Europe, not to forget North Africa, in the Roman Empire.

It was an offshoot of the Jewish faith, which had a deal with the Roman authorities, and Christians for a while could piggy-back on that deal, but not for long.

They were scapegoated for national disasters by emperors such as Nero, and they refused to observe ‘emperor worship’ even as a formality.

Martyrdom was common for Christians of all ranks. The spread of the faith led to the conversion of Emperor Constantine and things changed; he wanted the faith to be the religion of the empire and ended the persecution.

Now Christianity had a favoured status and became a mass religion. Its bishops need no longer keep their heads down, and came to have influence in the state.

After two millennia of Christendom in the West, we have become used to bishops in the House of Lords, a position of privilege, although the voice of the Church has been pushed back in terms of policy making.

In its early years it had to speak up and urge that it not be attacked, that it was harmless to the state, that it wanted only the good.

Now our bishops can urge governments to adopt certain policies or warn the public against harmful behaviour.

How should it use this privilege?

In his book Learning to Speak: The Church’s Voice in Public Affairs, baptist theologian Keith Clements weighs up the pitfalls of over-using this platform, and on the other hand the need to speak out at key moments.

We might ask whether the controversial statement by the Anglican bishops advising voters on the upcoming election was an example of using their voice at an inappropriate moment.

Or was it the right one?

Urging people to vote was surely good, if rather obvious, advice. But policy advice was more controversial, as the BBC’s Martha Kearney showed in her interview of the Bishop of Norwich on Radio 4’s The World at One. She pointed to some advice seemingly supporting party policies, of the SNP and the Greens, also to some mistakes in the bishops’ tax claims.

Newspapers felt this was a left-leaning statement, and Conservative MP Conor Burn made this case on the programme.

On balance, the bishops might have over-used their platform. They were saying obvious things, but also tending to favour political parties, where no great critical issues were at stake.

This was not a campaign like abolishing the slave trade, a clear crime against humanity needing the Church’s voice to fight it, led by lay Christians, not bishops.

Likewise, When Karl Barth announced in 1934 that Nazism was ‘The Anti-Christ’, so evil was it in its principles and aims, how right he was!

That kind of prophetic insight and announcement, was surely a word from God at the time. Christian voices against apartheid in South Africa, such as Bishop Trevor Huddleston and Desmond Tutu, as well as many other denominational leaders, were also crucially important.

The critical context is important – slavery, Nazism, apartheid, all matters of life and death.

We might think that, for example, the stain of rising anti-Semitism in our society is a more important matter for Church speech than how to vote in the election, especially when a cleric in Surrey has kept his job after making outrageous remarks on Facebook accusing Jews of orchestrating the Twin Towers massacre of 9/11.

If the Church speaks too often it becomes boring, another political party. It needs perhaps to reserve public pronouncements for the really vital moral and spiritual crises.