Being Anglican
Eastern window detail, St Cuthbert’s, Governor’s Bay (restored after earthquake destruction)
This Lent, alongside an ongoing love and need for Quaker community, worship, and practice, I’ve encountered a strong longing for the Great Church and Tradition. That is, for encountering Christ and the Gospel through scripture, sacrament, liturgy, beauty, common prayer, with others where I live, and in the architecture and living symbols of sacred buildings.
Not just beautiful things, but things soaked (“annointed”, “incarnate”) with Christ, and with the presence of the living and the dead.
The Holy Catholic Church, Universal and Parochial!
I go through my usual cycle of reviewing church history and beliefs, and discover - once again, but more deeply - I belong in the Anglican tradition. In terms of what I believe and where my life has led me. It’s a joy and a shock, before it’s a despair.
I have to put aside images of what being Anglican might mean: choirboys, conforming, not being a Quaker.
Yes, giving up on the Roman Catholic Church in my late teens, when I started to really think and became committed to social and political values and causes, was right.
Yes, when I came back to Church in my thirties, it was no accident that it was an Anglican church. Not just “the best holy catholic and apostolic church on the block”, as I previously thought.
For Anglicanism is given the grace of holding and offering anew, with balance:
(1) “the catholic substance”, “deposit”, or “paradosis” of faith (scripture, sacraments, preaching, prayer, and creedal and episcopal ‘oversight’ as to their authentic and reverent use, drawing on the wisdom of church tradition, establishing pastoral and eucharistic communities);
(2) that is reformed (doctrinally and liturgically centred on Christ and the Gospel, emphasizing the democratic participation of all its members in church worship and governance, adapted to local languages, cultures, and contexts, establishing the independence and autonomy of a national church);
(3) that is doubly reformed (committed to truth, open to modern science, history, biblical analysis, psychology, sociology, knowledge of other religions, numerous etc.);
(4) that is reforming in an ongoing way (“ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda” - “the church reformed, always [in need of] being reformed”, e.g. safeguarding and full inclusion of women and rainbow communities, moving beyond colonial identities and arrangements, and while independent and autonomous as a national church, remaining in communion with others in the ‘Canterbury family’);
(5) that is locally grounded and fit for purpose (e.g. committed to biculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, reaching new generations, is efficient and well-organized etc.);
(6) that is committed to being a prophetic voice and presence within wider society (“seeking to transform unjust structures of society, caring for God’s creation, and establishing the values of the Kingdom”, as the 1992 Constitution / Te Pouhere of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia puts it);
(7) that preserves and offers “the way of beauty” - its poetry of word and elements - as a path to God;
(8) that in the context of globalized, “hyper-modernity”, is responsive to a new hunger for contemplative spirituality and therapeutics (for healing, and connection to God, ourselves, each other and the world, through silence, stillness, embodiment, and slowing down);
and (9) that is genuinely pastoral in terms of the above (“teaching, baptising and nurturing believers within eucharistic communities of faith”, as the Constitution / Te Pouhere puts it).
Anglicanism is given the grace of holding and offering, with balance: the catholic substance or paradosis of faith, one that is reformed and reforming, centred on Christ and the Gospel, that is locally grounded and fit for purpose, independent and yet in communion with Canterbury and her family, that is committed to truth and reason, that is committed to being a prophetic voice and presence within wider society, that preserves and offers the way of beauty as a path to God, that is responsive to a new hunger for contemplative spirituality and healing, and that is genuinely pastoral in all that she is and does.
Gosh, that’s a lot to be entrusted with and to aim for! A rich complexity to competently offer and hold!
And especially ‘on the ground’, in local churches and contexts - often faced with dwindling numbers, limited energy, people-power, and funds, ongoing building and maintenance costs, and relying on a small, ageing group of laity and clergy to do the heavy lifting.
Made up of idealists with axes to grind!
Negotiating the usual family conflicts!
It starts to sound rather impossible, right, far too ambitious? A recipe for disappointment and despair?
Yet I will not budge on this vision and hope. If I do, I’m no longer being Anglican in a sense.
I was a member of a church that held and offered this broad, rich “Anglican comprehensiveness” within its limitations, context, and means - St Luke’s in the City, where I was married and where my kids were baptized. It wasn’t perfect. But it provided me with a pattern of wholeness and a hope.
Its building was destroyed by earthquakes in 2010 / 2011. The community went “on the road’ for a while and eventually, due to exhaustion, burnout, lack of wider support, and perhaps even the action of the Spirit, wound-up.
Our family have tried other parishes since, but for various reasons it hasn’t worked out.
And now I despair.
But I am trying to repent my despair and hopelessness about the church this Lent. Why?
Because, in a sense, Christians are crucified triumphalists:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. (I Peter 1: 3-7).
For while the Anglican Church is vindicated by its place in history, with a strikingly balanced witness to Gospel and Church and sound learning, its greater vindication lies in its pointing through its history to something which it is a fragment. Its credentials are its incompleteness, with the tension and travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to comment itself as “the best type of Christianity”, but by its very brokenness to point to the universal Church wherein all have died. (Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church, originally published 1936; 1989 edition, p.220).
How do I survive and repent despair?
I pray with A New Zealand Prayer Book. I practice compassion and forgiveness in the pattern of Christ. I practice silent waiting, Quaker-style.
References
Paul Tillich spoke of preserving “the Catholic substance” (tradition, liturgy, and rituals), alongside practising “the Protestant principle” (the prophetic criticism of idolatry).
“Anglican comprehensiveness” is a central idea from the theology of F.D. Maurice.
