Crossposted from Shreds and Patches:
I shall seek to write down that which I believe to be the essence of Anglicanism. None of the elements I note are in themselves the exclusive property of our tradition, but taken together they express what our church—with a small c—has sought be at its best. As such, these elements are always aspirational rather than accomplished ideals. Perhaps the third element noted below incorporates the first two.
1. Anglicanism is a church of sanctified time. It embraces the rhythm of life of the community expressed in the annual calendar and seeks to sanctify days, weeks, months, and the year as it notes and observes times and seasons, festivals and fasts. Its rhythm of worship is tied to this calendar and expressed in the lectionary, daily offices, rites and ceremonies involved in births, comings of age, marriages, and deaths. Time sanctified, as in the sounding of Herbert’s bell, as the ploughman stops work for a moment to acknowledge that his being is blessed by prayer and praise, church bells sounding, filling the very air breathed with God’s sound, heard by the community as men, women, and children go about their lives, time sanctified in silence broken by the voice of prayer which never ceases.
2. Anglicanism is a church of sanctified space. It embraces the land, dividing it into dioceses with mother cathedral churches and parishes also with mother parochial buildings, solemnly set aside and blessed, made holy by the prayers of the faithful, by Word and Sacrament, and by sacramental rite. It aspires to embrace the lives, occupations, joys, and tragedies of the people who live within its bounds, and it calls, sets apart, and authorizes ministers in whatever order to pastoral care and involvement in that context. Those who actively participate in the worship of the church, whose names are noted in lists and forms, constitute that pastoral ministry to the community, led by bishops, priests, and deacons, the indelibility of whose apostolic callings symbolizes the indelibility of the baptismal vocation.
3. Anglicanism is a church of sanctified worship. It seeks in common prayer to unite the voices, spoken and imagined, of those in sacred time and space, in disciplined and thus liturgical forms, in praise of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in adoration, supplication and confession, supremely in the Eucharist and then in various forms of common prayer. To that end it seeks the beauty of holiness, corporate lives made holy by use of beauty in word and song, ceremony and rite, art and architecture, vesture and adornment, whether simple or elaborate. It dedicates buildings and parts of buildings to God the Father, or to the Son, or to the Holy Spirit, or to the Trinity, or to holy men and women whose lives have been cause for veneration and emulation in their several ages and generations. These dedicated spaces symbolize and effectuate the vocation of the creature to adore the Creator, as the church on earth participates in and is aided by the worship of heaven.
In each of these ways, the Church lives into its vocation to tell the whole world of the coming of Jesus and is obedient to his commandment to preach, baptize, and celebrate the Eucharist and to be his instrument of peace, justice, and mercy in simple obedience until he comes again. It is a vocation suitable to all places in all times, and it depends not on what the world terms success or failure, but simply on obedience.
Please note that my description is aspirational. It is a brief essay into pastoral theology noting how who we are is deeply rooted in where we are and in the time we occupy. How this all works out in practice is framed by local context, urban or rural, set in Kenya or Singapore, Canada or Egypt, the US or Japan. It is tinged with echoes from the past, the forms by which political and social society is shaped at a given moment. Church bells may today be Facebook pages! But my concluding sentence is vital. In a consumerist age, when success, efficiency, or box office are exalted, it is good to remind ourselves that it is in obedience that our ministry is rooted and not in how successful we seem to be at a given moment in time.
