A Catechism of Our Faith

The Parish: A Spirituality of the Local and the Ordinary

This catechetical series is dependent for its vision on the poetry of the great 17^th Century, Anglican priest George Herbert. He famously abandoned a career of prominence at the court to be the pastor of a small parish, St. Andrew’s, Lower Bemerton, and there discovered the whole of the Christian life embodied and lived out. The ‘Church’ we are building could then be understood to be the Church in some larger and more abstract way, or as a local church, where people in fact receive the sacrament and hear the Gospel preached.  Not that the larger issues and mandates are lost, only that they are encountered in a place and a moment.

The parish - this is in no way unique to the Anglicans!  But we too have inherited it. It means that our theology needs a sense of place. It means that people who might not otherwise relate to one another are thrown together, cheek to jowl. It means that we minister with a responsibility to our neighbors who are not believers as well as to our own. It means that lay people maintain that patience which is ballast in many cases for the eccentricities or impulsiveness of their pastor!

There is a place for causes, and for the excitement of renewal, and for grander ideas which gather the like minded, but Anglicanism has first of all been a tradition of praying in a place in ordinary time. This may not at first attract the church-shopper of our time, and it is a tacit protest against our cyber-obsession. But it may in fact have a unique witness to our time. And its virtues, humility, patience, virtue, ought to inform how we imagine theology ought to be done too.

Discuss what the elements of a spirituality of the parish would be.

Our Vaunt Stilled: Incompleteness, Disagreement, Exploration, and the Spirit of Anglicanism

Descriptions of traditions tend to make them seem more perfect and more successful than they in fact have been. Perhaps better to leave this work to our neighbors, who probably have a more jaundiced view!

Anglicanism once had a monarch who could settle disputes, which is a mechanism with deep problems of its own, but at least it was clear. But once we entered the modern era, and Anglicanism spread to other countries (such as ours), the question of how to resolve disagreements, became more vexed.  The question at hand, and the underlying questions of how to decide, how to read the Scripture, whether to make room for dissent or not, have gone hand in hand.

Anglicanism has a history which is one long fight- catholics and protestants, modernists and traditionalists, etc.  There is really no era in which this was not so, although at key times in our earlier history there was a deeper deposit of agreement behind what was being fought about. 

Meanwhile, our history since the Reformation has presented us with an on-going imperative to seek reunion. Rome is our historic mother, the eastern churches our non-papal cousins, the Methodists the lost branch of our family. We all struggle with the same issues of interpretation which the modern era has thrust upon us. Archbishop Michael Ramsey liked to talk about a pervasive sense of incompleteness which drives us ecumenically and is itself a source of humility.  We are not self-contained, and this self-awareness ought be found in our parish as well as our denomination. It will become yet greater as denominationalism itself becomes problematic in the coming generation.

What passages of the New Testament are crucial in thinking about disagreement and incompleteness?