Having launched the Alexandrian School of Theology’s new DMin program (which I talked about last month), we carried by launching another new Anglican Studies program.  This is meant to streamline our ordination process by recruiting new ordinands and lay people who are aware of our vocation as Anglicans.  I was asked to give a little talk about why I’m Anglican, and I’m including a lightly edited version here. 

Why I am Anglican

My background is in evangelicalism, in a denomination in Canada called the Christian and Missionary Alliance.  I came to finally understand who Jesus after a year at Bible school.  My passion was to see people come to know him, and so I got involved in youth ministry with some success.  Because Canada was quickly secularizing, though, we weren’t seeing conversions.  This was despite the fact that we modelled our service on the big megachurches.  The model was that you take out anything that could be seen as strange to seekers.  We were embarrassed by the strange passages of Scripture, so we didn’t talk about them.  Thinking that nonbelievers would see ritual as too weird, we no longer had Holy Communion on Sundays but pushed it off to a Tuesday service.  Our worship came to resemble rock concerts with smoke machines and light shows.  In other words, we were embarrassed by Scripture, tradition, and the sacraments.  I came to believe this approach prevented people from coming to know Jesus – a person who was extremely different and weird from our perspective, which is why he was attractive!

On top of this, I was troubled by the way the different denominations had different specialities, but nobody was all things to all people.  Some churches spoke to the heart, others to the head.  Some to the lower classes and some to the upper classes.  Some to white people, others to black people, and still others to indigenous people.  Some focused on doctrine, others on social work.  Some had healings, others didn’t. 

            Finally, I took a job at a bookstore full of books by Protestants, Catholics, liberals and atheists.  Not only did I need answers to arguments against my faith, I came to see that sometimes the Catholics had thought about things that my own tradition hadn’t.  I came to see my church’s prejudice against Catholics and Orthodox as a problem. 

All of these questions demanded a serious theological tradition that my denomination didn’t have.  Luckily one of my pastors grew up Anglican, and he took me to see a famous Anglican theologian, J. I. Packer.  The event was put on by the Prayer Book Society in a diocese that still prayed according to Thomas Cranmer’s original intention.  Here I found a serious form of worship that was not trying to manipulate my feelings, that was based entirely on Scripture, that went back hundreds of years, and that still produced serious theologians. 

At the same time I was exploring another tradition that was even more ancient, and that had equally impressive theologians.  I was never attracted to the Catholic Church because of the claims of the papacy, but Orthodoxy doesn’t have that problem.  I loved the early church Fathers, their biblical interpretation, and the liturgies they made.  They also claimed to explain why the Western Church was broken into a million denominations and why we were shrinking: we had broken from the tradition of the Fathers and had lost the mind of Christ who said that the Church would be one just as he and the Father were one.  Even more than the Catholics, the Orthodox claimed to be the one true church.  The search for the true church filled me with anxiety – an anxiety that has overtaken the internet as thousands of young men in North America are rejecting evangelicalism in favor of Orthodoxy or Catholicism.  I had to choose: join the only true church, repudiate Western Christianity, and never take communion with my family again. 

Thankfully I came across a book by another Anglican theologian who provided an alternative: Ephraim Radner.  He didn’t make any apologies for the sins and divisions of the Western churches, sins that have robbed us of spiritual power and which have subjected us to a secular, atheistic state.  But he interpreted our situation through the lens of the Old Testament division between the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah.  Yes, the people of God can go into exile, but God also brings them back – back to repentance and purified of false prophets.  Radner gave me a more biblical understanding of Christian division and failure than the ancient churches who sometimes won’t acknowledge any sins in their past and yet still claim to be the only true Christians.  Eventually Radner moved to Canada, so I quite my first career and did my theological studies with him.  Ordination followed. 

            In seminary I was given an Anglican vision of the Church that grew out of the missionary movement.  Like other Protestants, Anglicans went all over the world, but we have a more robust communion of churches.  We aspire to have shared doctrine, shared ministry, shared sacraments, shared money, and shared decision making.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Gospel was spreading to every country, missionaries discovered that non-Christians were confused by our divisions.  The movement to reunite the churches therefore grew out of missions.  The Anglican Communion joined other Protestants, the Orthodox, and later, the Catholics, to work towards full visible unity.  In 1920 our highest Church council, the Lambeth Conference, came to teach that the vocation of the Anglican Communion was to reunite the whole Church. 

I can therefore be an Anglican who takes Christian unity as seriously as the Orthodox but without having to claim that my church is the best.  I don’t have to hate Pentecostals, or Orthodox, or Catholics, or deny that God is also at work amongst them.  I don’t have to pretend that my church has never done anything wrong.  I have a serious doctrinal foundation in the Prayer Book, and a serious liturgy.  We have a serious theological tradition, serious study of the Church Fathers and Reformers, a history of missions, and a global church that includes hundreds of tribes and tongues.  Is it a challenge to hold all of this together?  Of course!  Our church is still full of problems, but I know that God will purify and uphold us just as he did for Israel in the past.  Confidence in him is what allows me to do ministry.