I am an Episcopalian by personal choice and through the grace of God. My family of origin, as well as my husband’s family, are all Roman Catholic; I can’t emphasize enough the deep respect and gratitude I have for my Catholic upbringing and the ways it has shaped me. Still, for a myriad of reasons I won’t enumerate here, I chose a different path.
So for me personally, why Anglicanism? Being the only Episcopalian on this blog, I feel the need to make the usual disclaimers about speaking only for myself. My entries are just one person’s current, contingent take on what it means to me to be Anglican, so I highly recommend that if your curiosity is piqued you jump in and read more widely.
As a start, one of the clearest definitions of Anglicanism I have read can be found in An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church (Don S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum, editors). It makes plain some of the traits I so love about our church: its sense of balance and compromise, its ability to respect tradition while celebrating cultural difference, its emphasis on practice and worship over doctrine, its humble recognition that while God is unchanging and perfect the church is not. In addition, we are a church that embraces sacrament, liturgy, adherence to apostolic succession, and the centrality of the historic creeds, and you’ve got a pretty potent mix.
[blockquote]… its emphasis on practice and worship over doctrine … [/blockquote]
Ah, my bete noire.
It’s the job of the Church to teach not only how, but also whom and why, to worship. In liturgy, the “how” of worship becomes a powerful tool for the transmitting the “whom” and “why” of faith and doctrine. However, liturgy is only effective to the degree that it presupposes (or to use trendy TECspeak “incarnates”) doctrine. When the “how” of worship and doctrine becomes an end in itself, as often happens in TEC, worship degenerates into superficial religious socialization, or worse, unthinking ritualism. Ironically, downplaying the link between worship and doctrine is often viewed as intellectually and spiritually liberating. However, freeing worship from faith and doctrine not only frees us from having to think about our faith, it also frees us knowing the one whom we worship.
I see the current TEC emphasis on worship and practice as on one hand a commendable but misguided effort to find common ground in a fractious church. Misguided, because a common liturgy can never unite groups that worship different Gods, even if they use the same language and worship in the same building. On the other hand, I also see a more cynical motive at work. Undervaluing doctrine and over emphasizing liturgy gives protective cover to revisionists who claim to respect tradition even as they deliberately undermine tradition from within.
Hmmm..autoexcommunicated because or her “me-ness”. It sounds like she’s found a home in TEC…so she’s got that going for her which is nice.
After over a 30 years journey in evangelical Christianity I remember the joy of entering into the liturgy of the Episcopal Church. At first I struggled with that concept that the Church held, celebrating the differences. Coming out of differing groups that were rigid in their “beliefs”. It was refreshing to relax and embraces differences. That was pre 2003 convention (was it 03 or 04). Suddenly I realized that was embracing heretical doctrines. I don’t think that was what was intend by embracing differences. Since then, I’ve gone back to the Church I left 40 years ago, the Catholic Church. I have not regretted it. I have many friends in Orthodox Anglican churches and would be happy there too. But I love my local parish here and have found the spirituality of both the Pastor and many parishioners to be deep and loving. I’m glad for my experience in the Episcopal Church as it forced me to cross the Tiber; which I would NEVER have thought of doing before then.
Pamela, bless you in your journey. Many of us cradle Episcopalians would never have thought of the Tiber, much less of crossing it, until now. But the thought is there for many of us and I fear that GC2009 may produce the day of decision. But maybe there will be other options that have materialized in a much bigger form by then.