What’s right with the Church

This piece is published in the most recent issue of the St. Luke's Episcopal Church (EMC) Sentinel. I thought I'd pass it along.

What’s right with the Church

By the Rev. Victor H. Morgan

It is not hard these days to hear what’s wrong in the Church. Samuel John Stone words penned in 1866 seem very contemporary: “By schisms rent asunder, By heresies distrest.”

A few weeks ago, for example, a friend of mine in England told me she had attended an ordination service in which one of the hymns had been altered so as to remove the word “Saviour”, seemingly because the one ordering the service no longer believed that the human family needed rescue and hence a “saviour”.

A second example, on this side of the Atlantic, includes a Seattle female minister, the Rev. Ann Holmes, who recently announced that she was now both a Muslim and Christian. What, of course, makes her announcement so startling is that within Islam there can be no incarnation of the one true God, which rather leaves Jesus off to the side.

Lastly, but perhaps most distressingly, is the amount of money the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church (TEC), 815 Second Avenue, New York, N.Y., is spending on litigation designed to terrorize fleeing creedally orthodox parishes and to seize their property if possible. By way of background, the Vestries of these churches voted to withdraw from the New York–based corporate body and to affiliate with one of several bonafide branches of the worldwide Anglican Communion. In almost every case, the vote of the Vestry was confirmed by a vote of the congregation, and all other provisions of state law followed.

A spokesman for ‘815’ recently released figures showing that $800,000 has been budgeted in 2007 for this purpose, plus another $350,000 if needed. Some of the funds, if not all of them, are from trusts donated by the faithful of past generations. Such use of what one commentator has called “dead men’s money” surely not only dishonours those who gave it but more importantly the living God Himself.

But, in the midst of this discouraging news, there is good news. The Church of Jesus Christ is very resilient. Whenever the river of the Spirit is dammed up in one place, it spills out in another, and new tributaries are formed. During my recent summer schools in Oxford, I met people from all over the Anglican Communion (Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East) and was encouraged by the reports I heard. In many places – especially in developing counties – the Anglican Church is growing at an impressive rate. The Gospel is being proclaimed, people are coming to faith in Jesus, churches are being built, the poor are being cared for, justice is being sought for those who have no voice – all with comparatively few financial and material resources and often in spite of persecution.

But the good news does not end overseas. No, there is a faithful remnant of individuals and churches right here on this continent that continue to be about their Father’s business. Some of these churches predate the founding this country, but many others were founded in this millennium. Regardless, the Gospel is being announced and people are being brought into the Kingdom.

So, quite a few things are right in the Church today, which gives me – and I hope you – cause for great hope for the future. Anglicanism not only has a goodly heritage but bountiful resources for the future. What are some of these resources? Allow me to suggest four.

The first is commitment to Scripture. Of course most Christian communions claim loyalty to the Scriptures. This we would not want to deny or demean. With that being said, however, there is within classical Anglicanism a good track record of a holistic approach to Scripture that is not always present in equal measure in other communions.

Reading Scripture regularly and systematically in large chunks saves Anglican Christians from what I call the “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotation approach” to Scripture. Instead of viewing Scripture as a collection of interesting but unrelated stories and wise apothegms with some noble moral lessons thrown in, we tend to view the entire Bible as a great narrative or drama that is going somewhere. Creation is followed by the Fall; the

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Fall by God’s plan of rescue begun with the call of Abraham and culminating in the coming of Jesus the Messiah . . . and then, after that, our act in which we are called to build for and in anticipation of the full arrival of the reign of God at Jesus’ Second Coming.

Likewise, Anglicans classically delight in the public reading of Scripture, in particular in the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. The public reading of Scripture serves as an antidote to what the Apostle Peter in II Peter 1:20 calls “private interpretation”. “Private interpretation” is the pernicious practice of twisting the Scriptures to make them say what we want them to say rather than reading them in the context in which they were written and in the fellowship of the Christian community.

A second resource Anglicans have at their disposal is a time-proven liturgy, a liturgy that not only communicates the Faith once delivered to the saints to the mind but also to the heart. In authentic Prayer Book worship, the veil separating our sphere (earth) from God’s sphere (heaven) is pulled back, and we are allowed to enter into the Holy Place itself.

But, Prayer Book worship does something else. It not only connects us to God above; it also connects us with Christian believers around the world. A past Archbishop of Canterbury has written:

“Wherever we go throughout our Communion we find ourselves at home in a worship scriptural, catholic [universal], congregational, understanded of the people, simple and profound, of which the standard and the exemplar is the Book of Common Prayer. That knits us together indeed. That lies at the root of our fellowship with one another. And it is deeply moving to know that the older and the younger churches of our Communion alike find in this tradition the same values of catholic truth, scriptural soundness and evangelical zeal.”

A third resource is the worldwide nature of the Anglican family. When the Apostle Paul wrote the Christians in Rome telling them of his desire to visit them (Romans 1:11), he said that one of the reasons for his impending visit was to impart to them spiritual gifts, but then, almost in mid-sentence, he corrects himself and adds – “that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith” (RSV).

Something similar is true within the Anglican family. We don’t just export our gifts to others; we receive gifts from them as well. The Anglican world would be much poorer if we were all separate islands, each doing our Christian work apart from each other.

Christians from every conceivable racial, ethnic and cultural background worshiping the God of Creation and Redemption, the God revealed in Jesus, Israel’s Messiah, and counting each other as brothers and sisters is a sign that the curse of the Fall is being reversed and that God is putting the world back together again. This too – the worldwide nature of our communion and fellowship – is one of the resources we as Anglicans can and ought to celebrate and share with a broken world.

A fourth and final resource Anglicans have at their disposal is the ability to separate those things that are essential to the Faith from secondary matters and to remain gracious and generous in the process.

In at least some Christian communions, there is no such distinction between what have been called First Order and Second Order things. For example, in some American denominations, if a person does not hold one particular understanding of the events surrounding our Lord’s Second Coming (usually an understanding that is no older than the 19^th century), he is not welcomed as a member.

Anglicans, meanwhile, are quite willing to leave room for others to think. Why? Because one can believe anything one wants and be an Anglican? No, because there are things for which Scripture only provides signposts and not exact pictures. Events surrounding our Lord’s Second Coming is just one example.

Thus, at least one resource Anglicans have at their disposal is this ability, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to let secondary things remain secondary. The Lordship of Christ, the atoning nature of Christ’s Sacrifice, the Triune nature of the Godhead, the full divinity and manhood of Jesus, and the call of the believer to a life of radical holiness and purity would certainly all be of the First Order. They would be such because they are clearly taught in Scripture and have been recognized as such by Christians in every generation, but there are other things about which men good and true can disagree and remain in fellowship with one another. John Wesley said it best: In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty, In ALL thing Charity.

Armed with these four resources and the even more staggering resource of our Lord’s promised presence, let us not be fearful about the future. Rather, let take the offensive in announcing Jesus until He comes.