Becoming un-Baptist Part 5: Almost Anglican

Becoming un-Baptist Part 5: Almost Anglican

In my previous posts, I discussed how I had ceased to be a Baptist (church leadership, theology of baptism, and the practice of baptism).  As I was departing the Baptist fold, I nearly became an Anglican.  In the Anglican Church, I found a more ancient from of liturgy than is practiced among Baptists.  The worship was centered upon the Eucharist.  There was a prayer book that provided a vocabulary and a direction for my prayers.  I also had (and still have) friends who are Anglican.  Even more important for me, I found pieces of the Fathers in the worship service and was able to feel something of a connection with the Christian Tradition.

My wife and I enjoyed our fellowship within the Anglican churches we attended.  However, we never quite became Anglicans (for which I am thankful).  At the same time that we were attending Anglican churches, I was continuing to undergo some significant doctrinal disruptions.  Not only was I finding myself being un-Baptist, but in some ways, I was becoming un-Protestant.  This can be problematic when attending a Protestant church.

Could there have been room for me in the Anglican Communion?  Probably, if I had found a conservative Anglo-Catholic parish and remained there for the rest of my life.  However what I found was a Professor of Church History at an Anglo-Catholic Seminary talking about how we should reconsider the conclusions of Chalcedon (the fourth ecumenical council) and the remainder of the ecumenical councils.  In the parishes I attended, I found Anglicanism to be a rather low church affair because the worship was tailored to have people feel comfortable.  The doctrine seemed more like the Reformers than it did the Fathers.  Luther’s Law Gospel hermeneutic (this hermeneutic is prone to divide Scripture into the categories of Law, which condemns, and Gospel, which gives life.  Luther even opined that the Epistle of James: “was a right strawy epistle…for it has nothing of the nature of the gospel about it.”) was on display along with a dash of Calvinism (this was probably more to a living out of the 39 articles than anything else).  These points grew a little troubling for me.  I was becoming less and less convinced of the Reformation and the Anglican world is decidedly part of the Reformation.

Coming from Southern Baptist land, I liked the Anglican Church in North America.  They were conservatives starting a Church with true doctrine and practice as opposed to the Episcopal Church which well… um… would allow anyone to believe anything and remain a bishop.  As I spent more time, I began to feel as though the ACNA was simply resetting the theological capitulation to culture clock back to the 1970’s and doing so through a functional schism.  As a Baptist, schism is not a negative.  However, for an un-Baptist, schism is troubling, and it gave me a little more pause.

The breaking point for me was listening to Anglican Unscripted and hearing Kevin and George talk about how the Anglican Church followed the canons of Nicaea.  Then on Sunday I went to church and saw a deaconess pushing around an old priest at the altar because he was moving too slowly for her.  As I was sitting there, I realized that this deaconess would be ordained as a priestess and that the canons of Nicaea were not followed when they were inconvenient or at odds with modern sensibilities.

The very things that I loved about the Anglican Communion was the very thing that they were doing their best to down play or ignore.  I loved the pre-Reformation streams of thought.  However, as I encountered it, these came through a Reformation grid and a further American evangelical grid.  There was a liturgy that at times was strikingly beautiful, yet was also divorcing itself from the shared worship practices of the Old Testament and the Early Church.  This was not the place I was looking for.  However, during my time there, I began to appreciate the formative nature of liturgy and written prayers.