Are Sydney Anglicans actually Anglicans?
Are Sydney Anglicans actually Anglicans? If an Anglican from another part of Australia, or from the United Kingdom, walked into an ordinary Sydney Anglican parish on a Sunday morning would they recognise what they saw as being Anglican?
The building may have a shape that echoes the distinctive shape of countless English parish churches. You are, however, unlikely to find a robed or collared clergyman leading the service - unless you come perhaps to the early morning service. While the structure and outline of the prayer book service will be in evidence, it will be used flexibly. The music will most likely be modern in style and the words projected on a large screen. The pipe organ and the pulpit will not be used. The prayers may well be ex tempore.
For Melbourne journalist Muriel Porter, there is no way in which what I have just described could be called "Anglican." Her notion of Anglicanism relates to a particular liturgical style. Without this particular style, in their mind there is no Anglican identity.
The assumption of course is that the particular style of liturgy that she has in mind is normative for Anglican worship throughout history and in every place - and that Anglicanism itself permits little or no variation in that form. This point of view reflects the almost complete supremacy in most Western countries of the liberal-Catholic paradigm of Anglicanism, with its emphasis on liturgy over doctrine.
Evangelical Anglicans, however, have a commitment to Anglicanism as a theological entity. That is, they recognise that even if Anglicanism is not as strictly confessional as some other churches, it still has doctrinal parameters.
There is for Anglicans a core of orthodoxy around which all manner of stylistic variations are permitted and even welcomed. The needs of mission and local custom make liturgical flexibility desirable - a practicality that the Anglican formularies of the sixteenth century themselves recognise.
What is consistent as far as evangelical Anglicans are concerned is a common faith. They are Anglicans not merely by convenience but by conviction. To read more, click here.
2 comments:
Jensen's case for Sydney's "evangelical" Anglicanism is very wishy-washy in its commitment to the 3-fold tradition of 1662; Liturgy, Ordinal and 39 Articles. I'd rather have this version than an Anglo-Catholic one, but its easy connection with Arminianism, with "emergent" worship styles and with innovative patterns of leadership does make it hard to recognize as "Anglican".
Philip Jensen's "Why Anglicanism?" gives greater emphasis to the formularies.
I personally would not characterize the style of worship seen in most Anglican churches in Sydney as "emergent." It involves candle, icons, incense, prayer stations, etc. Rather it shows the influence of the worship styles of the Praise and Worship and Seeker Services movements, as well as old-fashioned mainline Protestantism. It is more "linear, modernist" than "emergent." But I understnd what you are saying.
Too often what is passed off as "Anglican" really is "Anglo-Catholic." To avoid the confusion of the two, it is important to stress that Anglicanism is a reform movement and Anglo-Catholicism is representative of the Church before the reforms of Anglicanism were undertaken or where no such reforms were made (i.e., the post-Tridentian Roman Catholic Church) and the corrupt unreformed state of the Church that the English Reformers sought to correct persists. If you do not favor Anglicanism's reforms you are not Anglican.
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